Yeah, the argument for not telling the crew is understandable. It’s wrong, but it’s understandable.
And the one thing that disappoints me about this movie is that the use of appropriate language might discourage teachers from showing it in schools. But if there was ever a movie that encouraged STEM education, it’s this one.
What’s STEM?
Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. Umbrella term for degrees and careers that are “techie” in nature.
That scene was straight out of the book, except in the book Annie’s response was funnier. Dunno why they changed it. The move had her saying a tepid “I hate you all.” In the book, she said something like, “Not one of you ever got laid in high school, did you?”
Yes, he said Vicodin.
Saw it, liked it, haven’t read the book, a few thoughts.
I heard Vicodin, too.
Thanks for the exposition, upthread, regarding the missing steps in creating water and the unteathered EVA, both took me out of the film a bit.
Would they really have let Martinez on another space flight? Especially the next Mars run.
I quite liked how they played the mission commander. I suppose some might complain she was wooden or flat, but it came across to me as a stone professional. When she gives the command to brace for impact as she’s strapping herself into the EVA chair for this hail mary pass I thought, unflappable, doesn’t miss fucking a thing.
Having said that, I thought the iron man maneuver was silly.
It’s not unreasonable to keep the crew in the dark, esp during the early weeks, before they have something resembling a plan, or know that he’s growing potatoes. Picture them imagining him starving to death day by day; we know that crew did everything right on the ground, but NASA only knows what they reported. If there were doubts or hard feelings and they festered for a year in space? Best avoided if there’s no upside.
The Iron Man maneuver was suggested in the book just like in the movie but dismissed outright, and they did not do that. The movie decided to go with it.
The upside to informing the crew is that they have lived on Mars, and have worked closely with Watney and would probably have a better sense of how Watney would react to his situation than anyone else. For example they might have figured out that Watney would try to find the Pathfinder to communicate with NASA.
Incidentally I was wondering why The Martian wasn’t released on IMAX. According to this article:
A real pity. I am looking forward to the Walk but if I had to pick between the two I would have preferred the Martian on IMAX. It would have been nice if they could have figured out a way to give both films an IMAX release.
I saw it last night and loved it. I thought most of the differences between the book and the film were in the form of omissions and I didn’t really mind them. The one difference that did bother me was the part where the commander goes out to get Watney using the MMU but when she gets to the end of the tether, doesn’t even bother unhooking from the tether to use the MMU to go the rest of the way. Why bother with the MMU at all then?
My impression was that the differences in the relative velocities would have made untethering to catch Watney suicidal - that if she caught him, the pair of they would have gone speeding away from the spaceship and the feeble jets in her MMU would have been insufficient to get them back to the ship.
She needed the MMU to go to the end of the tether and to stay there.
I loved the book, and I loved the movie. It was spectacular. So many scenes were visually quite a bit more interesting than a paragraph or 2 of text.
I especially liked how the movie contained a huge amount of details that they don’t lampshade to the audience. It’s there in the film but they don’t make a big deal about it, it’s just shown.
A few of the big ones : instead of saying “oh nutritional deficiency + no showers mean Watney is going to be in poor shape at the end of his stay”, they show Matt Damon’s greatly shrunken, skin lesion covered form. I found that to be a much more powerful image than him whining about how much it sucked to be stuck there for that long.
There’s a different set of spacesuits for going to space versus walking around on Mars. I was actually thinking to myself that this was unnecessary but it was still super cool.
Those ladders have a power lift assist mode. It looked cool although actually it looked like you could lose a hand using it.
One question : is the Martian terrain really that dramatic? In the film, in 3d, the various plateaus and hills seem to jut out of the terrain huge dramatic distances, making finding a rover route quite a bit more difficult than it would be if the planet were flat.
I thought it was a retractable ladder, and maybe not even meant to be retracted while someone was on it.
Stereoscopic vision only works for nearby objects. The human eye can’t detect parallax between a boulder 100 yards away and the mountain 2 miles behind it. So in that sense, the 3D effect in the movie, where nearby hills seemed to pop out against distant mountains, is unrealistic.
But Mars does have a lot of dramatic terrain. This is an actual panorama taken by Curiosity (click on the image to get the full resolution image).
I don’t know about that. For one, finding out that he hadn’t died suddenly, but instead was doomed to die slowly of starvation isn’t much of a relief. And that’s what everyone thought at the time they chose not to tell the crew. For another, grief and emotions aren’t rational. Finding out he was still alive and was going to die would send them through their grief process all over again.
