Martians

The Martian.

I read this a couple weekends ago. Guy at work recommended it. Mom gave me a copy because her "book club" group was reading it; I think that was because they were working on book/movie combinations.

Mom couldn't finish it. Too much sciencey-numbery stuff going on--not her cuppa.

I found three things annoying. Seriously annoying.


1. All that number chatter was distracting in the wrong way. And I understood all of it. It read too much like someone juvenile's private lab notebook/journal.


2. When you work for NASA, and you're an astronaut, and male, you are very nearly for sure an Eagle Scout. Almost all have been.

Problem is, you're also a Rocket Scientist. And when you're a Rocket Scientist, all problems get Rocket Science solutions.

So I'm on page 5, everyone else is gone, and our hero has recovered from the accident enough to walk around, and is in pursuit of repairing his radio, so he can tell NASA he's alive.

This is brainless. It's a Rocket Science solution, when he needs a Boy Scout solution. It does NOT take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out.

That solution is to go outside an pile rocks up to make letters to spell out "Injured. Still alive." and a date. Granted that's one-way comm, but you do that first, before figuring out how to fix the radio. And later he can go out and spell more words.

Takes to page 160 before that occurs to him. Page 160. Or 170, I forget.

NASA has a dozen low-orbit satellites around Mars, and there's only 15 mins/day when the ground-site is not in visual range of one of them. So a REAL Rocket Scientist back at NASA would have been looking at the ground site as soon as the sand-storm passed, to see what remained. THIS NASA waits 30 days, and even then they aren't running change-detection software on the images, someone has to eyeball a detail or two, and THAT doesn't happen immediately.

And how come the spaceship that departs doesn't have a telescope/camera that can point at the landing site to look at the storm damage? No visual sensors that look backwards? Seriously? no comm to the satellites?


3. And then when he drives out to Pathfinder/Sojourner, he complains about navigating over a featureless but rocky terrain via dead-reckoning. He complains about there being no natural landmarks, and of course there's no GPS. And no compass, either, because there's no iron core to the planet, no planetary magnetic field, yadda, yadda...

What a knucklehead. Once again, you need a Boy Scout solution. If there are no landmarks, MAKE SOME. Pile up rocks every mile, in a straight line from the last couple of piles, you can go in a straight line a long ways. You're guaranteed to drift somewhat, but it'll be close. Pretty sure I learned this idea in 1970. Maybe 69.

He thinks of that on the way back. Well past when he should have been making them.

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Yeesh. I hope the movie is better. Well, you know he isn't going to go out and pile rocks up.

And I hope my tax dollars that go to NASA are helping them understand that they need multiple backup systems and alternatives for these sort of difficulties. The army has man-portable radios with funky antennas that fold up into tiny spaces. The landing site ought to have a wide variety of stuff dropped, with extras, especially comm gear.