The Soyuz capsule above planet Earth.
The TMA-14M Soyuz (better known as the "Soyuz Capsule") is a major film location in Gravity.
Description
Dr. Ryan Stone spends roughly 1/3 of her time in the film in the Soyuz capsule. As they approach the substantially damaged but still operational ISS, they see its crew has evacuated in one of its two Soyuz modules and that the parachute of the other capsule has accidentally been deployed, rendering it useless for returning to Earth. Matt Kowalski suggests the remaining Soyuz be used to travel to the nearby Chinese space station Tiangong and board one of its modules to return safely to Earth. After narrowly escaping a large fire in the ISS, Stone gets into the Soyuz along with a fire extinguisher. However after undocking from the station, she discovers that the parachute is tangling the capsule up with the station, preventing her escape. Stone has to get into a spacesuit and fix the problem, just escaping the cloud of debris that is ripping through the ISS, destroying it. The Soyuz capsule is Stone's sanctuary, but it is running low on oxygen and the temperatures are dropping inside the capsule enough to make ice form on the window. Stone then finds that the Soyuz is out of fuel, preventing her from getting Kowalski and re-entering Earth's atmosphere. She tries to use the radio to communicate with Houston but only gets the ham radio of an Inuit fisherman named Aningaaq instead. Distraught, Stone shuts off the oxygen and attempts suicide by hypoxia, only to hallucinate Kowalski. During this hallucination she remembers that the landing rockets do have fuel, and uses this to get to the Tiangong station, later using explosive decompression to eject from the Soyuz and the fire extinguisher as a makeshift thruster. The second Soyuz capsule's fate is unknown. It is abandoned and left to orbit the planet by Stone but could have been destroyed by the debris field after it had completed anoter orbit. In the script it was destroyed upon re-entry.
Apparently, the Russians hid the Vodka inside the capsule also.
Components
- Orbital Module
- Main Soyuz Capsule
- Zvezda Engine Module