TM: What does NASA think about The Martian?

[Daniel]

terpkristin wrote: "Don't get me started on people bringing in Bill Nye as a science correspondent about space things... "

If there were no people like him involved, some influential projects could've not even be there. There is a huge need of intermedium between us "dumb mortals" and serious engineers/Nobel prize nominees who often cannot or simply don't care to explain difficult stuff. And the science grows only more sophisticated with each year. There is great benefit in making science fun and making it being a show.

[terpkristin]

I'm well familiar with the politics. He's not really helping. The first step that need to happen is to get the head of the relevant committees replaced with people who have a basic understanding of science, not people who deny climate change and such. The second thing that needs to happen is to have a consistent view and requirements, not things that change every 2 years. Without those, nobody, not Bill Nye, not NSS, not Planetary Society, not AIAA or any other group can make true headway.

But Nye is a glorified science teacher, a mediocre one at that. We need more former astronauts, more Neil deGrasse Tysons. Nye is just a talking head that spouts stuff that's incorrect on CNN.

[Trike]

terpkristin wrote: "As for the metric/US thing and design robustness, I'm not going to bother explaining why it's not as simple as the media made it out to be and why the single point failure in the book made no sense. It's not worth my time nor is it really relevant to this thread. But as with most things the media reports, they have no idea what they're talking about. Don't get me started on people bringing in Bill Nye as a science correspondent about space things... "

I'm not a huge fan of Bill Nye, but he's a just a kid show scientist who used to be an aeronort and is irrelevant.

But the Mars orbiter crash really was as simple as an English-Metric conversion failure. The error came from the contractor -- which I see is Lockheed Martin, shocker -- and NASA's middle managers who dismissed concerns of its engineers. That latter aspect is pretty much the exact same scenario which doomed both Challenger and Columbia, which is why you put engineers in charge of engineering projects and not politicians who are actually accountants.

I mean, Lockheed Martin has cost us how many billions of dollars (or is it trillions now?) for that piece of crap F-35, which seems to get itself grounded every other month for yet another component failure. Shame the Lemon Law doesn't cover multi-million-dollar fighter jets. Not only has it been outclassed in every computer wargame scenario, recently it lost in real-life mock dogfights to an F16... a plane that is almost as old as I am.

Losing dogfights would be fine if it fulfilled its primary role of bomber, but Lockheed somehow also screwed that up and the bombs don't even fit on the plane. It's like the place is being run by DIY weekend warriors who don't know a Phillips head from a flat head, and yet we keep throwing money at them.

The ISS has been left without HVAC a couple times because they have no redundancy systems whenever they have an ammonia leak.

That's why I completely believe that they would send a piece of sub-optimal equipment to Mars and they would overlook a communication system that could fail if a single component broke. Because they've done it before. They're doing it now, fer cry.

[Zeph]

Spoiler at the end.

OK, I'm late to the party, but I ran across this tigle more recently, and just finished listening to the audiobook (which I do while exercising); I hope that's OK and that I'm not blundering to comment after listening rather than literally reading.

The audiobook format was fine, other than a small wince whenever the reader referred to "A.S.C. two" character encoding (ASCII) :-)

OK, the book was fairly entertaining - as others have said there's not much character development but the plot was entertaining. Really, the distinguishing feature of this book it that it's relatively realistic/plausible/accurate in the technical sense. The jokes were, for me, way less than laugh out loud funny, more like the quirky sense of wise-ass humor one might tolerate/appreciate in a friend.

The technical details were remarkably plausible tho, compared to the vast majority of science fiction (of that which occurs close enough to our own era that the technology isn't just Clarkian magic).

Spoiler.

The ending however was not very plausible on the technical level. If Watney was within 42 m/s of the Hermes velocity and 65 km of its position, then he was essentially in the same orbit and was going to escape Mars and head back toward Earth just like the Hermes, in an almost identical orbit (until Hermes began ion thrust). There was no need to snatch him up as he passed, before he orbited back around Mars. The Hermes could take its time gradually adusting its orbit to be exactly identical (using a small amount of thruster and a longer time period) and then safely bring him aboard. So the whole rendezvous seemed technically silly; and yes of course we all know this was an artificial plot device to build dramatic tension, which is typical in such plots and within the artistic licence of the author (just like the unrealistically forceful windstorm it begins with). I'm just noting what kinds of major liberties were taken. (They had at least two people on board who would have known this immediately, too).

I also have doubt about venting (a large part of) the onboard air through the nose being able to change the ship's velocity by 29 m/s; that air would have a pretty tiny portion of the ship's mass, so would have to accelerate to a correspondingly high speed - not far from chemical rocket exhaust speed, but starting from just 1 atmosphere pressure and declining rapidly. And finally, a space-only ship designed for ion thruster microgravity (with extreme need to conserve mass to the minimal needed for that plus safety) would probably tear itself to pieces with a sudden 1G 4 second reverse thrust.

Despite these final technically implausible plot gimmicks at the very end, the McGyvver ingenuity (except way more plausible than that TV show) that dominated most of the book was generally pretty good and overall I'd recommend the book.

And this is one of those uncommon books that might actually be improved in the movie version, where screenwriters at least might have a better grasp of character development and dialogue (tho they will probably make it less technically accurate, a fair tradeoff for a movie).

[Joanna Chaplin]

They gave an advance screening of the movie on the ISS.

http://io9.com/the-martian-has-premie...

I'd say I'd love to be a fly on that wall, but I have no idea how flies do in microgravity.

[Ken]

I also work in technology and (formerly, in a more limited capacity, space science).

I have many nasty things to say about Gravity. I found the arguments posted here about the Martian, both for technical accuracy and inaccuracy, pretty agreeable. That is, I think the criticism is fair and on-point.

It will be interesting to see how Hollywood adapts the book and how much worse(?) their accuracy will be.