Headscratchers / SpaceCamp

• It's puzzling that this being an astronaut camp, Max waxes more about Star Wars but never brings up Star Trek, the latter having far more positive acclaim among NASA folks and is clearly credited with a lot more Ascended Fanboy types ^note the first shuttle being named Enterprise for example, many aspiring engineers and scientists, not to mention the fact that Star Trek in general is more scientifically accurate than Star Wars with few of the latter's fantasy aspects.. At least Max didn't say anything about the former being cooler than the latter.
  • It's the typical Hollywood "You can only be a Star Wars nerd or Star Trek nerd" stereotype. It's something that so few Hollywood creators still get wrong, as you barely see any characters mentioning being fans of other Sci-Fi shows like Farscape or Blake's 7, or Space: 1999, or some other sci-fi series or franchise in modern works (the only exclusion to this was The Big Bang Theory, but it sometimes played this stereotype straight just as much as it averted it a few times and mainly focused on popular sci-fi franchises with only an occasional reference to lesser known works). In the time that the film was made, it was either Star Wars or Star Trek, and couldn't be anything else outside of those two. And for this film, considering that the film was distributed by 20th Century Fox, it's easier for them to use quotes and references to Star Wars since they owned the rights to the film and wouldn't have to worry about paying rights to Paramount, a rival studio, for quotes and references to Star Trek and other tie-in works to that franchise.

• If Andie was an astronaut trained as a shuttle pilot, could they not have done an RTLS maneuver? (Return To Launch Site; jettisoning the tank just after the boosters, turning around and landing back at the cape) Or they could have taken the emergency egress slidewire baskets?
  • RTLS was considered an extremely hazardous maneuver, even the best shuttle pilots didn't look forward to attempting it if they didn't have to. Transatlantic Abort or Abort Once Around would have been more viable. . .but then there wouldn't have been as much of a movie. The kids weren't trained on the emergency egress, and rushing to get panicking kids, completely untrained and unexperienced in the technique, to basically zipline away from a shuttle that's moments from explosion would have been as hard as performing the RTLS maneuver.