Stuck on Mars with nothing but disco: Ars talks with The Martian’s Andy Weir

“I’m pretty much fucked,” reads the opening passage of Andy Weir’s The Martian. After barely surviving a catastrophic accident that leaves him stranded alone on Mars, those are the first words protagonist Mark Watney writes in his journal. The passage is followed by an elaboration: “That’s my considered opinion: fucked.”

I knew immediately that I was going to like this book. After all, even if I were a highly skilled and trained astronaut, the first thing I’d say in that kind of situation wouldn’t be a Star Trek style stoic affirmation—it’d be a lot of swear words. It’s only human, and Watney, for all his otherworldly genius, makes a remarkably accessible everyman.

Set in the near future, The Martian tells his story. Watney is an astronaut and member of mankind’s third manned Mars landing, and he finds himself stranded alone on Mars after his crewmates are forced to abandon him during a dust storm (hence the gloomy tone of the book’s opening passage). Watney must attempt to survive using only leftover tools and components from the abandoned mission, because there is no Home Depot on Mars. Fortunately, he has a few tricks up his spacesuit sleeves: he’s damn smart, damn resourceful, and really, really damn optimistic.

We won’t spoil whether or not Watney manages to escape Mars (at least, not until the end of this piece, in a section clearly marked “HERE BE SPOILERS”). But Weir’s “Apollo 13 meets Cast Away” story managed to break into the New York Times’ Best Seller list twice, with the hardback version peaking at the number 12 and the just-released paperback currently at number seven. The book has also infiltrated the Ars Orbital HQ to become a staff favorite, and we’re not alone in liking it. The book’s movie rights were bought up by Twentieth Century Fox, and Sir Ridley Scott (of Alien and Blade Runner fame) is currently directing the film version. It’s tentatively set for release next November.

Weir was gracious enough to make time for an interview, and we talked for more than an hour about the wild ride he’s taken with The Martian, transforming from a mobile app developer with a self-published serial to a bona fide bestselling author. In addition to all his success, the author was happy to talk about the future of NASA, too.

The Martian author Andy Weir.

Credit: Crown Publishing Group

Andy Weir is Mark Watney

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: talking to Andy Weir in real life is basically exactly like having a conversation with Watney. He’s self-deprecating, funny, and sharp—and hella good at math.

“He’s like all of my good qualities—and better at them—and none of my bad qualities,” Weir joked. “He’s really brave, I’m not. I’m a smart-ass, he’s a serious smart-ass!” As we talked, it quickly became clear that Weir and Watney have an additional trait in common—an almost pathological tenacity and problem-solving drive.

Many other news outlets have interviewed Weir and told the story of how The Martian came to be, so we won’t re-re-rehash the story beyond a quick summary. The Martian was written in installments and put up for free on Weir’s website, receiving good reviews from a small community of readers. However, attempts to shop the book to publishers were met with failure. After receiving reader requests for a way to read the book outside of a Web browser, Weir repackaged it in .epub and .mobi formats, eventually submitting it to Amazon’s online store so it could be loaded on Kindle readers. Doing so required Weir to attach a price, since Amazon won’t let you publish Kindle books for free. So Weir sold copies for the minimum of $0.99. Weirdly enough, far more people paid to download the Kindle version than downloaded it for free, and word of mouth pushed the book into the top download lists on Amazon. From there it attracted the attention of Crown Publishing, a Random House imprint, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The book starts as a series of journal entries by Watney, describing his efforts at using his mission’s landing site as a base to survive. After a bit, the narrative expands. The journal entry style takes a backseat and readers get third-person viewpoints from people back on Earth. Weir originally planned the story to only be told from Watney’s viewpoint, but he realized that wasn’t practical. “I had a general idea of how it was going to end, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there. But the further I got into it, the more I realized there’s just no way NASA wouldn’t notice he was still alive—it was inevitable they’d figure out he was still alive, and I’d have to show what’s going on there and what they do….And that ended up making it a much better story, so I’m glad I sort of bungled into that direction, because showing the other crew and the folks back at NASA was a great device, and broke up the monotony of log entry after log entry.”

The view from Earth adds context to Watney’s struggles to survive, and, frankly, the people back home are all good characters. The cast list expands to include NASA administrators, engineers, technicians, and also Watney’s crewmates, safe aboard their Hermes spacecraft hurtling back toward Earth. The chapters that focus on these characters also give some much-needed breathing room for the audience, because when Weir turns his narrative lens back on Watney, all hell inevitably breaks loose.

