The Real NASA Technologies In 'The Martian'

An anonymous reader writes: On October 2, movie audiences will get to see Ridley Scott's adaptation of Andy Weir's brilliant sci-fi novel The Martian, about a near-future astronaut who gets left for dead on the planet Mars. (Official trailer.) Both book and film are rooted in actual science, and NASA has now posted a list of technologies featured in the movie that either already exist, or are in development. For example, the Mars rover: "On Earth today, NASA is working to prepare for every encounter with the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV). The MMSEV has been used in NASA's analog mission projects to help solve problems that the agency is aware of and to reveal some that may be hidden. The technologies are developed to be versatile enough to support missions to an asteroid, Mars, its moons and other missions in the future." They also show off their efforts to develop water reclamation, gardens in space, and oxygen recovery.

Comments

Re:book was boring

[TomGreenhaw]

Huh - I couldn't put it down.

Re:book was boring

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

No, they don't. In science fiction, or at least hard SF, which this purports to be, you get to posit a coupe of unknown things, like faster than light travel, inertia dampers, anti-gravity lifts, space elevators, and such. After that, though, real science has to work. Two plus two still has to equal four. You can't split molecules of H2O and get some left over He as a bonus. As the GP poster notes, the amount of insolation has to be right. The fiction part, and the good writing part, comes in seeing how that characters react to the situations they are in. There are a large number of really good planetary colonization/survival stories that have been written since the 1950s. This book is not one of them.

You can always posit that magic works, but then you've crossed over into fantasy, not SF. Or, you can blur the lines a bit, as Heinlein did in Stranger In A Strange Land, which is ultimately about ethics and morals and how we treat those who are different. Whatever you do, once you set up the rules, you have to play by them. If you're going to get way more insolation than Mars actually gets, you have to tell us how, or it's a major fail with anyone who has a decent science education.