Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Conversation with Andy Weir of “The Martian”

Episode Date: October 27, 2015

“The Martian” has won universal acclaim from scientists, astronauts, NASA, science fiction fans, and people who thought they weren’t science fiction fans. Mat Kaplan talks with the author about his harrowing, uplifting, amazingly detailed and realistic tale.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You are the only human being on a vast and deadly planet. Frightened? Then you're ready for this week's Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. More about that scary Halloween version of our theme later in the show. What I'm even more excited about is my conversation with the author of The Martian, Andy Weir. Bill Nye is on the road this week after joining us for a very joyous celebration of the Planetary Society's 35th anniversary.

Bruce Betts was also part of that celebration. We'll hear his preview of the night sky and get another space trivia contest underway with What's Up. Let's join Emily Lakdawalla out beyond Mars in the vast reaches of the asteroid belt. Emily, as we all recover from that glorious 35th anniversary celebration, there is news from Ceres. Tell us about these new images. Well, these images are not actually new, but they're new to the public. And this is how things work on all NASA missions.

All NASA missions return images, which are science data from the mission. And the scientists have some time to examine the images, make sure they're all complete, make sure the spacecraft doesn't need to send any other data to make them complete. They calibrate them. They make sure that the data are perfect. And then after this period of data checkout is over, which usually lasts about three to 12 months, they send all of the data to something called the planetary data system. And once the data is in the planetary data system, anybody in the world can use that data to do whatever they want to, either science or, in the case of my blog entry here, making really beautiful pictures. So you've been in touch with some of your colleagues who've been doing exactly that.

Tell us about these. Are these the first color images? Yeah, you know, for reasons I've never been able to understand, the Dawn team has not released any color global portraits of Ceres. They released some images that show variations of color on the surface, but those are scientific photos where the color data is heavily exaggerated to emphasize differences from one place to another. But members of the public often were not that interested in the science as much as we are, and what would it look like if I flew there and saw Ceres myself? These images are intended to answer that. They're intended to simulate what a human eye might see while they were there, although it's not a perfect simulation. But it shows you this subtly colored surface, vaguely brown, with the bright spots peeking out of the craters. And it just, I don't know, it always feels more real to me to see these color images of planets and moons and smaller

objects in the solar system. They all look great. And it's a very diverse group. But you included a caveat that you've sort of hinted at there. That's right. So these images, for a number of reasons, they don't perfectly represent what the human eye would see. One of those is that they're not precisely calibrated. The amateur image processors took red, green, and blue filter images, combined them into color, but without any direct knowledge of how the different intensity of red, green, and blue are supposed to be next to each other, you can only guess at the overall cast of color. We know that most objects in the solar system tend to be somewhat red because reddish colors happen when you bombard surfaces with cosmic radiation and the solar wind.

Ceres is going to be slightly reddish. But exactly how red it is, these people didn't know. They just did their best to simulate. All right, Emily, we will be talking more about Ceres and the Dawn spacecraft. In fact, we'll be doing so on the evening of November 4th. We'll be putting an announcement up about this at planetary.org very soon when you and I join Mark Raymond, the mission director and engineer, project engineer, on stage at Cross Campus Pasadena at 7 p.m. on the evening of November 4th, that specific time. And there will be a live webcast.

So watch for the announcement of that. We'll say something else about it next week. And I look forward to seeing you there, Emily. Thanks. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, planetary evangelist Emily Lakdawalla, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye has the week off as he travels back across the country. Now, for the first time in the history of this show, we're going to move what's up to the beginning of the program so that we can then go straight

through a long, very special conversation with Andy Weir of The Martian. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. The director of science and technology for the Planetary Society is Bruce Betts. He joins us here as he joined us many times, actually, on stage last Saturday during our 35th anniversary celebration. I enjoyed all of your random space facts. Oh, good. They were very random.

Well, that's part of the goal. I don't always achieve it, but in this case, I do. I feel badly when they aren't as stochastic as they could possibly be. Nice bit with Amy Meinzer as well. I hope that all of this is going to be available as video at Planetary TV very soon so that many more of you can enjoy it, more than the 3,000 people in the packed Pasadena Civic Auditorium. For now, tell us what's up in the night sky. The end of the night, the pre-dawn sky, still popping with planets.

We've got Venus and Jupiter both there, two brightest planetary objects, brighter than any stars, Venus being the brighter of the two, and Mars, much dimmer and reddish. This is all in the pre-dawn east, and there you can watch them move relative to each other from one morning to the next. Venus will be getting closer to Mars, and Jupiter will be getting farther from Venus. But that's the planetary party is in the pre-dawn. You can still check out Saturn in the west shortly after sunset, but just hanging out solitary. We move on to this week in space history. It was 2004 that the Cassini spacecraft had its first Titan flyby. It is still flying by places like crazy,

just partying with Enceladus these days. We have a very special Random Space Fact intro. Now, anybody who heard the theme up front, I said I would explain what that was about. And I'm going to leave that explanation until after we hear this. Here we go. It is time for another random space fact. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Not bad, huh? Oh, very,

very nice. Very cool. Tell us, tell us about it, Matt. We have to thank Paul Bruegel for creating that for us. Paul is the music director for a Coney Island-based horror show called Phantom Creep Theater. He improvises music for the silent horror films that they show as his alter ego, get this, the decomposer. And these guys, Phantom Creep Theater, they also have a very entertaining podcast. I've listened to a couple of episodes.

It's called, what else, Phantom Creep Radio. And I really want to go to their monthly midnight monster hop, which is at a New York City tiki bar called Otto's Shrunken Head. And for that intro, Paul had a special guest, Moloch the Mighty, who is the host of their show. So, Paul, thank you for making this a very special Halloween show. Yes, thank you so much. You still have a random space fact after all that? Yeah, but I feel like it's just not creepy enough. Okay.

We'll be the judge of that. It's a little tiny bit creepy. It's certainly weird. It's a little tiny bit creepy. It's certainly weird. The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. Happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's intermagnetic dynamo. That was kind of scary. Reorganizes itself.

The sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero, then emerge again with the opposite polarity. So north becomes south, south becomes north. Chaos ensues. zombies, apocalypse. You get the idea. I am shaking in my boots. I'm actually barefoot, so that's difficult. All right, let us go on to the creepy trivia contest, which was kind of creepy

because I apparently confused the daylights out of people. But here was the question. As of 1980 and 2015 each, so this was part of our sequence celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Planetary Society, I asked, how many worlds had either been soft landed upon or had successful atmospheric probes with the following important caveats? Note that I count spacecraft not designed as landers but that survived after landing, but do not count touch-and-go or fly-through sample returns. This was a tricky one, apparently. Many people would agree with that last statement because...

