GRAVITY and Gravity

In Alfonso Cuarón‘s Oscar-winning 2013 movie GRAVITY, actress Sandra Bullock‘s Dr. Ryan Stone makes an emergency entrance into an abruptly abandoned International Space Station. This month, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti recreated this scene onboard the space station, as in the photograph below, with the movie playing on the ISS Viewscreen.

In GRAVITY, “gravity” refers to both the Newtonian force that causes the astronauts and their spacecraft to endlessly free-fall around Earth and to the grave nature of their situation, a brilliant and stunning drama of adversity, courage, persistence, and triumph.