I bet NASA absolutely packed their days with experiments and exercise and maintenance and other scheduled tasks, just like they do for current astronauts on the ISS. Getting a person into space is so incredibly costly that every minute is used for a productive purpose if possible. I bet there are scientists on earth waiting in lines 10-deep to propose experiments and tests they could run with the extra time they had headed back (since they didn’t have Martian rocks to analyze).
Why would they have thought he was fated to to die imminently? The crew obviously had the means to return, and they knew that. At the time he established communications with NASA, Watney had reckoned he had at least a year (I believe) of rations (without rationing), plenty of time for them to return (I may be misrembering the sequence, but it doesn’t make sense that he would undertake the relatively long and difficult chore of establishing communications with NASA before accounting his food supply). The only concern raised by NASA about the crew returning to Mars was fatigue, tedium, and possible emotional trauma (easily overcome with the resolve of rescuing a stranded crew member), not fuel, supplies, an injured crew member, a galactic storm, or an upcoming crew member’s wedding. Like after finding out the truth about Watney, the professional astronaughts would have run around the bridge with their hands in the air, losing control of the ship, crashing into the moon.
Presuming he was fated to die before rescue, do you think they would have been less emotionally affected if they found out years later that he suffered and died? It would probably have been more emotionally gruelling because they would never have been given the chance to at least consider rescue options (what ifs). Grief and emotions are rational; sometimes our reactions to them are not. But nothing in the context of the movie (haven’t read the book) suggests that the crew…anyone…thought returning in time was impossible. I understand time later became an issue when his crops died.
At the time that NASA made the decision, no one had any idea that the crew could get back to Mars. That was the whole point of the Rich Purnell maneuver - that he figured out it was possible for them to accelerate toward Earth, slingshot around the planet (picking up more supplies on the way), and head back to Mars.
They undoubtedly still would have been emotionally affected when they came home. But they would not have been in the middle of piloting a spacecraft home at that point.
By “…no one had any idea that the crew could get back to Mars.” you have to be referring to time. But how much time passed between the crew leaving Mars and Watney’s first message to NASA? Certainly not more than a year (or I misunderstand the movie), and Watney estimated he had a year of food, without rationing or potatoes. And he must have known how much food he had left when he first contacted NASA because he would have determined that first, long before he underwent the lengthy task of contacting NASA. Why would anyone think they’d could not return in time?
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They undoubtedly still would have been emotionally affected when they came home. But they would not have been in the middle of piloting a spacecraft home at that point.
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But my point about professional astronauts not acting like bumbling idiots upon hearing adverse news? They’re trained to navigate space, colonize Mars (essentially), and return home. I think they’d perform ok under a bit of emotional pressure.
As someone else mentioned, the Hermes did appear to be using some type of solar electric ion thruster; however, the discussion of using Hohmann transfer orbits and the timeline of the transfer suggested discrete impulse, not any kind of continuous thrust. There are cycler trajectories that allow faster and more frequent flybys between Earth and Mars (but not low enough delta-V to enter into orbit) but these are generally well out of phase with Hohmann transfer orbits. Since no details of the Hermes propulsion capabilies were presented in the film it is difficult to know just how much of a trajectory modification the vessel was capable of making to achieve a Mars return, but it does appear to be kind of a punt to allow for the dramatic tension of having Watney recovered by his crew.
Although Mars atmosphere is not inconsequential for aerodynamics (in fact, it is the most difficult solild body in the Solar system to land upon owing to the thin but existent medium), for ascent barely any protection would be needed. The orbital velocity required is much lower, and if I recall correctly at max-Q the dynamic pressure is somewhere around 50 psf; enough to blow you off your feet if you were standing up, but not enough to injure someone through an EVA suit or shear limbs.
More problematic is that the MAV seems to have no propulsive capability–not even attitude control–after ascent booster burnout, and thus is tumbling. This really makes no sense, especially since the entire crew goes down to the surface. It also doesn’t make much sense that they wouldn’t have accounted for potential variance in the rendezvous calculations and planned the trajectory accordingly. No reason was given for the propulsive shortfall and no discussion of off-nominal performance, so the last minute ‘Hail Mary’ pass of blowing an airlock to eject the ship’s air came off as being highly contrived.