Sorry. A whole lot of people who entered, and there weren't really that many because this was a tough one, and there weren't really that many because this was a tough one. A whole lot of people did not count one pretty significant world among those that would qualify, and that was Earth. We had one correct answer in this admittedly small group, and it came from a guy who usually just entertains us but doesn't win the contest, Torsten Zimmer in Germany, who said, as of 1980, four worlds soft-landed, atmospherically probed,

Earth, Venus, Mars, and the Moon. And then since then, up to the present, we have added Jupiter, Titan, Eros, and our favorite, well, I don't know about that, Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, just last year. So congratulations, Torsten. Sorry for those people's minds I bent, and hopefully learning occurred. We are going to send Torsten a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a Planetary Society rubber asteroid.

We had a few of those on stage over the weekend. So, Torsten, you can call that whatever asteroid you like. Was I supposed to keep those to give out? I threw them at the audience. No, no, no. We have a few more back at the office. Not a problem. All right.

How about next time? All right. Next time, I really was desperately looking as apparently the audience is looking for something a little more concrete. So here it is. In honor, we just gave out the Cosmos Award to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but it honors, of course, Carl Sagan. What was Carl Sagan's middle name? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. So here we are at the other end of the ease of question spectrum. You can get yours in to us by, you've got until November 3rd.

That's Tuesday, November 3rd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And the prize, once again, is pretty cool, I think. Not just a Planetary Radio t-shirt, but we will give you one of those. Bill Nye's greeting on your answering system, your voicemail, whatever you're still using. Anybody still have a cassette-based system out there? Anyway, Bill will record a personal message to go out to all of your friends and family and robocallers. How's that? That's pretty cool.

You can say goodnight, Bruce. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, think about what your brain does when given confusing questions. Thank you, and good night. Mine just basically shuts down. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up? Boo! Who'd have thought a hyper-realistic story about a man stranded alone on Mars would become both the number one best-selling book and the number one movie in theaters? Well, you might have thought

that if you were as thrilled by The Martian as I was. I was equally thrilled to join its creator a few days ago. I talked with Andy Weir for nearly an hour at a home in Los Angeles. It was one of the most enjoyable conversations I've ever had for this show. It includes Andy's thoughts about protagonist Mark Watney and his other wonderful characters, how protein bars could destroy a rocket, and what the crew of Andy's Mars spaceship Hermes could have had in common with the Donner Party. Also, why we should and possibly must colonize Mars

rather than the Moon or someplace else, and why nuclear reactors in space will be essential. Andy even pays tribute to Opportunity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Here is the longest one-on-one conversation we've ever presented. Andy Weir, I am so proud to have you on Planetary Radio. Thank you for being here. Thank you for that great book.

Thanks for having me. I got two words to start with. Duct tape. Pretty critical words for our hero. Mark Watney, your wonderful character in the book, he says at one point, oh, yeah, duct tape will work in your vacuum when it's really cold. Is that really true? Yes, it will.

Actually, they use duct tape on the Apollo 16 mission. I'm probably wrong on that. But one of the Apollo missions has to be 15, 16 or 17. They had a problem with the rover and the the fender of the rover had broken off and and it was kicking lunar dust up at the astronauts. And so it was a significant problem. And so they took the operations manual and duct taped it into place to make a makeshift fender and it solved the problem. So that's duct tape out in the vacuum on the moon, you know. They Mark Watney did. They Mark Watney did, yes. Or either that or Mark Watney, I don't know, Gene Cernan did or whoever did that. Again, I don't remember. It has to be Apollo 15, 16, or 17, because those are the only ones with rovers. There was a particular Apollo mission, which I heard you, I think you

told Adam Savage in the terrific interview that he did with you, conversation that you had in his talking room. He was such an enthusiast, such a fan, obviously the same way I feel. You talked about a different Apollo mission being, if any of those helped inspire the Martian, which one was it? Well, Apollo 13 was one of the biggest inspirations, of course, with everything that went wrong and then everybody working hard to get the astronauts home alive. Surely that one was pretty critical. What's funny is if you look into the deep details, stuff went wrong on every mission. Apollo 11 almost had to abort

their landing because their computer kept having problems. Yeah, overloaded, right? Yeah, it was overloaded because they left the navigational... It's a long story, but it was overloaded. Apollo 12 got struck by lightning twice during its ascent. Apollo 13, we know about all this stuff.

Apollo 14, I think, also had some sort of problem with the landing radar. 16 had a problem with the SBS, I think, the main threat. I mean, if you look it up, every single one of them had a bunch of problems, none of them nearly so life-threatening as Apollo 13, but a lot of them had near-abort situations where they almost had to just give up, but they worked through them all. Yeah, they worked through it, as Mark Watney does, of course. I read the book months ago. I've now seen the movie twice, better in 3D, but loved it both times. I had to reread the book.

I thought, I'm just going to skim it, I thought, a couple of days ago. I ended up pretty much rereading the entire book. I ended up pretty much rereading the entire book. I'd kind of forgotten how awe-inspiring it is to find, if not some really clever observation or solution on every page, the pages that didn't have one of those had some funny joke. Sometimes, often it was both. I just am amazed at how the action proceeds and the detail that you went through to build this. I'll give you an example. Before Watney leaves on his trek across Mars, he cooks all of his potatoes.

You explain why that was an important thing to do. And he could only put four in the microwave at a time. Oh, my God. How did you go through this process as you developed this amazing story? It's just the way astronauts do their thing. You solve one problem at a time. You don't try to think about 20 things at once. You say, okay, what is the issue I'm dealing with right now? Solve that.

Work the problem. And then move on to the next one. And so, as you mentioned with the potatoes, cooking them. Thing is, cooked food takes less energy, takes less of your energy to digest. That's why cavemen started cooking food. I mean, they didn't realize it, but that's why that was such a huge technological advancement.

We don't think of cooking food as a technology, but it is. The heat breaks down a bunch of the complex proteins inside the food, and that makes it easier for your body to digest it, which means it takes less energy, which effectively means that the food has more energy. So instead of taking up a bunch of energy to digest it and then seeing what you come out as positive, you get a lot more. So simply by microwaving the potatoes, he dramatically increased the amount of calories he had available. He got more internal pirate ninjas, you're saying.