Math MacGyver

It turns out, if you have to be stuck on Mars, Watney is the guy you want to be with. It comes as a matter of course that NASA’s astronaut corps is stuffed full of extremely competent individuals who train for years for their individual missions, but Watney’s consistently brilliant leaps of math and logic are positively Holmesian—or, perhaps Poirot-ian, given that both Weir and Watney have an affinity for Agatha Christie.

Weir equips his Mars expedition with oxygen- and water-generating equipment, all plausibly researched and based on sound science. With those two needs met, one of the first tasks Watney must tackle is food. There are adequate food stores for a long time—the mission’s stores were stocked to supply six people for thirty days—so Watney quickly calculates how long he can stretch his rations if he reduces his caloric intake. However, because of the relative positions of Earth and Mars, there is literally no way that a rescue operation could arrive for hundreds and hundreds of days. That, sadly, is a far longer time period than Watney has food to survive.

It’s easy to believe that The Martian was written with the cooperation of a fleet of NASA engineers—but it wasn’t.

But Watney is, fortuitously, a botanist—and the Mars mission was stocked with a small supply of actual for-real potatoes that the crew would have baked and eaten over Thanksgiving. Over the course of several log entries, Watney works out how many calories he would need for survival until rescue, how many potatoes would be required to fill the calorie gap between his rations’ exhaustion and rescue, and how much arable soil would be required to support a crop of potato plants that could grow that many potatoes. He even deduces exactly how to transform sterile dead Martian soil into healthy living potato-friendly soil (hint: it involves water, bacteria, and poop), and then he builds a potato farm on Mars.

Watney faces at least a dozen separate, meticulously researched disasters and challenges while attempting to stay alive long enough for rescue, and that’s the lead-in to the biggest shocker of all. It’s easy to believe that The Martian was written with the cooperation (officially or unofficially) of a fleet of NASA engineers at JPL and JSC—but it wasn’t. Much like Tom Clancy writing The Hunt for Red October without assistance from the military and submarine communities, Weir researched the hell out of space flight and Mars survival routines all on his own.

The amount of research put into the book is stunning. For example, in order for there to be potatoes available for Watney to grow, Weir had to time the Mars mission such that it took place over a Thanksgiving holiday. This required actually working out the specifics of the book’s Mars mission in great detail, including constructing an ephemeris of the solar system’s bodies and simulating several years’ worth of orbits to find exactly the right time period. Weir needed to ensure that the radio signal time delay between Earth and Mars, and between Earth and Hermes, is “accurate.” And as the planets’ positions shift through the hundreds of days across which the story takes place, the radio delays are exactly what they should be.

This proved far too difficult to do with pen and paper, but Weir’s background as an application developer enabled him create software that would generate and track the orbits as needed. The level of simulation required to find a launch window for Weir’s proposed Mars mission that overlapped Thanksgiving also leads to a neat Easter egg in the novel—although the mission’s exact date is never given (not even the year is mentioned), Weir absolutely has a launch date for the story. No one has yet figured out what it is, but the clues to do so are buried in the text for anyone who wants to consult a solar system ephemeris and work it out. (“What I’m afraid of is that someone will try it and prove that I was wrong, like, ‘No, you had Mars’s location off by ninety degrees and everything else is wrong!’”)

Celestial mechanics were only one of a multitude of mathematical challenges Weir pushed through in figuring out how Watney would be able to survive on Mars. For every ludicrously complex solution Watney is able to come up with after just a few hours of cogitating and maybe a nap—like, for example, how to extract hydrogen from one of his mission’s discarded spacecraft and burn it to produce more water in order to aerate his potato crop soil—Weir spent days working out the math.

“That’s what the Internet’s for!” he said, laughing off the suggestion of partnering with NASA. “Just Googling around! I was like, ‘OK, what’s in hydrazine?’ and ‘OK, how do I get the hydrogen out of it?’”

How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

Building a toy solar system on his computer wasn’t anywhere near the craziest thing Weir simulated to get the book right. The most complex bit of math turned out to be figuring out how to keep Watney alive in the latter part of the book, where he must traverse more than a thousand kilometers of Martian wilderness. Weir worked out hard numbers on how much electricity Watney would need to generate in order to run his equipment, and that was just the beginning—he also had to figure out how to actually generate the electricity, how to carry the electricity-generating bits and pieces, and all the other logistics necessary for the trip. Weir ended up with “numerous doc files and spreadsheets” full of calculations by the time he was done.

