As the party are driving along the road, cars are falling on them but they avoid them. Suddenly, there are bullet holes everywhere in the car.
During conversations between Earth and the "space-ship" near Mercury replies are immediate. The speed of light (and radio waves) is 186000mi/sec 300000km/sec so there should be a delay of 7 minutes both ways.
You can't repair a spaceship's communications system by soldering a wire to the ICSP header of an Arduino Uno clone.
Solar flares travel at close to the speed of light, (a fraction slower), but would still take 3 minutes to reach Mercury from the Sun. They declared "20 seconds until landing" then the flare started then hit them.
Originally, Mercury is going to pass by Earth at twice the distance of the Moon. Mercury has double the mass of the Moon. Using the inverse square law, the effect on Earth would be a half that of the Moon - bad, but not as disastrous as they're making out.
If the magnetic force of the meteorite was strong enough to attract objects along the highway as it passed by in a car, the force should be strong enough to attract any iron containing object in the office without the object being placed nearby..
All of the cars that fall back to earth are burning on the inside, for no apparent reason.
Christopher claims that his radio can transmit to Mercury. However, there is no explanation as to why it cannot transmit to amateur (ham) radio stations in Houston and thereby communicate with Mission Control.