More pirate ninjas, sure. Well, it's funny. If you do dimensional, so pirate ninja, for those of you who haven't read the book. And by the way, I fully expect that the regular audience to this program has read the book and seen the movie. And if they haven't, it's their own damn fault. So don't worry about spoilers. So we're all, we're, we're, the beginning of this discussion is a spoiler warning and yeah okay that's right pirate ninjas are uh kilowatt hours per soul and if you a soul is a martian day and you know

kilowatt hours is actually a unit of energy so if you do the dimensional analysis it's a power it's a power so and uh somebody worked it it out online, and I think one pirate ninja is actually 40.6 watts. That's what it works out to be. There must be thousands of these little observations and solutions within the book. How did you approach it? Did the problems, did the challenges come first, and then you had to figure them out, just as Mark Watney does in this story? Yeah, pretty much. That's what I did. I mean, I would come up with the problems first. Usually the problems just presented themselves. It'd be self-evident. It'd be like, well, he's got this problem now. And when they weren't, I just tried to think of what is the

most likely problem he would have next. What's the next, I mean, his equipment's all well past its, you know its intended use duration. He's got all these issues. I would think of the problems first, and then I would try to think of the solutions. And usually there was a solution. Now, I have the advantage of being able to spend as long as I want thinking about it. Watney, he's very smart, very clever, very resourceful and fearless, and he can come up with in a few minutes. He can go, oh, okay, I got it.

I know how to solve this. But it took me weeks to work that out. Sometimes I couldn't come up with a solution. Sometimes I would have a problem and I'd be like, yeah, that'll kill him. And there's nothing I can think of to make him not die. Then I would cheat, you know, because I'm the writer. And so I'd go back into, I'd say like, okay, if I can't keep him alive, and if I like the problem, I'd figure out what is the smallest little piece of technology that he would need to have to solve this problem? What is the least invasive, most likely thing that he would have on a space mission that would help him solve this problem in some clever way? Then go back in the earlier chapters and mention it here and there so that from the reader's point of view, it was there all along. Did a lot of that happen before most of us heard of this book, when you were still releasing it a chapter at a time online?

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's when I did all the writing. The only changes that happened between the online version and the eventual print release were like wordsmithing and prose. So it's like, oh, this paragraph is awkward. Let's rewrite that. Or this is, you know, the editor would tell me, you got a little too technical here. You need to dial it back. It's starting to read like a Wikipedia article, you know.

Not that there's anything wrong with Wikipedia, but it's not the sort of thing you, not the sort of thing most people read before bed. It is also, I think, remarkable. thing most people read before bed. It is also, I think, remarkable. I don't know of another movie that has stuck as close to the book as the movie that most of us have now seen, Ridley Scott's film. I mean, obviously, a few things had to be left out. But do you feel the same way? How do you think they did with your work? I think they did a fantastic job. I mean, the adaptation is very true to the book. There's a bunch of stuff that they had to take out, of course. Otherwise, it would be a six-hour movie. But the things they took out are things that if they'd left it up to me, if they'd said, all right, Andy, you have to trim this down to two hours.

What do you take out? I would have taken out the same things. So I think they did a good job. The things they removed are self-contained plots, self-contained subplots that don't affect the main plot line. And I think they did a really good job. And Matt Damon absolutely nailed the character of Watney. He is exactly the way I imagined Watney. So I was really happy with that.

Let's talk about Mark Watney. I told you some weeks ago, the first time we ran into each other, that this book reminds me so favorably of a guy I think you read as a kid, Robert Heinlein. Oh, yeah. Because it is so inventive and so clever, but also the character of Mark Watney. He's kind of a wise guy. He has a good time when he's not fighting for his life. And the humor seemed very much like the kind of stuff that Heinlein would let his protagonists participate in.

I just love this character, and I hope you take it as a compliment. Oh, I definitely do. Thank you very much. Yeah, Heinlein is one of my, what I call the holy trinity of authors that I look up to. Heinlein, Asimov, and Clark. Those are the guys that I grew up reading because my father had a giant inexhaustible supply of books, sci-fi books that he'd collected over his life. And so I ended up reading basically baby boomer era sci-fi, so 50s and 60s stuff, even though I'm a Gen Xer myself. Those are the authors that I grew up reading. That's what sci-fi was to me.

Yeah, it's hard to go wrong with those three. There's much more I want to talk about with the characters and with the story that we can get to a little bit later. But back to some of the mission. You told Adam Savage in that great conversation that you had with him that you actually worked it out. You picked a particular date for the Ares III launch. You ready to reveal that? Oh, sure, yeah, because people have already worked it out. You picked a particular date for the Ares III launch. You ready to reveal that? Oh, sure. Yeah, because people have already worked it out. So Ares III left Earth orbit on July 7th, 2035. And the reason I know that is because I worked out all the orbital dynamics, all the things that Hermes does in the book, those are real orbital

trajectories that I calculated for Hermes's acceleration and stuff. Yeah, and so that means I had to pick a launch window, you know, because the positions of Earth and Mars are very important. And I was further limited by the fact that for plot reasons, I needed the original mission plan to encompass Thanksgiving of that year. So I needed them to be on, I needed their plan to be on Mars Thanksgiving. So yeah, July 7th, 2035. And the first person who worked that out as a, was a guy named Kenny Ray, who works for JPL actually. And he, he worked it out by a combination of things, but clues in the book, most notably the transmission latency between Earth and Mars at different times in the book. And so he's like, well, then Earth and Mars have to be this far apart at this point and that far apart at that point and so on.

Also, because he knew that I think Sol 16 is Thanksgiving. He worked out several possible windows that it could be. Some of them are in the past, and some of them are like hundreds of years in the future. And he's like, well, it's not that based on the technology they had. So he narrowed it down, got it right to the day. Even the slingshot around the Earth that gets Ares 3 back to Mars, that fits? Yeah, that fits. It's a little optimistic. The slingshot around Earth, well, actually, the trajectory I put together, it doesn't get much of a slingshot from Earth. What it does is it uses Earth's gravity to change its direction of travel.

So it's kind of like if you were, you know, running down the street and you grabbed a lamppost to, like, turn right. You know what I mean? Yeah. That sort of thing. And that's basically what Hermes did at Earth. So 2035, pretty advanced spacecraft. And in fact, in the story, it's been to Mars already twice before Ares III, right? Right.

Wow, that's optimistic. I could only hope that you'd be correct about this timeline. I think it's probably very optimistic. I think more likely speaking realistically. So you need to remember, I wrote The Martian to entertain, not as an actual prediction. Right. And the purpose of The Martian, and I freely admit this, I shamelessly pulled on your nostalgia heartstrings by making it feel like the Apollo program. Everybody loves thinking about the Apollo program. So I'm like, it's the same thing. Right. I mean, we've got it. It's named after a god you know it's aries you're right and it's and it's like all nasa and america who yeah you know and you know with with some international cooperation we've got vogel who's an esa astronaut right and stuff like that but realistically i think if you're asking for predictions my guess is the first manned mission to mars will be a large

multinational effort i think it'll be organizationally similar to the International Space Station. I think it'll be the U.S., ESA, Roscosmos, the Indian Space Agency, JAXA. I think everybody will work together because it's incredibly expensive. They'll make a nice big ship, and they'll send an international crew to Mars. And so I think that's much more likely. And I also think it won't happen until maybe around 2050. So you obviously think this is an important priority. People should go to Mars.

