And it was unfortunate, because they didn’t give those astronauts their best shot at potentially solving the problem they had. Would Nasa not tell the other astronauts that Watney was still alive? Well let me put it this way: they didn’t tell the Columbia astronauts everything. So, with a slow acceleration of 1G taking off from Mars you’d get to 50 kilometres before you’re travelling at 1km per second. The question is, at what altitude do they reach 1km per second? Let’s figure it out: OK, so 1,000 metres per second squared, divided by … … you want to go slow in this case, so let’s say 1G.
The atmosphere is very thin, so can you get high enough that the atmosphere becomes irrelevant before you’re going fast enough that the atmosphere is a threat? It depends on the thrust profile.
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Would you need windows in a rocket to survive a launch from Mars? It’s an interesting question. So Minovitch had to get out the chalk and walk them through it and convince them that it would actually work. The managers making the decisions are typically people who were once engineers but haven’t done it in a while and perhaps are not so good at maths any more. He was a very junior person, somewhat analogous to the character in the movie. He was a trajectory analyst at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1960s and he came up with the idea of the gravity assist that became the basis of the Voyager programme to go to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. It may appear to be a Hollywood device, but in fact there is a basis in history for such a person.
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One thing in the movie that is possible, and perhaps the producers knew the story, is the character of the nerd (played by Donald Glover) who comes up with the gravity-assist trajectory that rescues the mission. Martians are not going to get their water by importing hydrazine from Earth and burning it with precious cabin oxygen, they are going to bake it out of the soil. Martian soil is about 5% water by weight at low latitude, and up to 60% water near the poles. Water is available in its natural state on Mars as ice, permafrost, or soaked into the soil. That’ll certainly work, but if I was stranded on Mars I would just make water out of the soil. Matt Damon’s character took hydrazine from the rocket fuel and dissociated it into nitrogen and hydrogen, which you can do, and he burned the hydrogen with oxygen to make water. Even climbing the ladders in the initial scenes, they seem to be exerting themselves. As far as I can see they didn’t bother with that in the movie. If you’ve got a 150lb person with a 150lb suit, that’s going to feel like 100lb on Mars – lighter than the person alone on Earth. Mars has about one third the gravity of Earth, which is an asset to explorers because you’re wearing a heavy space suit, but it doesn’t feel that heavy. But if Columbus had waited for ocean liners, or even clipper ships, he never would have gone anywhere. There’ll be ships like that some day, just like there were ocean liners a few hundred years after Columbus made his voyage. Going to Mars is not about realising the vision of a giant science-fiction spaceship, it is about sending a payload from Earth to Mars that is capable of supporting a small group of people, and then sending that or a comparable payload back.
It’s just that the ship was so big and elaborate and expensive-looking. But be warned: If you're looking to watch "The Martian" at home, your options are a bit more limited than you might think.The diameter of the torus and the rate of rotation on the Mars Orbiter spacecraft looked about right to create an artificial gravity level somewhere between Mars and Earth, so that was OK. After his crew mistakenly strands him on Mars, Mark is forced to rely on his wits to survive the endless perils of the Red Planet.Įqual parts harrowing survival thriller and stark character-driven drama, "The Martian" finds Damon delivering one of his finest performances to date, and doing so almost entirely sans scene partners - though the film does boast a stacked cast of supporting players including Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Mackenzie Davis, Donald Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Sebastian Stan.Įpic scope and white-knuckle thrills aside, Damon's performance alone makes "The Martian" worthy of a rewatch - or a watch for the first time. If one were to pore over the best sci-fi films released in the past decade or so, they'd be hard-pressed to find one quite as well-loved as 2015's " The Martian." Adapted by "The Cabin in the Woods" helmer Drew Goddard from Alex Weir's novel of the same name, and directed by the legendary Ridley Scott, "The Martian" stars Matt Damon as astronaut and botanist Mark Watney.
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