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Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Gravity took off at the box office over the weekend, and astro-experts have been fact-checking the film’s science left and right. After Neil deGrasse Tyson took to Twitter to chime in on the film’s faults, we decided to ask a panel of experts — astronomer Phil Plait and former astronauts Leroy Chiao and Tom Jones — to give us some definitive answers to our burning questions about the film’s accuracy. And they explained everything, from the mechanics of Sandra Bullock’s spacesuit to using a fire extinguisher in space.

Entertainment Weekly: Let’s start with the catastrophe that propels the film.

Leroy Chiao in space. Courtesy of Nasa.On July 8, Nasa will launch the Space Shuttle Atlantis into orbit for the final time, effectively ending the 30-year-old space shuttle program with a big, eardrum-shattering boom. Though there’ll be plenty of cheering (and drunk) fans in Florida for the lift-off—a good number of them likely blaring Europe’s “The Final Countdown” from their pickup trucks—it’ll be a sad and anticlimactic moment. After Nasa enjoys a summer of astronaut nostalgia and commemorative T-shirts . . . what then? Maybe the Kennedy Space Center becomes another Florida tourism destination, with thrill rides and overpriced corn dogs and a chance to yell at the moon with Buzz Aldrin for premier club members. Or maybe all of those rumblings about space tourism will actually come to pass, and Nasa will get a second lease on life. Even if space travel becomes as widely accessible as Caribbean cruises,...