I do think it's an important priority. However, I want to be clear. I think we should have a long-term goal of having self-sufficient human population somewhere other than Earth. It doesn't have to be Mars. It could be Titan. It could be Europa. It could be the moon. But somewhere other than Earth, because once we do that, our odds of extinction drop to

basically zero. But when we're all on one planet, it could be a disease. It could be a war. It could be a meteor strike. I don't know. But all our eggs are in one basket. I do think we should have a long-term plan of having a stable human population somewhere else. Mars is a really good place for

that. I'll get to that in a second. If all you want to do is gather information about Mars, if you just want to know about the geology, if you want to know about the atmosphere and stuff like that, really you should just send robots. The reason we should send humans to Mars is to find out how to make humans live on Mars. So now I've got to ask, what do you think of the initiative that began at JPL and actually at the Aerospace Corporation, which the Planetary Society did its humans orbiting Mars workshop about calling for an orbital mission and maybe a stop at Phobos by the mid-2030s. I love that idea. I love the idea of a manned orbital mission because it gives you the best of both worlds,

no pun intended. Remember, if all you're trying to do is gather scientific information about Mars, there is no compelling reason to send humans to the surface. Now, I'm going to get—10,000 people are like firing up their email clients right now to send me angry grams. But listen, what I'm saying is, yes, right now, right at this moment in time, a human astronaut on the surface of Mars would be way more effective than any rover technology we currently have. But that's not going to be the case for very long. And if you consider the cost of sending humans to Mars and returning them safely to Earth and all the safeties and secondary and tertiary systems you need when human life is on the line, then if you took that money and instead put it into making

better robots, you could very quickly have a robot that's not only as capable as a human astronaut, but superior. The only problem is it doesn't have a human brain, right? So getting around the surface, taking samples, doing analyses, doing sample returns, even stuff like that, that can all be done remotely. But the thing that is on the surface doesn't have a human brain to draw conclusions and make decisions about, ooh, I didn't even notice that rock before. But now that I see it, I want to go over there. And, oh, this is a totally different, this is not what I expected to do here at all. This warrants more investigation. That's where an orbital mission comes in because you have a zero latency,

well, effectively zero latency decision process for that robot. So it's effectively the same as having a human brain in control of everything with no latency. As it is, our 4 to 20-minute latency between here and Mars makes everything really slow. You say, like, okay, rover, go over there. Okay, and in about 40 minutes, we'll find out how that went. So I love the idea of an orbital mission to Mars. We would first litter the planet with robots, not just one, but a whole bunch of rovers for the humans to control once they get there.

And they hang out in orbit for a while, a long duration space flight, and then they come home, which means we don't need to land them safely on Mars. We don't need to get them up off of Mars. And that just dramatically simplifies the manned mission. We still need to invent Earth independence, which we don't have yet, because even ISS, it's Earth dependent, right? So we still need to invent Earth independence. But other than that, I think it's fantastic.

And so I think the first, quote-unquote, manned mission to Mars would be kind of an Apollo 10. Yeah, great comparison. I want to make a note here. Bring Andy to next congressional hearing. I'm sorry if I rambled a bit. Hopefully you can edit that down as needed. For this audience? Yeah.

They won't call that rambling, and neither will I. Back to this wonderful ship that your astronauts get to fly about in. Yeah. It's powered by these very special, very powerful ion engines driven by a nuclear reactor. Right. VASIMIR. I want to know, has Franklin Chang Diaz, the former astronaut, has he sent you a check or at least a box of chocolates?

I have received emails from people who work with Dr. Diaz, but I haven't spoken to him. I haven't heard from him. He really ought to be thanking you because, I mean, here is this technology he's been working toward for many, many years now and has a long ways to go. Do you think it's as promising as you show off in Hermes? Ion engines, absolutely. VASIMIR has some problems that they haven't solved yet, but I'm optimistic about it. And I went to Ad Astra in Houston while I was there, and I got to see their VASMers. That's his company, of course.

Yeah, right. And he wasn't there, but I got a chance to look at their VASMers, and it's pretty impressive. They didn't have it in operation or anything like that, but I got to look at the numbers, and they can get some tremendous specific impulse out of it. Now, Hermes' engines are like the next generation beyond even the speculative stuff we have now. Hermes gets about 220 newtons of force out of its engines, which ultimately gives the 110,000 kilogram Hermes about two millimeters per second per second acceleration. And that's all my orbital calculations are based on that. That would require, yes, a nuclear reactor, which is a bit of a political hurdle.

Do you think it's, is it inevitable? I mean, are the advantages so great that you see these in space? Yeah, I think it's inevitable. Also, if you ever want to colonize Mars or the moon or anything like that, you will absolutely 100% need to have reactors. There is nothing that even comes close to the energy density of a nuclear reactor. And we have an anti-nukes dog in space barking downstairs since we are in a home. So we'll ignore that. Yes, it's a very nice dog, but he has a lot to say.

Yeah, and it's the downstairs neighbor's dog. A company called Gen4, which used to be called Hyperion Systems, makes a nuclear reactor that, or at least can make. I don't know if they've actually produced one yet. But they have a nuclear reactor that produces 25 megawatts and weighs about 15 metric tons. Wow. That energy density cannot possibly be beat. So 25 megawatts is enough to power a small city, right? That's how much it is. And for 15 tons, that's ridiculous. 15,000 kilograms, that's it? I mean, that's a little bit heavier than the lunar module.

And so if you compare that to – if you wanted 25 – I mean I don't – I could do the math. But if you wanted 25 megawatts of power with solar cells, that – That's a big wing. That's a big panel. There's – let's see. There's about 1360 watts is the amount of solar energy hitting Earth. So you can approximate the moon to be about the same distance from the sun in the grand scheme of things. So you get about one kilowatt per square meter. So if you converted 100% of all the energy hitting the surface of the moon, you would need 25,000 square meters.

Less than that, more like 20,000 square meters of solar cell to equal what you get for one of these reactors. And that would only work half the time because the other half the time, that part of the moon is facing away from the sun. I'm just also enjoying that you went through that in your head. Oh, well, no, I've done these calculations before. Ah, okay. Yeah, but yeah. But still, there's a lot of your character in you, I suspect.

Let me take it back down to the surface, the surface of Mars, that is. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I neglected to explain why I think Mars is the best place to colonize. Oh, good. Okay. Why is Mars the best place to colonize? Why not Titan?

