The Fast & Furious Outer Space Sequence Gets One Thing Right, According To A NASA Pilot

The "Fast and Furious" franchise, aside from veering away from its original premise of high-speed street racing, has defied the laws of science with each film that hits the garage. Audiences have seen Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson pull down a helicopter like he's Captain America in "Hobbs and Shaw," an army of zombie cars flood the streets of New York, and Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) lift a car to use as a shield during a gunfight, as if he were flipping IKEA furniture. Perhaps the most absurd moment in the entire series, though, is something fans practically brought into existence when Tej (Ludacris) and Roman Pierce (Tyrese Gibson) drove a Pontiac Fiero into space.

It's quite a jump from the first film, which featured our heroes hijacking trucks carrying TVs and DVD players. Regardless of how ludicrous it was (which coincidentally involved Ludacris himself), Roman and Tej's lap through the stars actually earned some respect from a real-life astronaut. In an interview with Vanity Fair (via YouTube), former astronaut Chris Hadfield was asked to share his thoughts on various movies and shows about spaceflight, pointing out what they got right and what they got wrong. Sandwiched between the likes of Apple TV+'s "For All Mankind" and "Top Gun: Maverick" was "F9: The Fast Saga," which, as crazy as driving a car into space might be, certainly captured the awe of looking down at our beautiful blue planet spinning in the vastness of space.

Hadfield didn't mince his words when it came to the movie's daring and downright silly voyage into space. "Their engines fire, and like 30 seconds later, they're in orbit. It took me eight and a half minutes, so they really went fast. They were getting crushed." Nevertheless, Hadfield was forgiving of the franchise's ninth movie, going where no street racer had gone before, specifically when "Fast 9" pumps the brakes and lets the heroes just look where they are.

It's in Tej and Roman's brief beat floating through space that Hadfield was happy to praise, capturing the rare experience of seeing Earth in its entirety. "I love the scene when those two guys — and you see it reflected in their visors — are suddenly actually seeing Earth from space. The beauty of that and the wonder of it that they're emoting there, it feels just like that," Hadfield explained. "Suddenly, all of the blue is below you. You're out in the eternal blackness, and all of life is laid out there on this beautiful curving arc under them."

Incredibly, then, it's in one of the most far-fetched moments in the entire tire-screeching saga that they actually had a bit of reality to it. Well done, Toretto family. While you might have tested your audience's acceptance of Vin Diesel having an estranged brother that looked like John Cena, sending a mechanic and a street racer on a space mission got the thumbs up from someone who has actually been on one for real.