I just watched George Clooney’s “Midnight Sky” on netflix.

The movie is visually striking, set on a space ship and on an apocalyptic Earth in +30 years.  Some sort of unspecified radioactive disaster has pretty much wiped out all livable space on Earth.  The movie focuses on the attempt of a sick astronomer to communicate with a space ship that has been off exploring a newly found habitable moon of Jupiter.   They have been out of communication with Earth for a couple years.

I really didn’t understand the foundational premise of the movie.  We have been able to receive communications from satellites that we’ve sent to Jupiter, and a quick google says it’s only ~22 light minutes between Jupiter and Earth.  If that distance is the closest, let’s suppose that it’s a few times that at maximum separation — that’s still only a couple hours separation (guestimating).  Why would the ship have gone completely out of communication with Earth for years while they were on their mission?

There were lots of other holes in the movie, and I wonder if some of those missing pieces were detailed in the book?

Incidentally, the astronomy facility looked really cosy and comfortable for a something located in Antarctica!  There was mention of the poles late in the movie, but early on there was the famous picture of the explorer Scott with his four companions on the wall, which I assumed was meant to give away the location (I recognized that picture from Brian Keating’s book, “Loosing the Nobel Prize”.)