OK, so he was wearing some protective gear in the book, but his controlled burning of hydrazine left enough hydrogen to cause an explosion. With a makeshift setup like that, he’d have also released a lot of hydrazine vapor into the Hab.
Just saw it yesterday, and thought it was okay. I enjoyed how they found disco music that had lyrics so appropriately matched to each scene.
My favorite part was the bit about being a space pirate, and everything at JPL. My husband (Doper Andy L) liked the line, “I’m Teddy. I’m the head of NASA.”
My husband and I saw it with a group who had some good comments. One man said that it was a mistake to have orange EVA suits on a planet like Mars.
Enjoyed the book and the movie. I appreciate that they didn’t try to shoehorn a love story into it. Also, I think the part with him on earth afterwards was made up, correct?
Correct - the book ended with Watney’s arrival on Hermes, making a final log entry from sickbay. But the film ending was no more “made up” than anything else.
Indeed. Here’s a guy dressed for working with hydrazine. Caption reads: Anhydrous hydrazine being loaded into the MESSENGER space probe. Note the safety suit the technician is wearing. Very nasty stuff.
I was gonna say…
Ready for the Ralph Lauren spring line!
They had the budget and visual effects crew to simulate a blue sunset/sunrise on Mars. I would’ve loved to see that in the movie, without any explanation as to why it’s blue, like most of the other tech stuff.
I wonder why they left that out?
Did the book mention that? If not, the simplest explanation is that they didn’t put it on screen because they didn’t realize it’d be blue. Because yeah, that is a pretty cool visual.
I do not recall, were the skies orange?
I just got home from seeing this film and IMO it’s easily one of the 3 best science fiction films of all time. I gave it 10 stars on IMDB. I can’t wait to see it again.
Ridley Scott, sire, you have redeemed yourself in full for the crapfest that was Prometheus (but please, don’t do that to us again).
I don’t recall Watney mentioning the color of the sunset in the book, but I remember a few scenes in the movie and it looked like a typical, golden-colored setting on Earth.
The thing is, with so much input from NASA types, and Andy Weir himself during the making, I’d be shocked if it never came up. Especially the concept artists and VFX director certainly looking at tons of reference images in pre-production.
Orange it is.
Say, one thing I have been wondering about: He refers to all of his crewmates by last name. I can see that maybe Cmdr. Lewis might be a stickler for protocol like that, but I find it hard to imagine that, stuck in close quarters with them for months at a time, that there’d be that much formality between peers. I’d expect the rest of them to all be on a first-name basis at least, or more likely on a nickname basis.
Using last names isn’t necessarily formal. Just as using first names isn’t necessarily friendly, if it’s just the custom in a certain environment.
Yeah. In the military, we often didn’t know the first names of our fellow soldiers. The last name is right there on a name tape. I, and most people, got used to just answering to our last name.
After all that time in close quarters, there’d be a strong possibility of some of them growing to the sight of each other (or shacking up, like Beck and Johansson). The use of last names might help them keep some necessary distance, and be a reminder to all of them to act like professionals/officers.
I recall an interview with Andy Weir where he says he didn’t realize how incredibly toxic hydrazine is. Which is fair enough, there are a lot of substances which are regarded by ZOMG TOXIC! by the lay public and even some scientists and engineers, but in actually are not very hazardous when used in small quantities with basic precautions.
Hydrazine is not such a substance. The lowest dose known to cause adverse effects is only 0.4 parts per million (in air) where chronic exposure will cause liver damage. It can only be smelled at 4 ppm, and it’s lethal at 430 ppm. Essentially a few mg of vaporized hydrazine is Bad News. Since Whatney’s trying to catalyze the breakdown of several hundred kg of hydrazine, anything less than 99.9999% reaction efficiency is Really Bad News.
So let’s say we wanted to make water from hydrazine. How could it be done more safely? Maybe we could give Whatney a glove box, which seems like a reasonable thing to have for some Martian geology. There, hydrazine vapor would be contained and there’d be no risk of skin contact. Could the reaction be done entirely in solution? Just mix water and a slurry of finely ground catalyst in a pressure vessel, slowly add suitably small quantities of hydrazine, and let the reaction continue to completion. Whatney also would probably have some sort of mass spectrometer suitable for detecting trace gases in the atmosphere or organics in the soil, which could be used to monitor the air in the hab and confirm the completion of batched reactions.
For that matter, one would have expected the Hab to be designed to supply water on-site in some manner or another, whether from subsurface ice deposits or chemically from other materials. Water is one of the massier requirements for life support, and one of the easier ones to procure on-site, so something like that would probably be standard for a Mars mission. No need to Magyver up a solution when you’ve already got something purpose-engineered for the job.
If their environment is self-contained and they recover excreted water, then they don’t actually need much in the way of reserves, right?
In the book, they didn’t set the Hab up until they got there, so they’d need to have reserves enough to make it for a few days. At that point, maybe it doesn’t make sense to send along further equipment.
He needed enough water to grow a crop of potatoes, so that may have been more than available for personal use of the crew. Potatoes are a fairly water hungry crop and maintaining sufficient water level in the soil is crucial to growing modern cultivars of potatoes. Even if the habitat had some kind of water synthesis system it probably wasn’t intended for water production on the scale needed for crop production.
I’m sure there are numerous routes to synthesis of water from monomethylhydrazine but another thing he needed was aqua ammonia (NH[SUB]3[/SUB] in an aqueous solution) to produce ammonium nitrate or some other bioreactive nitrogenous fertilizer. I don’t know whether this was addressed in the book and don’t remember any mention in the movie, but you’d want to mediate the catalyst to produce this in addition to hydrogen for reaction with oxygen. He also needed to produce and distribute this in quantity, so his burner producing vapor to a tented cover was a pretty workable solution in lieu of an irrigation or hydroponic setup.
Pure hydrogen is dangerous stuff; its diffusivity, sensitivity to spark ignition across a wide range of concentrations, and invisibility pose a significant hazard in application. It’s not surprising that Watney “blew myself up” in trying to react it. Frankly, I would have figured out some way of remote ignition rather than standing there right in front of the burner, but then, I’m not stranded on the surface of another planet with no way to communicate home.
Stranger