I think the answer is probably obvious, but please. Well, Mars is much closer and easier to get to, for starters. But the question is, why Mars and not the moon? Because the moon is way easier to get to for starters. But the question is why Mars and not the moon? Because the moon is way easier to get to than Mars. For instance, if you were, if you were on a football field and you were standing at one goalpost, and if Mars were at the other goalpost, the moon would be a few centimeters in front of you. I mean, that's the magnitude of difference between the distances. The reason to go after Mars is because it has actually everything we need to grow our biosphere.

So if you go to the moon, you can build a dome or whatever, and you could have people living there. And you can have an internally – let's say you've worked out all the details of maintaining a biosphere with no waste. And so your water is internally – Water's at the poles. Well, whatever. I'm saying you bring everything with you. You've got water. You've got your air that recycles.

You're able to grow food. I mean, you have a circle of life thing going on. But how does your society get bigger? How do you make the second city on the moon without relying on Earth? You can't because the moon lacks critical things. You need for life, Earth life, to live somewhere, you need chone. The four great things. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. These four

things are absolutely required. You could bring a bunch of it with you, but that limits the size of your biosphere. You can't make a larger biosphere. Plants don't come from nothing. They need to take carbon out of the carbon dioxide in the air. You need to add carbon to your world. There's practically no carbon on the moon. There's practically no dioxide in the air. You need to add carbon to your world. And there's like practically no carbon on the moon.

There's practically no nitrogen on the moon. There is a little bit of water on the moon, but the water on the moon would be kind of like oil on Earth. It's a limited, non-renewable resource. You know, it's like, okay, there's some water. It's difficult to get. It's difficult to sort out, stuff like that. Mars has everything.

Mars' atmosphere is carbon dioxide. So there's two of the things right there, C and O. And there is lots of water in the soil. There's about 35 liters of water in every cubic meter of Martian soil. So there's straight up water, which by the way, is where all the hydrogen comes from. And then the last thing is nitrogen. Well, good news. Mars' atmosphere is 2% nitrogen, and there are already nitrates in the soil. You have literally everything you need for life to continue spreading. Now, I'm not talking about terraforming, but if you made a Mars base or a Mars city or something like that, that city would be able to make another city and so on. So you would be able to spread Earth life across all of Mars and just keep expanding. You'd be limited only by the speed of your society's desire to expand.

Good case. Plenty of silicon, too. You could make more computers and iPads. Well, I mean, there's all of those things if you start getting into the high tech. But the main thing is you have a reactor that makes power. From that, you can sm makes power. From that, you can smelt metal. From that, you can make pressure vessels. And then everything else comes from that. You have energy and pressure vessels, you're set.

So you think we need that second home. And of course, you're not alone. Elon Musk agrees with you. What do you think of his idea for sort of doing the quick route to terraforming? Nuking the poles. Yeah, yeah. I don't think he was very serious about that. When he made that quote, he was, Elon Musk is first and foremost an engineer, right? I mean, the way his mind works is an engineer. And you say like, well, if that's what you want, here's the fastest way to make it happen. But he was not genuinely suggesting that we do that.

So I think that that quote got taken out of context. As for terraforming Mars, I think that's way far off. I believe, you know, I'll be dead before any of this goes on. But I believe that we will already have a large stable population on Mars before we before the technology is even available for us to consider terraforming it. More of Andy Weir, author of The Martian, is just a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. Casey Dreyer here, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. The New Horizons Pluto encounter was NASA at its best. But did you know that it was almost canceled twice? It was saved by thousands of space advocates who wrote and called Congress nearly a decade ago. Today, more missions are threatened by budget cuts, including a journey to Europa and the Opportunity Rover on Mars. You can learn more at planetary.org

slash stand up. Pluto was just the beginning. I here, I'd like to introduce you to Merk Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merk, is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute, Planetary TV's not on TV? That's the best thing about it.

They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merck? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with more of special guest Andy Weir, author of the number one best-selling book, The Martian. We're in the middle of the longest conversation I've ever aired on the show.

It was also one of the most fascinating and entertaining. Andy was equally entertaining on stage with Bill Nye at the Planetary Society's 35th anniversary celebration. But you're getting to hear so much more of his thoughts about the book, the movie, and his view of our real-life future on and near Mars. There's another guy who you've talked about and give some credit to for the approach that you take in, in the book. And that's Robert Zubrin, who I'm not sure is ever making jokes

when he talks about the things he'd like to see on Mars. But you found him inspiring. Yeah, well, Mars Direct is a is a very good approach that I think almost everyone accepts, that it's like one of the best ways of getting people to Mars. And the basic principle behind Mars Direct is twofold. First off, sending all the supplies in advance. And second off, using in-situ resource utilization to generate fuel so that you can return. Now, the Ares mission profile in the book is definitely, it's basically Mars Direct with my own changes made to it because Mars Direct, he made that in the 80s, the 1980s.

I was there at the first presentation, and he got a standing ovation. I was one of the people standing. As well he should. But now, in the intervening 30 years, it's out of date. It didn't account for ion engines or propulsion drives and stuff like that. Also, my main beef with Mars Direct is the presumption that your entire return craft is on the surface. With ion engines, you have the ability to do an insertion with your big ship and stay

in orbit, and then so all you need is a MAV, a Mars Ascent Vehicle. The idea of launching something from Mars that is big enough to support your entire crew for the many months return, yeah, I'm not buying that. And the other thing is Mars Directory relies on home and transfer windows because, once again, they didn't have ion engines. That's the special trajectory between Earth and Mars. Yeah, a Hohmann transfer ellipse is the lowest energy approach to Mars.

It's when Earth and Mars are positioned just right to minimize the amount of delta V you need to get from Earth to Mars. And then you do another one in reverse to come home. in reverse, to come home. That's great if you need to do point thrust accelerations, like these big chemical burns, which is what Zubrin envisioned for Mars Direct. But when you have ion engines, you do the really slow, constant acceleration over time,

you get to Mars much faster, and you have lots of options. You can abort, you can return to Earth, you can be halfway there and have a problem, go like, oh, screw it, turn around, go back home. I mean, it's not graceful, and you'll end up going around the sun and it'll take you a long time. But you have abort options and you're not limited to these extremely narrow windows. So it's like one of those things in a home and transfer ellipse, if you miss your window, you all die. I mean, on your way home. If you miss your window on Earth, well, then you have to wait until the next window, right? If you miss your exit window on Mars, everybody dies. With ion engines, if you miss your exit window, it's going to take you longer to get home.

Mars Direct was the absolute best solution when it was written. It's just new technology. And new knowledge has also told us something really awesome, which is all the water that's in the soil on Mars means it used to be they would use the plan to make fuel is you make methane out of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, basically, using the Sabatier reaction. And so there's carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars. So you're set on that. You just need to bring hydrogen. And for every kilogram of hydrogen you start with, you can make 13 kilograms of methane.