It all comes together beautifully. Although Watney explains everything he does in great detail, it’s never overwhelming or dry, and the complex math behind the science never intrudes on the fast pace of the story. The biggest reason for this is that Watney is a fun and engaging narrator, peppering his survival tale with deeply personal and often hilarious asides. Of almost equal importance with the challenge of growing food to Watney is the fact that the disaster that left him alone also left him with only his commander’s USB stick of 70s TV shows and disco music. When the NASA director somberly wonders what poor stranded Watney must be thinking about in a moment of despair, the point of view shifts to Watney:

“How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.”

People, places

As impressive as Watney’s characterization is, Weir scores big points for accurately capturing the familiar way in which all the other characters talk and behave. Having worked with and around manned space flight engineers for a big chunk of my career, I can tell you that they’re a lot like any other bunch of office workers—they have jargon- and acronym-laden conversations, but they’re far more likely to say “hand me that thing over there” instead of “hand me the left-handed Mark 7 grommet torque application assembly provider.” There are also a lot of meetings involved in working in space flight.

I can attest that this is 100 percent accurate.

Weir explained that he also worked for a number of years at Sandia national labs at Livermore, starting at age fifteen. And although that provided a solid foundational window into how scientists act and talk, it’s worth repeating: He managed to portray NASA without talking to them. The Martian nails the jargon, the attitude, and the feel of people working at the agency.

 “I had no contacts at all in aerospace of any kind at the time I was writing it.”

“I had no contacts at all in aerospace of any kind at the time I was writing it. Now, I’ve got a bunch! But back then, no, nothing. I think the way that ‘feel’ came across was because of my long experience in the software industry, which while obviously being much less exciting than aerospace, it comes out the same way in the day-to-day functionality. The people in a software company are all very good at what they do—they’re all really good engineers, and we have meetings, we work on features…and it comes off with that same feeling you’d have with mechanical or electrical or aerospace engineers.”

Considering that care, it’s no surprise Weir’s received positive feedback about the book from the aerospace community.

“I think basically there aren’t that many books that try as hard as I did to be as technically accurate as The Martian is. Aerospace engineers tend to be nerds, right? And they read science fiction, or watch it on TV, and they’re used to seeing so much bullshit—so much hand-waving and violations of physics—that it’s probably hugely refreshing to see a book that at least tries to be accurate.”

Why so serious?

After finishing The Martian, we really only had one major complaint: Watney spends more than a year on Mars before the story ends, and he remains almost ludicrously optimistic throughout. He never really breaks down in despair, even during several moments where things go from bad to worse (and worse, and worse). Before even being asked, Weir brought this up when describing the hardest engineering challenge he had to write Watney out of.

“I didn’t want the book to be a deep character study of crippling loneliness and depression.”

“I’ll give you a sideways answer to that,” he said. “There are a bunch of severe psychological effects that would happen to someone being isolated for almost two years. And also the anxiety and stress of being on the verge of death from various problems for so long—most people would not be able to handle that. The loneliness, the isolation, the anxiety, and stress—I mean, it would take an enormous psychological toll. And I didn’t deal with any of that. I just said like, ‘Nope, that’s not how Mark Watney rolls.’ So he has almost superhuman ability to deal with stress and solitude.

“And the reason I did that was because I didn’t want the book to be a deep character study of crippling loneliness and depression—that’s not what I wanted! So the biggest challenge were the psychological aspects, and I just didn’t address them and I hope the reader doesn’t notice.”

He’s right—Watney faces down situations that would crush lesser people, all without seeing another human face for his entire time on Mars. But once Watney is able to re-establish contact with NASA (no spoilers on the method used), Weir figured that he could realistically have Watney solve any problem capable of being solved. That kind of ability would probably buoy anyone’s spirits. “Once he has contact again with NASA, you’ve got the brain trust—the smartest people in the world would be working on the problem,” clarified Weir. “So I think it all comes down to if there is a solution at all, they will find it and they will execute it.”

A man, a plan, a canal, Mars Direct!

The mission on which Weir dispatches Watney and his crew is the third in a fictionalized program called Ares, which is a complex multi-element mission involving a number of different vehicles. It does not at all resemble NASA’s actual current manned Mars mission plans, which at least for now are slated to use the still-unbuilt Space Launch System heavy lift rocket. Weir’s Ares missions instead look like a variation of a much older plan to reach the red planet: Mars Direct.

“It is, mostly,” Weir admitted. “But it’s updated for some technology that’s been created since Mars Direct was invented. Mars Direct didn’t account for ion engines, which I believe are a much better way to get humans interplanetary distances.” The large Hermes spacecraft used in The Martian to ferry crews between Mars and Earth is powered by an ion thruster, a low-power, high-efficiency type of rocket that delivers a small but constant amount of thrust.

