- Factual errors: As pointed out by one of the characters, the ship enters the "blackout" area around the sun (and loses contact with Earth) anomalously early, before Mercury's orbit in fact. Communications from this close to the sun are not a problem in reality (and were possible with 1970s technology), but the writer and director took deliberate creative license to improve the tension.
- Factual errors: In his DVD commentary, director Danny Boyle says the original idea for Icarus I was to "be on its side, like the Zeebrugge". In fact, he is referring to the "Herald of Free Enterprise", the British ferry that capsized on 6 March 1987 while leaving the Belgian port of Zeebrugge. 193 passengers and crew were killed.
- Factual errors: As the crew attempts to rotate the shield to repair it, there is an argument that they would lose com towers 3 and 4, which they say would need on the way home. However, many shots including the simulation of payload delivery reveal that the Icarus' small shield which is supposed to protect Icarus after the payload is detached, just isn't wide enough to protect those towers at all, so they would've lost them anyway. It is even questionable, whether this shield would be capable of protecting the Icarus itself after detaching the payload with the large shield and at that close distance from the sun.
- Revealing mistakes: In this movie, like in most science fiction productions, sound is heard in space. This is impossible due to the absence of a medium that can transmit sound in the vacuum of space. (However, audiences have grown so accustomed to this error, it is hardly an option for any sci-fi production to stay true to the laws of physics in this case.)
- Incorrectly regarded as goofs: In the transmission received from the Icarus I, they refer to themselves as the Icarus I, rather than simply Icarus. This doesn't make any sense unless they are already aware of an "Icarus II" mission. The Icarus II is launched almost immediately when the Icarus I disappears, confirming that both ships and both bombs were built at the same time or consecutively, and thus the naming makes sense.
- Continuity: When the ship is tilted to angle the damaged shield away from the sun, the crew is very unnerved by the incredibly loud sounds made by the cooling metal of the shield expanding and contracting. They all seem in surprise by the loudness of the noise, even though they know what it is. However, these sounds should have come as no surprise, and everyone should have known exactly what to expect as, only a few scenes before, the shield was completely removed from all sunlight when the ship orbited Mercury, and would have inevitably produced the same phenomena.
- Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The spacecraft takes sixteen months to cover fifty-five million miles but only takes what seems a period of less than a week to travel the remaining thirty-six million miles. As described in the commentary, it takes sixteen months to arrive at their destination because, they likely had to use the gravity of larger planets such a Jupiter (which is in the opposite direction) in order to obtain the correct velocity to orbit the sun.
- Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): In the scene where four crewmen are forced to go into outer space, with no protection, Corazon states that the temperature outside is -273 degrees. This is not true, because though outer space is near the absolute zero (-273 degrees Celcius) it is in fact about 3 degrees above absolute zero. She should have said -273 degrees Celsius, or 3 degrees Kelvin.
>>> WARNING: Here Be Spoilers <<<
Goofs below here contain information that may give away important plot points. You may not want to read any further if you've not already seen this title.
- Incorrectly regarded as goofs: SPOILER: Two of the crew members jump from the Icarus I to the Icarus II without space suits. Contrary to expectations created by B-movie science fiction, this is entirely possible. The human body simply does not have enough internal pressure to explode in vacuum. Air in the lungs is expelled almost instantaneously, provided that the subject doesn't attempt try to hold his/her breath. Blood is contained and held under pressure by tension from the walls of the circulatory system, so it has has no way to boil. A prepared individual can remain conscious for more than ten seconds, and stay alive for for several minutes, in a complete total vacuum. One NASA engineer involved in a vacuum chamber mishap has discussed the sensation of standing exposed in vacuum until he lost consciousness, from which he recovered completely.
- Factual errors: SPOILER: During the "space jump", one of the crew members freezes solid in a couple of minutes. Space is very very cold, but objects in a vacuum cool down extremely slowly. The heat in the object has to go somewhere. On Earth, the heat would be transferred to the cold surroundings, such as the air, by contact. In a vacuum, there is nothing to transfer the heat to, so objects that are warm stay warm for a long time. This is the principle behind vacuum flasks. The only way a object in a perfect vacuum can cool down is by electromagnetic black-body radiation, which is incredibly slow.
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