Well, I've never watched the show, but this is clearly made up whole-cloth by the writers, because this isn't what gravitational lenses do.

What they are probably getting at is that time slows near large/heavy bodies with a lot of gravity. The projectile itself would NOT slow (all things being equal), but would, instead, continue to travel at 200 mph - it's just that an hour would take a lot longer (for someone outside the system)!

So, a 200 mph projectile would cover 5 miles in 90 seconds, normally, from our reference point. The show says that instead of 90 seconds, the projectile took 30 minutes: that's a time dilation factor of 20x for that 5 miles. If you had a black hole and the projectile shot across very close to its surface, you could, say, slow time 19x.

Of course, the mass of a black hole is infinite, so the answer to "How much mass?" is infinite! And, of course, you couldn't just shoot a projectile across the surface of a black hole (or any other mass) in the hopes of only taking advantage of the time dilation: the missile would get sucked down into it and all that.

So, sorry there is no answer to your question, but I hope the clarification that the writers probably mean that time slows, not the projectile, is interesting!
Source(s):
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/relativity/specialrel.html


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