An Ion engine test firing.

Credit: NASA / Wikimedia Commons

“Mars Direct originally imagined that you would send a ship to Mars, and it would start making fuel out of the Martian atmosphere,” he continued. This is, in fact, what happens in the book. Along with a number of pre-supply drops, the astronauts have a fueled-up return vehicle and all their supplies already waiting for them when they arrive. “And then you send the manned mission to Mars, and they land to do their stuff, and they leave on the return ship that’s already on Mars. The ship that they lift off of, they ride all the way home.”

Weir explained that the original Mars Direct plan relied on elliptical Hohmann transfer orbits to get the astronauts to and from Mars, which meant that the mission times were dictated wholly by synodic period of Mars. That mission would have had a required stay time on Mars of a little over a year.

By modifying the plan to include the enormous Hermes spacecraft as an in-system ferry, the Ares missions didn’t have to worry about the synodic period of Mars or riding the long slow Hohmann orbits out—they could simply point and go. Plus, the Mars Direct plan required the crew to return to Earth in what might be a very tiny Mars ascent vehicle—the craft that gets landed first and waits for the astronauts to arrive. An eight-month Hohmann orbit transfer in a tiny craft seemed like madness to Weir. Instead, he gave his characters an enormous spaceship to ride in—one that builds up inertia with ion engines and aerobrakes at its destination.

We made the obligatory joke about Star Wars: Episode I focusing on an intergalactic trade dispute.

One thing that might be a little less than realistic about the mission is that it’s not an international partnership—Weir wrote the book with the Ares Project as a NASA program (though the presence of international astronauts in the crew is obviously indicative of some international cooperation). This is in contrast to NASA’s efforts to put a space station in Earth orbit, which were met with repeated stonewalling and budgetary issues through the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately, the organization had to rely on a complex international partnership to get things into orbit (hence the International Space Station). If Ares were to happen, it likely would be as a joint project, but Weir had a simple explanation for making the fictional mission NASA-only. Storytelling expediency.

“The reason I did that was because I wanted to focus on Mark being in trouble and technical solutions,” he explained. “I didn’t want to take time away to explain a bureaucratic organization that doesn’t exist yet in the real world, you know what I mean?”

We made the obligatory joke about Star Wars: Episode I focusing on an intergalactic trade dispute and Weir laughed. “Right, well, anyone who would read The Martian already has a basic understanding of NASA. They know how NASA works. They know that NASA has a mission control center in Houston. They know that rockets launch from Florida. They know that NASA has its own internal structure that ultimately leads up to a director who is answerable to congress and the president—everybody knows this stuff.”

So if it was a multi-national effort, it’d only introduce more logistic slog. “How does their decision-making work? Is there a council from countries, or whatever? Are there delegates? I didn’t want to have to explain all that, so I just went, ‘Eh, it’s NASA.’”

Silver screen

Of course, we’ll get to see all of this in about a year. As of this article’s publication, Sir Ridley Scott is in heavy preproduction for the film version of The Martian. The book was adapted to the screen by Drew Goddard, whose screenwriting credits include Cloverfield, Cabin in the Woods, and World War Z (he also wrote a smattering of Buffy, Angel, Lost, and Alias episodes). According to Weir, the screenplay follows the book pretty well. We asked if he’ll be able to have any input on the script or the shooting process once things get kicked off.

Matt Damon as Watney? “I can see him in my mind, saying smart-ass things, kind of with that crooked smile, you know?”

“Well, mostly my job so far has been to cash the check,” he responded. “I don’t have any authority or anything like that. They do e-mail me and ask me technical questions every once in a while. I could go to the studio and meet people, if I wanted—they told me I could, but it’s in Budapest.

“Ridley Scott was really impressed by this one specific studio, and it’s this huge huge soundstage, so they could build the entire hab as a single set, or they could build the entire Hermes as a single set.” Weir then said they’re filming the exterior Mars scenes in Wadi Rum, Jordan—presumably with some red tint post-processing to make it look like Mars.

As far as the other big name attached to the project, Weir is confident that we won’t see a personality-wiped Jason Bourne character playing Watney. “A lot of people forget how good an actor Matt Damon is! Remember, he can do ‘smartass’ really well, as we saw in Good Will Hunting!…and I can see him in my mind, saying smart-ass things, kind of with that crooked smile, you know?”

