Where No One Can Hear You Scream: 18 Big-Screen Space Disasters

'2001: A Space Odyssey'

Stanley Kubrick's science fiction masterpiece introduced the world to HAL 9000, the sentient shipboard computer that controls a spacecraft bound for Jupiter. HAL sends astronaut Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) out on a space walk to replace a supposedly faulty antenna unit, upon which it severs his oxygen hose and cuts him loose. HAL later turns off life support for remaining crew members but fails to kill Dr. David "Dave" Bowman (Keir Dullea).

'Apollo 13'

The 1995 docudrama from director Ron Howard recreates the ill-fated moon mission, in which astronauts Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) are thrown into jeopardy after an explosion causes their craft to lose power and oxygen. 

'Contact'

Jodie Foster is Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway in this 1997 film, an astronaut who works with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program and detects a repeating number sequence from the star Vega that might have been sent by extraterrestrial life. After a terrorist attack kills the first crew designated to investigate the transmissions, Arroway heads up a second mission. A wormhole journey through space brings her face to face with an alien who takes on the form of her deceased father.

'Event Horizon'

The year is 2047 and spacecraft Lewis and Clark is sent to answer a distress call made by Event Horizon, a starship that has vanished on its maiden voyage. The crew, headed up by Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne), boards the ship and find signs of a massacre -- the result of the previous crew turning on each other after slipping into a dimension of "pure chaos, pure evil."

'Flash Gordon'

The campy 1980 space opera best known for its Queen soundtrack was directed by Mike Hodges (Croupier, Morons From Outer Space) and begins when New York Jets football star "Flash" Gordon (Sam J. Jones) and journalist Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) are lured onto a spacecraft made by Dr. Hans Zarkov (Topol), bringing them to planet Mongo, where Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow) entraps them.

'Galaxy Quest'

The sci-fi comedy from 1999 featured Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman as stars of a canceled space show who find themselves transported for real to another planet by a race of aliens, Thermians, who believed the TV episodes were historical documentaries and patterned their lives after them.

'Gravity'

The upcoming space thriller from writer-director Alfonso Cuaron features Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts on a space shuttle mission that goes horribly awry after a satellite crashes into their craft, stranding them in the abyss with depleting oxygen reserves. The film got rapturous reviews after premiering at the Venice Film Festival, with Todd McCarthy calling it "the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space" and "a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise."

'Lost in Space'

The 1998 adaptation of the classic 1960s TV series sees the family Robinson placed in suspended animation and sent on a 10-year mission to planet Alpha Prime. Little do they know that the spying Dr. Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman) has boarded the flight as a stowaway, and reprogrammed the ship's robot to destroy vital navigation controls, sending the ship hurtling toward the sun.

'Marooned'

The 1969 space thriller from John Sturges and starring Gregory Peck and Richard Crenna was released less than four months after the Apollo 11 moon landing, when public fascination with the U.S. space program was at an all-time high. In it, a trio of American astronauts return from an experimental space station when the engine of their Apollo spacecraft fails, and they find themselves marooned in orbit.

'Mission to Mars'

A 2000 film from Brian De Palma, the film stars Tim Robbins and Don Cheadle and was inspired partly by the Disney attraction of the same name. It's set in 2020, on the first manned mission to the Red Planet. There to discover if Mars might contain water, allowing for human colonization, three crew members are killed by a whirlwind that buries a fourth alive -- sending a second crew on a rescue mission. They, too, prove to be headed toward disaster.

'Moonraker'

James Bond goes to space in the eleventh film in the series, in which 007 (Roger Moore) and astronaut Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) are sent to space to save humanity from Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), an insane industrialist who plans to poison humanity and repopulate Earth from his space station.

'Pitch Black'

The first film in the Riddick franchise sees Vin Diesel's criminal Richard B. Riddick transported to prison in a cargo spacecraft that is damaged by comet debris, sending it crash-landing on a desert planet, where Riddick and the crew join forces to save themselves from hostile alien predators.

'Solaris'

Gravity isn't George Clooney's first time playing an astronaut. In 2002's Solaris, Steven Soderbergh's remake of the 1972 Russian film, he plays Dr. Chris Kelvin, a psychologist sent aboard a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. There he learns that a scientist friend has committed suicide and that the rest of the crew has died amid mysterious circumstances. 

'SpaceCamp'

Kate Capshaw stars as an astronaut accidentally sent into space with a group of SpaceCamp campers in this 1986 adventure. The Space Shuttle Atlantis must then travel to a partially constructed space station to retrieve oxygen stored there. 

'Space Cowboys'

Directed by Clint Eastwood, this 2000 film stars Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner as aging former test pilots sent to space to repair an old Soviet satellite. What they don't know is that it is armed with nuclear missiles.

'Sunshine'

Danny Boyle's 2007 sci-fi thriller takes place in 2057, when a crew is sent on a deadly mission to reignite the sun with a nuclear bomb the size of New York City.

'The Black Hole'

Disney's 1979 blockbuster, the priciest at the time for the company, follows the spacecraft Palomino, which discovers a black hole on a journey back to Earth. The Cygnus, a massive spaceship nearby, somehow withstands its pull, leading the crew to investigate and meet its mysterious commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) and his robot henchman.

The 'Alien' Franchise

The sci-fi horror saga, which began with Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi thriller Alien, follows Warrant Office Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as she battles a predatory species of extraterrestrial life, designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger.