Headscratchers / Ad Astra

• It never crossed anyone’s mind that aliens using communications tech capable of interstellar communications probably consider humanity’s methods archaic?
  • Well I guess they might well do so. What's the headscratcher here, exactly?
• How could piracy possibly be a thing on the moon? There aren’t any places for pirates to hide. The moon’s surface has very little entropy, so it would be fairly easy to trace track marks back to their source. Committing crimes in international areas doesn’t mean the perpetrator is immune to prosecution. It just means there isn’t a government actively policing the area.
  • Levant says that certain countries are giving the pirates sanctuary. So essentially there's a form of Cold War privateering going on.
• They know that the trip from the lunar base to the rocket will be dangerous. Not only do they bring nothing heavier than handguns, but they don’t fire at the pirates until it’s too late. You’d think they’d be more aggressive about protecting a VIP.
  • You would think that everyone would have better guns on the Moon given its lawlessness, but the space pirates seem to be armed with the same handguns, so presumably in this world, that's just what everyone has. Maybe gun control has become more strict in the future. They don't fire on the pirates at first because they're not sure whether the pirates are going to attack, and they presumably don't want to provoke violence that might be avoided, especially given the fact that they quickly realize that they're outnumbered. When the pirates do open fire, they're very inaccurate at first, so presumably the handguns they all have are pretty short range, and shooting at longer range would have wasted ammo.
  • Also Luna has no borders (which has contributed to the lawlessness) so that could be anyone driving around, such as another country's military escorting some technicians to do some work on the nearby solar power station. They can't afford to just open fire on anyone else they see, because it might lead to a real war breaking out.
• Luna is stated to be a war zone where everyone and everything is fair game, so why is everyone including the military still driving around in bog-standard civilian rovers that are barely different from what the US brought with them in The '60s? Deploying vehicles with enclosed cabins would not only allow armor to be attached and make targeting the occupants much more difficult, it would also protect them from the very unhealthy and abrasive lunar dust. Or how about reinforcing and/or protecting the wheels so they can't be totaled by any casual collision? After all, on a lawless battlefield like this where private companies can attack national militaries without repercussions, it's unlikely that there are regulations in place that forbid something so basic.
  • This is a recent event (though it has apparently been going on for some months) so they wouldn't have had time to build military vehicles, but that still doesn't explain why no armor has been improvised on the buggies. On the other hand we don't know how effective those energy weapons are. Perhaps a beam striking metal armor would still penetrate, or create a burst of lethal radiation? Some anti-ramming bars wouldn't go astray though.
  • The Mars rovers have enclosed cabins, so why don't the Moon rovers?
    • Mars has an atmosphere. Luna doesn't.
• SpaceCom wants to keep Roy away from his father and from the mission because they don't trust him. All they want him on Mars for is to deliver a speech. Why can't he do that from Earth? Even if we assume that for a technical reason Mars is more suited for sending messages to Neptune than Earth is, certainly they could relay a record of him saying the same thing on Earth.
  • It's mentioned that the Mars base is underground, making it the only SpaceCom base that can continue unaffected by the surges. Presumably they just want to make sure that everything about the plan runs as smoothly as possible.
• Lima station was supposed to be very hard to find (since it was lost, and drones have failed to find it) but Roy finds it easily. On the other hand, he may have been lied to about the station being hard to find.
• The restaurants and other shops on the lunar station are all international, massive brands—except for Yoshinoya, which is limited to parts of Japan and the Greater Los Angeles region. Either Yoshinoya expanded in scope between now and when the movie takes place to where they catch up to brands like Subway, or they invested a lot of money relative to their size as a company to get that property up there.
• How the hell is Roy not rotting in a jail cell at the end of the movie? He broke aboard a top-secret space mission to save the solar system under circumstances that led to the violent deaths of all hands. He should be charged with murder.
  • Legally his actions would be manslaughter. It's possible that SpaceCom covered up the circumstances, like they did years before with the Lima Project. It was more politically expedient to present Roy as a hero and the deaths of the crew of the Cepheus as a tragic accident.
  • So Roy being the son of a pretty famous person gets arrested and has a trial. Said trial would reveal certain facts that they went to great pains to hide to begin with. I assume his freedom(and early retirement) was enough to shut him up and provide security. The death of the crew can be dismissed as an accident on Mars.
• Why was it necessary to send the Cepheus all the way to Neptune just to plant a nuke aboard the Lima station? Surely a nuclear missile — or ten — would get the job done without having to put three humans in harm's way.
  • Nuclear missiles are designed to launch from the Earth's surface and hit another point on the Earth's surface a mere tens of thousands of miles away. You're talking about hitting an object billions of miles away.
    • I'm sure one could be launched from the Earth, a nuclear missile can't be too different from a nuclear rocket. And the accuracy is not an issue so long as the rocket has a targeting system and thrusters to correct it's course. It should be easy.
• If the Lima Project is orbiting Neptune that puts it at 2.7 billion miles to 2.9 billion miles away depending on its relative position to Earth. If a power surge hitting Earth from that distance, assuming it is discharged three dimensionally and therefore reduced in power over the distance it covers as the power becomes evenly distributed in every direction (which would mean Earth is hit with about 0.000000000054907363% of the power of the discharge), can be so destructive then how powerful must it have been at the source? Any space station, even one responsible for such a discharge, surely must have been torn to pieces!
  • It's stated that the surge actually gets more powerful as it travels, although it's not explained how.
• The Lima project was set up to be far from Earth to contact alien life that might not exist, so why do the crew become bored and dissolutioned so easily? Surely they knew it might be a hopeless task and were subject to psychological screenings. If they had strong ties to Earth like friends and family then they wouldn't have been allowed to go and even if they did then why not have a crew replacement service every year or so? The film gives the impression that they were there for life but people must have realised that there would be a psychological toll on them and give them some distractions or promise of returning home. A mutiny is unsurprising, although the end result isn't so much.
• Not only does Roy make the journey to Neptune in record time but he says he is doing so at constant acceleration and is then seen floating in his rocket. A constant acceleration should result in an artificial gravity and it implies he will suddenly put on the brakes which would destroy the ship. In reality he should be accelerating up to maximum speed and then coasting off the momentum until it is time to hit the brakes.
• The Lima project lasted over 30 years. How come the crew didn't starve and dehydrate? And run out of oxygen? There was no mention of any supplies being sent to the station.
• Why did the Lima crew actually begin to emit those surges towards Earth? What were they trying to achieve? Revenge for being abandoned? Roy's father did mention that a riot happened onboard the place.
• Why actually nuke the orbiter? Shouldn't simply severing the emitter from the station do the job?

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