For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist Kip Thorne as his science consultant — and the visual simulations Thorne helped design for the film's black hole were so mathematically accurate that they generated two peer-reviewed scientific papers and became the model for how astrophysicists visualize black holes today
JPL's management contract is suddenly up for grabs for the first time since the 1930s, and NASA's own language shows why this is more than a routine procurement fight