What expenses? I think the rocket used for the first (failed) resupply launch was already being assembled for a future (Ares 4?) pre-supply mission. The Chinese rocket was already being assembled for their Mars probe. NASA employees don’t even get overtime pay. They did have to modify 2 probes, but that cost should be miniscule compared to the whole ARES program cost.
Though it just occurred to me: Why was the Ares-4 MAV already on Mars, but not the Ares-4 Hab & supplies? (I did read the book, but I don’t remember if there was an explanation for this.)
It takes a while for the MAV to synthesize the rocket fuel - I’m remembering around a year. Since it already has to go early, they send it along with the previous Ares mission (3 in this case) so the pilot on Ares 3 can land it from orbit instead of it needing to be an automated landing (it can’t be landed under control from Earth because of the 20-minute delay in transmission time).
There no point in sending all the other supplies that early, and a potential downside if they get covered by sand or damaged over a matter of years.
Haven’t read the book. Great movie - I really liked it!
The Council of Elrond gag was funny, and Boromir was sitting right there! I’m impressed Teddy knew his Tolkien well enough to want to be Glorfindel.
The trailer was unfortunately misleading, both as to Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and implying that that was Watney’s wife and child.
I didn’t buy that the Hermes crew could be kept in the dark for two freakin’ months as to Watney still being alive. They would be in touch with family and friends, and have newsfeeds from Earth, I presume.
Why never show Watney’s parents? Might’ve been a good scene - but might’ve diluted the focus on Mars/Mission Control/Hermes, I guess.
Was Watney wearing Navy aviator’s wings on his shirt in one of the scenes? What do we know, from the book, of his background?
Would the MAV burn up, all or mostly, when it fell from orbit, given the thin Martian atmosphere, or would it just make a new crater?
According to Wiki, Martian exteriors were filmed here (as they were on two previous Mars-related movies): Wadi Rum - Wikipedia
A nitpick: The U.S. and NASA flags were on the wrong side of the podium in the press conference scenes.
Heh. I read it somewhere as “America has spent a lot of money to rescue Matt Damon over the years.”
I thought it was maybe a mix of malnutrition, vitamin deficiency (no mention in the movie of multivitamins that I remember), “bedsores” (wearing a spacesuit too much without the chance to really bathe) and radiation burns.
Others have already responded to this. I’ll add that Henry Kissinger, of all people, argued in one of his White House memoirs that the same might have been said of Columbus before he sailed over the horizon in 1492. If all social problems must be resolved, and all other demands for funding met, before we explore the universe around us, then those voyages will never be made - but they may well hold the answers to at least some of those very problems!
Exploration and discovery are essential to the human spirit, I believe, and worth the time, treasure and talent we spend on them. The Martian gets that.
In the novel the booster they hijacked was for a Saturn probe:
“What about an Ares 4 presupply?” said Teddy. “Land it at Ares 3 instead.”
“That’s what we’re thinking, yeah,” Venkat confirmed. “Problem is, the original plan was to launch presupplies a year from now. They’re not ready yet.
<snip>
“There’s also the booster,” Venkat said. “The only way to get a probe to Mars with the planets in their current positions is to spend a butt-load of fuel. We only have one booster capable of doing that. The Delta IX that’s on the pad right now for the EagleEye 3 Saturn probe. We’ll have to steal that. I talked to ULA, and they just can’t make another booster in time.”
“The EagleEye 3 team will be pissed, but okay,” said Teddy. “We can delay their mission if JPL gets the payload done in time.”
The only pill I remember seeing was a valium pill, not a vitamin. “I’m going to dip this potato in a crushed valium now, because nobody can stop me”.
And while he could have been getting his vitamins from pills, that still leaves him needing protein and (to a lesser extent) fat. He was getting some from the freeze-dried rations, of course, but probably not enough (yet another contributor to his apparent poor health late in the movie).
Yes, we do need fat in our diets. It’s not something that comes up often, especially in rich countries, since most First World diets have far more fat than is needed. But when you’re eating almost entirely potatoes, yeah.
Potatoes actually have a decent amount of protein. 10 per day would be enough to meet FDA recommendations. Watney had to have been eating around that number just for the calories.
I’m aware of the idea of rabbit starvation, in which one has problems if virtually all calories are from protein. It’s not clear to me what the problems are for a carb+protein diet, though. Rabbit starvation seems to come about because the liver can’t metabolize that much protein.
Didn’t the Irish peasantry in the 19th century live on a nearly all-potato diet (until the potato blight caused a massive famine)? Not well, I assume, but for more than a couple of years …
Potatoes might have enough protein as a whole, but they don’t have complete proteins. Proteins are made up of 20 different amino acids, and humans need all of them. Some of them, our bodies can make on their own, but the rest, we need to get from our diet, and those are called essential amino acids. Very few plants contain significant amounts of all of the essential amino acids: For that, you usually need to either eat particular combinations of plants (like grains and legumes), or eat animal foods.
The 19th-century Irish did eat a diet very heavy on potatoes, but that’s not all that they ate. They also had milk, cabbage, and a few other cheap vegetables, and the milk and the other vegetables were enough to complete their proteins.
The biggest thing Watney has in his favor is that the typical American diet has a heck of a lot more protein than we actually need. So the small amount of stored rations he had, even with as little of them as he’s eating on a daily basis, just might have enough to meet his needs. But it’s still definitely something to be concerned about, and probably one more thing that he had to calculate out.
In the book, Watney thinking he might not survive, writes messages to all the Hermes crew including advice to one of the men saying “…he should tell (the non-captain woman) how he feels…” and those two end up sharing quarters on the trip home and Watney takes that mans bunk. Only his message to the captain is in the movie.
According to my wife, in the movie this man has a wife and two kids on earth (which are shown at the end) plus an affair going on in space. Is this correct or did the movie deviate from the book and we’re imagining an affair?
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