What About "The Martian?"

Wonderful film, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in 1) space exploration; 2) director Ridley Scott; 3) actor Matt Damon; 4) author Andy Weir; and 5) a science fiction adventure that really puts science first - almost always. I'd give that final point a solid 9.

The Science

Why not a perfect 10?  Mostly for one rather  serious contradiction.  Within the first few minutes of the movie (don't worry, I'm not giving the plot away here), a huge dust storm whips up the surface of Mars, as happens fairly often on the Red Planet.  The wind is so fierce at the Ares III mission site that it begins to topple the spacecraft that has landed there nozzles-down, forcing the crew to blast off sans biologist-astronaut Mark Watney, the character played so well by Matt Damon.

Now to the contradiction: later in the film Watney prepares to leave the Martian surface in a similar spacecraft parked at another location (which turns out to be a partially staged Ares IV site), but is forced to don a spacesuit and strip almost everything out of the vessel in order to get sufficient speed and velocity to escape Mars and rendezvous with a passing Hermes craft.  "Almost everything" includes, amazingly, the nose cover of the vehicle, which Watney replaces with a duct-taped sheet of plastic.

Well, you can't have the science both ways.  If the Martian atmospheric pressure is so low as to permit a taped sheet of plastic to stay in place during a high g-force launch there is no way that same lean atmosphere could topple a heavy rocket. So which is it?  

Turns out the plastic sheet escape is more scientifically correct than the high-pressure storm that blows the life out of Watney's mission.  This is because the atmosphere of Mars is only 1% that of Earth, giving even the fiercest dust storm on the Red Planet the Earth equivalent of a 10-15 MPH punch - sufficient to fill the atmosphere with Martian dust but not to create much force against a many-ton spacecraft that has landed there tail-down.

And by the way, why would the second escape craft be so wimpy to begin with? Like the rocket at the Ares III site it is fit out to allow 5 astronauts plus their Mars rocks to rendezvous with an orbiting mother vessel. So even given that Watney needs more escape velocity to meet up with a passing (not orbiting) spaceship how hard should it be for a single Mars explorer with no baggage to escape the Red Planet's gravity for the encounter?

The Story

Even accepting the story that the crew is forced to escape before the Martian windstorm can blow over their spaceship, how can it be that Watney has no communication with them?  This makes no sense at all in view what comes later in the film.  Let's take a closer look:

The next time we see Watney's crew mates, they are in an enormous space station-size Hermes craft that includes artificial gravity and room for dozens of astronauts. This means that when they escaped Mars, their landing vehicle docked with the giant craft, which would most certainly have been occupied by one or more crew members left in orbit, Apollo mission-style, to monitor conditions on Mars and communicate with the crew on the ground in real time (rather than with the 24-minute delay typical of communication from Mars to Earth and back). 

Since this giant spacecraft was obviously in orbit over Mars, why rush to leave the Red Planet once the remaining crew had been rescued from the dust storm? The mission had months to go, meaning that the orbiting craft would have been totally prepared to stay the course. It makes no sense whatever that the crew wouldn’t continue to pass over the mission site until the storm passed, doing reconnaissance and collecting as much data as possible while attempting to determine the fate of their missing comrade.

In a real mission of this sort, moreover, not only would each astronaut be able to communicate with colleagues on-site (as we see in the movie), but also all communications would include crew in the orbiting vehicle, and be relayed to mission control on Earth as well.  So how would it be possible for the escaping crew not to hear from Watney once he got his bearings back?  And even if something happened to the communicator in Watney's suit, this mission had a human habitat.  It simply boggles the mind to think that NASA would have forgotten to include means of communication in that facility!

This is one more area where "The Martian" leaves scientific reality and becomes a Hollywood thriller; unfortunately, that creates a rough spot in the story line for those expecting accuracy as well as a good adventure.

Nevertheless, "The Martian" is truly worth seeing.  The scenes on Mars really make you feel like you are on the Red Planet, and the adventure itself is compelling and seductive.  The last movie to combine science and adventure on this scale was "Apollo 13," a fine movie about real events.

I plan to write a follow-up post focusing on "The Martian" mission; in the meantime, drop a comment here... and treat yourself to a viewing!

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The author is an inventor with 10 proxy robotics patents pending and 2 books on the subject. Saving Earth: The Proxy Robot Age and Proxy Robotics: To the Moon and Beyond are available in print from The Book Patch, and the latter publication is also available as an eBook from Amazon.com.