So that was the idea. But now we know that there's also tons and tons of water in the soil. So now you don't need to bring anything. Mars is basically made of rocket fuel. There's carbon dioxide in the air and there's water in the soil. So if you have an automated system for harvesting that, you can make as much methane and oxidizer as you want. Unlimited. It paints an awfully nice picture of the red planet.

The technology to do this is very non-trivial. But, you know, we're starting. The Mars 2020 probe is going to have the MOXIE. It's basically the oxygenator as depicted in in the book uh it takes carbon dioxide and strips off the carbon and then now you have oxygen i love that that's going to be on the 2020 rover yeah because it i mean we're pretty sure it'll work it's oh yeah it's really an engineering it's not it's yeah it's an engineering challenge it's not it's there is there is nothing like the chemistry to do that the the you know you sit down and do it

on paper and say like oh here's what you need to do is simple they've known how to do that. The, the, the, you know, you sit down and do it on paper and say like, oh, here's what you need to do is simple. They've known how to do this for like centuries, making it actually happen. Well, you know, that's a little trickier. I'm glad you brought us back down to the surface. Cause I want to talk about some more of the stuff that Mark Watney was up to there and some of the reactions that you've gotten to it. For example, I have talked to more than one JPL person who was just thrilled by what you did with Pathfinder. I had one of them say, yeah, you could really do that. There's support.

There's support you could plug into just like that. I bet they've been all over this. Oh, yeah. They were really happy about that. And of course, one thing I think JPL was particularly happy about was simply drawing a distinction between JPL and NASA because a lot of people don't realize – I mean, you have to be a space dork to really know the difference between those entities, right? JPL is a subdivision of Caltech, and they contract with NASA. Unlike a lot of the other NASA centers. Right, as opposed to like Marshall or Johnson or Kennedy.

Those are all just straight up owned by NASA and operated by NASA. One of my favorite bits of feedback that I received both from NASA and JPL people is that the most unrealistic part of the book is the high level of cooperation shown between NASA and JPL. That's funny. Yeah, there have also been some architectural improvements to JPL, I noticed, by the time of the movie. That was one of the biggest bits of feedback from the NASA and JPL folks when they watched the film, because they had special screenings for those guys, of course. They all said, like, wow, man, I wish we had facilities like that. Man, those are beautiful facilities. These giant, spacious buildings with, like, architecture,, those are beautiful facilities, giant, spacious buildings

of like architecture, you know, beautiful stuff. Yeah, I noticed that. I spend some time there now and then. Well, I've, yeah, I've been to the, I've been to the real Mission Control Center. And it's like, it's really spectacular and awesome to me. But then you see the one in the movie, and you're like, wow, yeah, I see they've added about a hundred flight controller positions. Yeah, it looked more like the Johnson Space Center. And the one in the movie, I mean, there were. It was huge, yeah. Huge.

But, you know, it's a manned mission to Mars, so, you know, there's a bunch of stations. They're keeping track of all sorts of stuff. One of the sequences that I was delighted to read again when I reread the book in the last few days is the airlock accident, which is so beautifully built. And you do it a little bit at a time. We get the whole sequence of how

this nearly disastrous accident comes about. It's built so logically. It really seems to me that it could be just like a textbook description of here's how the best intentions can still go wrong. I mean, was that a sequence that you had in mind from the beginning? No, I actually had to create the airlock accident because I had reached a point where he kind of solved everything. Like he had solved everything.

He had enough potato farming and whatnot to last him until a resupply mission could arrive. I was like, well, that won't do. You know, I really wanted to force the crew to go back to get him and not just have him wait for Ares IV. And so he could have lasted to Ares IV, I mean, with the way things were. So by having that airlock accident that kills off all of his potato plants, that now created an urgency in a... But even, you know, the details as you gradually tell us how the canvas, the hab canvas gives way, I mean, the flaws that were caused. And of course, you make the point that it lasted a hell of a lot longer than it was expected to. Well, yeah, I mean, that flaws that were caused. And, of course, you make the point that it lasted a hell of a lot longer than it was expected to.

Well, yeah. I mean, that's how things fail. Nothing lasts forever, except apparently opportunity. But other than that, opportunity, you know, they're actually in danger of having to shut down the opportunity probe for lack of personnel on the ground to manage it. We are all over that in society. We're not going to let that happen unless we don't have our say. I've got to believe that we keep rolling. If nothing else, some private group will say, like, look, we'll do it.

Just give us some radio time, and we'll have all of our staffers do it. I'm sure there will be lots of people more than happy to volunteer their time to run a freaking Mars rover. Time to make another note to my colleagues that, yeah, I bet you're right about that. I bet you all you would need would be like, okay, JPL, we just need time slices on the deep space network. Yeah. That's it because they run all of that. So you're just like, that's all we need, they run all of that. So you're just like, that's all we need.

The little bit of that. And you route all that to our control center and we'll take care of it from there. I'd love it. I would do a graveyard shift now and then if I had the technical, uh, qualifications. Um,

and maybe we just, maybe we just run it into a rock and kill it, but it's better than, it's better than shutting it down. Oh yeah. When it's still working. I couldn't agree more. One of my favorite moments in the film comes out of the airlock accident.

And it's when Mark Watney, it's an almost wordless scene. He's counting, I think, in the movie. It's like he's counting his potatoes or something, his supplies, as he gets ready for the trek across Mars. There's a storm. ready for the trek across Mars. There's a storm. And that patch he's made out of canvas, hab material and duct tape and other stuff,

is whipping in and out. It's going from convex to concave to convex. And it's like he just keeps going. You can see he knows if that thing fails, he's a dead man. So I actually wasn't thrilled with that particular scene. Oh, tell me. Yeah, do tell. So Mars' atmosphere is like one two hundredths of Earth.

It wouldn't whip in and out at all. However, I can't bitch about that because I'm the one who set up a scenario where Mars' atmosphere is powerful enough to rip off satellite dishes and knock over everything. Starts the whole story. Right. So I'm the one who made this happen in a universe where Mars' atmosphere has a bunch of inertia. OK, so that's on me um but that having been said while all that stuff's going on and he's really scared i mean he's he's clearly he's really scared and happy he's like ah you know stuff like that i'd be like all right if that if that's going on outside put on your eva suit or go hang out in the

rover or go hang out in the other airlock or something but don't just sit around where you're gonna die if that thing breaches if that's what you're worried about yeah yeah i get it so i i understand why they did that scene but yeah it wasn't it was so well played it was i mean it's it's a it's a great scene from a from a dramatic intention standpoint but me being the little scientific twerp you know it bugged me and and And the worst thing about it is it's my own damn fault because, like I said— You built the damn universe. I made this take place in a slightly parallel universe where Mars has a thicker atmosphere. And so, yeah.