There is still the cost of labor and mission planning, which is considerable. And contrary to your statement, NASA employees can get overtime as approved on a by-project basis. It is true that many programs do not authorize overtime pay and employees (and sometimes contractors) work unpaid overtime; nonetheless there is cost with any change in mission planning and operations. However, in a situation such as this, the public relations impact would be justification for nearly any cost. It isn’t as if this would be at the expense of other critical funding for Medicare or disaster relief, and still probably a pittance compared to the overall expense of the program.
This does beg the question, however, of the apparent lack of contingency operations. Had the MAV fail to function (which is one of the major reliability drivers in studies of the NASA Design Reference Missions) it appears the crew would have had neither an alternate ascent method or contengency for a longer surface stay until replacement supplies arrived. This is a real problem in actual mission studies with no clear solution other than fully redundant ascent capability or a large surplus of supplies, but the problems they had keeping one astronaut alive would have been multiplied by a factor of six (at least) had the MAV failed to launch, and yet they appeared to have no thought toward the contingency. For that matter, they seemed to be doing little in the way of contingency studies for resupply trajectories, whereas in reality there is substantial effort put into contingency operations thoroughout all phases of planning. (That scene in Apollo 13 with engineers scrambling to figure out how to connect the CSM lithium hydroxide canisters to the LM systems? That was all worked out well in advance with the expectation that the LM could be used as a lifeboat.) The scale and capabilities of the Hermes also seem a little discongruent. It is clearly large enough to house a crew at least twice the size; perhaps this might be in support of future missions, but it still begs the question of why only a single six person crew was sent instead of multiple crews going to multiple ground destinations (which would be more cost effective) or backup crews in case of a primary failure.
There are a few other minor issues I have stemming from a more particular knowledge of Mars mission studies or differences between some of the geologic features in the film versus reality, but nothing that can’t be explained as decisions made to improve the narrative and visual presentation. For the most part, the technical details were respectably accurate. My biggest complaint is how rushed the film is, and how it necessarily had to skip over many potentially interesting details and operations on the Hermes and back on Earth. The story could easily have spanned an eight or twelve hour miniseries rather than a two-plus hour film. The thing that really threw me out while watching the film weren’t the techincal details but the the ultra-modern appearance of both Houston mission control and especially JPL, which in reality looks like a college campus that hasn’t seen significant renovation since the early 'Eighties. I did like the nice touch, however, that a crewed mission had to rely on JPL (which for the most part works only on uncrewed missions except for their maintenance of the Deep Space Network for communications) for their communication via Pathfinder, and that the rover comms system apparently used a slight adapation of the same comm software as Pathfinder, which is actually not unlikely.
Overall, it was an entertaining film that clearly leveraged a lot of real science and engineering experience to tell a plausible story, and of course great performances by the always solid Matt Damon and a great supporting cast. I wouldn’t put it on par with [2001: A Space Odyssey, but then very few films even achieve that milestone. It is certainly way better than anything you’re ever going to see out of J.J. Abrams hack machine.
Stranger
Were’nt the Apollo astronauts also pretty much reliant on a single ascent engine, and screwed if it failed?
As it is, supplemental materials (with Neil Degrasse Tyson!) suggest that the Hermesis basically a mobile ISS and the outbound flight takes 4 months.
The Hermes did use an electric thruster, but it was powered by a nuclear reactor, not solar.
Weir did the simulations using a homebrew program and at least claims that the maneuver was based on a constant low-thrust engine. Simulating this stuff isn’t extraordinarily difficult so I’m inclined to believe that it works out.
Of course, the Hermes had normal maneuvering thrusters as well (presumably a common hypergolic bipropellant). They used up much of the propellant reserve on the final capture. The main thruster wouldn’t have been useful there–they only needed a few tens of meters per second, but the acceleration would still have been way too low.
The email was addressed to Vogel in the book. Did they change that in the movie? (I remember because the bad German aroused his suspicion.)
Because without the Rich Purnell manoeuvre, they couldn’t. Hermes was already well on its way to Earth, and couldn’t simply turn around.
This is explained in the book: the MAV is designed to comfortably lob six astronauts (plus rock samples, etc) into low-Mars orbit. In this instance, though, it needs to rendezvous with Hermes on a high-speed flyby. Even stripped down and with only one passenger, it can’t quite make it, but they calculate it can get within grabbing distance at a barely-acceptable speed difference. In the event, the canvas covering on the capsule comes loose and causes enough drag to interfere with the burn, so Watney ends up several kilometres further away than planned and too slow to grab.