All right. Here's one that you came up with, which they kept pretty faithfully in the movie. The disastrous loss of the Iris resupply mission, the first one. It's another tale you tell so well. How in the world did you come up with protein bars destroying a rocket? Well, I knew from the start that I wanted that to fail, right? Because once again, I was conspiring to make sure that the crew has to go rescue Mark, right?

So I was like, okay, make sure that the crew has to go rescue Mark. Yeah. So I was like, okay, well, they're in a hurry. So they skipped inspections. And so what was really the problem was one of the bolts had a metallurgical flaw in it. I remember that now. Right. And so the protein bars could have bounced around all they wanted. But I don't know what made me come up with it. But I was like, okay, what are they sending?

Mostly food. Okay, so they're sending food. Great. Okay't know what made me come up with it, but I was like, okay, what are they sending? Mostly food. Okay, so they're sending food. Great. Okay, well, how can I screw with this? Well, I realized that protein bars would undergo liquefaction while under enormous stress. Liquefaction is a thing that happens in an earthquake. What happens is you've got like the ground, right? And you've got a lot of clay and whatnot in the

ground and it's really it's really rigid you can build buildings on it no problem but when there's an earthquake what happens is if you look at clay microscopically there are uh hard bits and soft bits there's like a kind of liquid more aqueous parts of it and then there are solid little bits of rock and stuff like that in it and when you uh put a lot of stress or force on it, like an earthquake does, you shake it, it compresses the hard bits, but the liquid doesn't because liquid doesn't like to compress. And so what happens is it becomes a larger percentage liquid than it was before. That's liquefaction, and it acts more like water. And so it becomes more aqueous and more liquid.

And that's why what was once a completely solid area becomes like a soup, and then buildings just sink into it. Well, protein bars are pretty much the same thing. They're like an oily, fatty mixture with food particles throughout. You're not making me hungry, but— Okay, yeah, well, you know, hey, oily, fatty mixture sounds good to me right now. It's about lunch time. But anyway, so what would happen is that would compress the solid food parts but leave the fatty mixture, the oil stuff, liquid.

And so it would have the same effect as liquefaction. So that's how you get your shifting load and stuff like that. And take out a very expensive rescue mission. Yep, and then that coupled with the bad, caused too much pressure on that bolt, so it sheared. And then the rest of the bolts, they failed in succession. I love your thought process. There are hundreds of examples that we could talk about today.

But at some point, we really do have to end this. I want to talk about characters, because I'm also thrilled by the characters. Of course, Mark Watney. That's a given. Two of my favorites, Mindy Park and Rich Purnell, the astrodynamicist. And of course, Mindy is the communications person. FedCon. Yeah, ends up being the person who basically

spies on Mark Watney for a living. Two of my favorites among a lot of characters, possibly at least in part because they remind me so much of so many dedicated, smart young people who are crazy for space, crazy for science, who have jobs like one of those guys that you never really hear about but are absolutely critical. Every one of these Mars missions that you see, they didn't just point it at Mars and shoot. I mean, people like Rich Purnell put a huge amount of work into figuring out exactly how to get it there. Mindy Park is interesting. I like her.

Everybody likes her. And I think one of the reasons they like her is because she's one of the few people in the story who isn't a NASA higher up. She is a low-level person. She's not Teddy or – you know, Teddy is in charge of NASA. Venkat is in charge of all of Mars missions. Then there's like Annie is the director of media relations. Mitch is the flight director. I mean these are all really high-up, important positions.

Whereas Mindy Park is like a low-level functionary who works like a graveyard shift at satellite control. She ends up thrust into this and you can really identify with her. Most of us are not at the tops of our fields. Another interesting thing someone once told me that I think is funny, no one would ever accuse The Martian of being literature, right? It's an adventure story. It's a thriller, whatever. But there isn't really any deep symbolism or anything like that that happens in there. Mark Watney's personality is exactly the same at the end as it was at the beginning. He undergoes no change whatsoever, right? Even though he spent a year or something, over a year on Mars or something like that, he's still like, nah, same personality at the end as he at the beginning. on Mars or something like that, he's still like, eh, same personality at the end as he

at the beginning. And so it's the same with everyone except Mindy Park. Someone told me Mindy is the only character in the story that undergoes growth because at the beginning she's really shy and nebbish and intimidated by all these important people. And by the end she's just casual

and cracking wise with them and stuff like that. You told me something interesting about her quite a while ago and that you gave her the name Park for a particular reason. Well, in my mind, she was Korean, ethnically Korean. I mean, she's an American, but ethnically Korean. But in the movie, you know, she's played by Mackenzie Davis, who did a fantastic job.

I never specify anyone's ethnicity ever in the book. You can draw some distinctions like Martinez or Venkat Kapoor or, yeah, Bruce Ng. Yes, yes, NG. NG, right. The head of JPL. Right. But I never actually say anyone's ethnicity.

So I can't get mad that they didn't make her exactly the way I envisioned her. I don't know. I think it still hit it out of the park in terms of diversity, the approach the movie took. The astronauts, the relationships among them are so different from most of the science fiction movies that have put a whole bunch of people inside a spaceship, I think. Why did you take that approach? I mean, you don't get the conflicts, the big fights. That's because those don't happen.

It's always bothered me in movies like that. I mean, they don't pick random people out of a room and throw them in a spaceship. They do lots of psychological screening, and they make damn sure that if a crew is going to be together for a year, that they're going to get along. And not only that, but each one of them individually, well, they get screened to make sure they have a personality that gets along with people. And then they make sure that the crew has good cohesion with each other through lots of testing and exercises and whatnot.

And then and only then are they willing to do long duration spaceflight. These things where there's a bunch of conflict or tension and stuff between the people on a crew, I'm like, that could only happen if NASA or whoever organized the space mission in this fictional world is really crappy at their job. And it seems that they have enough to battle anyway externally. a very good cohesive team. They have no internal conflicts whatsoever. Everyone is utterly and thoroughly confident in Commander Lewis. In fact, one of my little whinges about the movie is there are a couple of places where just, they're very minor, but there are a couple of places where people kind of question Lewis.

At the beginning, when Lewis calls for the abort, Mark's like, Commander, come on. She's like, no, no, no, we're aborted. kind of question lewis at the beginning when lewis calls for the abort uh it marks like commander come on she's like no no no we're aborted in the book they wouldn't not have even done that in the book it's like complete 100 confidence in commander lewis and her decisions and and no questions one thing uh just a random aside you clip it out or not i don't know i i had a um a maritime lawyer sent me an email I had a maritime lawyer sent me an email telling me about some of the things. He said, like, technically, when the Hermes crew started the Rich Purnell maneuver against NASA's things, that was not a mutiny.

It's called baritree. Baritree. Baritree. Yes. A mutiny is when you mutiny against your captain or against the leadership of your vessel. But when the captain orders the vessel to do something in conflict with what it should be doing, that's called baritory, and that's a different thing. Wow. It's not a mutiny because the people aboard Hermes were doing what their commander said to do. It's baritory.

I think you probably get the best email of anyone I know. I do. It's baritone. I think you probably get the best email of anyone I know. I do. It's awesome. So Commander Lewis, just Commander Lewis, is guilty of baritone. And the rest of the crew are not because they're obeying their commander. That lovely

little character, Johansson, who I thought was just great in the movie. Kate Mara, yeah. She reveals, and I'd forgotten about this, when she's talking, I think, to her father, that there actually was a plan, a survival plan, if the resupply of the Hermes had not worked. Right. The plan, and this was not NASA didn't come up with this plan. This was like Lewis came up with this plan.

In the event that the resupply didn't work, then everyone except Johansson would commit suicide immediately so that the supplies would last longer. But those supplies would not last her long enough to get back to Earth. Oh, God. So she would have to eat the rest of her crewmates. They worked that out amongst themselves, and they decided Johansson would be the one to survive because she's the one who has all of the skills necessary by herself to operate the ship. And she's the one who's most likely to be able to survive. And she's also the smallest, right? She's physically smallest, and so she needs the fewest calories and so on.

And so they worked that out in advance, but it turned out not to be necessary. Do you have a favorite astronaut? You mean in real life? In real life, yeah. Oh, yeah. John Young. He was in Gemini and Apollo and the space shuttle. I forget which Gemini he was on. He was on Apollo 16. He was the commander of Apollo 16. Was it just his breadth of experience across all those missions? He was a damn good astronaut. And he was the commander of STS-1, the first space shuttle mission. He was the commander. Yeah, he's just everything an astronaut's supposed to

be, I guess. I just really admire him. My favorite little snippet or story about him is when Apollo 16 was launching. Well, whenever any of those things are launching, they have biomonitors on the astronauts and they can see their pulse, heart rate, temperature, everything, right? Normally during launch, people get a big adrenaline rush, right? It's like, for instance, Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins, their heart rates went up to like 150, you know, during the launch, because it's like, you know, during the launch of Apollo 16, Young's heart rate never got above 70, which is approximately what my heart rate is right now. It's just like arresting.

It's just like, huh? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to rock it. Yeah, it's going up. One cool cucumber. My heart rate might be a little bit higher than that because this has been so much fun and just delightful.

I mean, I wish I could have these conversations with you on a weekly basis. We hold astronauts in such high esteem. Even though space programs around the world receive criticism, maybe they always will, it still seems to represent something so important to so many people. How do you describe the place that space exploration, this push into the final frontier, what does that mean to humanity? Well, I think one of the reasons it's so popular is because there is nothing cynical about it at all. It's not something you're doing for military purposes.

It's not something you're doing for a special interest. It is purely a manifestation of our natural human instinct to want to see what's over the next hill. And it's just that on a grand scale, on a monumental scale. The thing people don't talk about, I don't know why, but they don't talk about it when they're talking about like, why should we continue to fund the space program? Why should we be putting people into space when there's problems here on Earth? Why do we spend this money, et cetera, et cetera? Well, it comes down to, for the same reason we have the National Endowment of the Arts, because it's cool. It's

awesome. It's something we can be proud of. It's been 45 years since we landed people on the moon and we are still intensely proud of it. It's just like seen as one of the greatest accomplishments in mankind's history. If you think of it like a family, no matter what the problems are in your family, you still budget some money for vacations or going out to have a nice dinner with everybody, even if you're broke, even if you're poor, even if one of your kids has cancer. You know, whatever it is, you still budget some money for the things that make you feel good. And going into space, you know, at a national level in terms of priority,

going into space is something we can all feel very proud of. And it doesn't really cost that much compared to, you know, other national programs. It's a small expense for a lot of pride and happiness. The only sequence in the movie that I can think of, which is really not represented in the book at all, is the end, the epilogue. Did you like it? I loved it. Yeah, I liked it. It's good. I mean, I can understand why the movie, you had to see Mark back on Earth, right? I had an epilogue originally in the book. It's nothing like the one in the movie.

But I didn't like the fact that in the book there was a sudden time jump over eight months just to have one last scene. But in movies, you're used to that. You're used to this little thing at the end. My only complaint is that they didn't put the main denouement of the book in it it was in the trailer interestingly every human being has a natural instinct to help each other out if a hiker gets lost in the mountains right that that that's kind of the the point of the book is that we're that that's what humans are like is that we really will is like if a hiker gets lost in the mountains a a thousand people go look for him.

If there's an earthquake, everybody lines up to give blood. I think Star Trek said the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. Yeah, sometimes. And we as a species have something deep down in our instincts. It doesn't need to be taught. It's just there because you find it in every society ever. If any of us are in trouble, all of us care about it. And that's beautiful.

There's a scene in the movie where Mark Watney is actually feeling pretty bad about his chances at this point. But he's sitting on a bluff looking out over this absolutely gorgeous Martian vista. And he's the only person on the planet who can see it because he's the only person. Would you hope that someday, I imagine like me, you don't really expect it to happen, but would you like to see that vista? Not in person, no. I would not go to Mars. Even if it were as safe as commercial air travel, I would not go to Mars. I write about brave people.

I'm not one of them. You and Ray Bradbury. But you wouldn't mind a virtual reality representation? Sure. I'd love to see pictures. And I'd love for other people to go to Mars and then tell me about it. I don't think anybody has ever done a better job of pretending to go to Mars and telling other people about it than you have in your book. And you know the competition for that statement is pretty tough. Well, thanks. Thank you so much for this conversation and for this magnificent book, which Joel Achenbach of the New York Times said he thinks you may have single-handedly helped to save the space

program. Well, that's probably a bit of an overtstatement, but I do think there's a virtuous cycle in progress right now where there's more public interest in the space program, which causes more demand for entertainment about the space program, which will in turn drive more public interest in the space program. So that's like a virtuous cycle, the opposite of a vicious cycle, right? And I think The Martian is part of that. But I think it's a bit much to say that I have saved NASA. What is it? What's the Mark Watney line about my botany powers? Mars will come to fear my botany powers. Yes. Well, Earth will come to fear your writing powers.

Well, thank you. It already has. Thank you very much. This has been such fun, and I'm just delighted that you were able to take the time. Thanks for having me. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its highly resourceful members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear Martian skies.