Weir is clearly excited about it all, and the more he talked, the easier it was to be excited too. The cast sounds great, with Sean Bean playing the role of NASA Flight Director Mitch Henderson and brilliant cinematic chameleon Chiwetel Ejiofor in the roll of Ares project director Venkat Kapoor. Jessica Chastain (recently of Interstellar) will play the Ares 3 mission commander, Melissa Lewis, and other big names like Michael Peña, Donald Glover, Kristin Wiig, Sebastian Stand, and Jeff Freaking Daniels are on the playbill. If production doesn’t slip, set a calendar reminder for November now.

NASA for real

Before our time was through, Weir was happy to transition to real life and share his thoughts on NASA’s next step. Surprisingly, the author isn’t in favor of an immediate push to land on Mars.

“I know you would expect me to say a manned Mars mission, but I think the next thing should be a return to the moon. It’s unreasonably hopeful to think we could go directly to Mars without any intervening steps. We need to test long-term space flight, we definitely need to invent centripetal gravity, we need to have a space station or a ship that can spin to provide gravity—I could go on for a half hour on why I think that’s necessary, but long story short, the effects of long-duration microgravity are so devastating that I don’t believe any exercise regimen would solve it.”

Weir is referring to (among other things) spaceflight osteopenia, the tendency for astronauts’ bones to lose density in microgravity. It can be fought somewhat with exercise, but Weir is right—so far, no long-term solution has been found (other than gravity). “This means inventing new designs for spacecraft that can stand up to a lot of force because they’re spinning.”

“It’s unreasonably hopeful to think we could go directly to Mars without any intervening steps.”

Lunar missions would of course be great for public relations, but Weir believes the Moon could function as a proving ground for Mars missions, even though the conditions on the moon are different from Mars. “If you’re going to do a manned Mars mission…one thing it involves is sending a ship somewhere in advance and having someone come home in it. That would be a good thing to test in a lunar mission. Send a return ship to the moon, have it land, then send a rover to the moon and have it collect samples, put it in the return ship, and have it come back.

“As to the manned program right now, I love that they’re offloading booster manufacturing and launches to private companies,” he said. “I’m pretty pleased with the approach of not just paying one company to work it out—there are multiple companies on the line…I’m a big fan of SpaceX myself! And I am not a fan of SLS at all. I wish they weren’t working on it at all. I wish they would have farmed that out too.”

Artist’s conception of NASA’s SLS rocket at launch.

Credit: NASA / Wikimedia Commons

Weir is quick to point out that it’s not the concept of heavy lift he’s against: it’s the actual SLS rocket. “It’s very expensive. It’s $40 billion to maybe put up a rocket sometime around 2020, and I’m like, ‘come on.’ As opposed to SpaceX, actually, with Elon Musk, who’s said ‘If you give us $3 billion, we can probably develop that rocket.

“Consider the Falcon Heavy,” he said. “They haven’t launched one yet, but it’s estimated to cost around $100 to $120 million dollars per booster—that’s what SpaceX would charge you for it, and it can put 53,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit. Which is about a third of what SLS can do, right? But OK, three of those launches and you’ve put the same mass up into LEO, and it cost about $360 million—not $40 billion. I would be absolutely on board with SLS if the price to orbit per kilogram was low. If it had an economy of scale, I would be like, ‘yes, absolutely!’ But it’s not! Anyway, so I’m not a fan of SLS and I don’t think it’ll work.”

“I’m a big fan of SpaceX myself!”

Weir interrupted himself: “Well, no, I’m sure it will eventually, if they keep pouring money into it—eventually there will be a pile of dollar bills that reaches into space that we can climb!”

On the subject of piles of money, we had to ask Weir about that other effort to put humans on Mars: Mars One, which we’re pretty sure will end in tears. Weir made a dramatic sigh. “I don’t take them seriously at all,” he said. “Yeah, so—do you have kids?”

“No,” I replied.

“OK, well, I want you to imagine that you have like a 10-year-old son. You come home one day and he’s hanging out in the living room with his friends and they’re taping some cardboard together and you’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ and he says ‘We’re making a rocket that’s going to go to Mars!’ and you’d be like, ‘OK, great, have fun with that!’

“You wouldn’t subject it to deep scientific analysis, and you wouldn’t try to get industry experts in—you wouldn’t have the media in to interview your son or anything. I have no idea why people take them seriously! I think they honestly believe they have a workable idea, but I don’t think that it’s actually a workable idea.”

WARNING: the last section has been placed on its own page because it contains a few spoilers. If you are planning to read the book, stop now and come back after you’ve read it.

Spoilers below—fame, fortune, and sequels

Weir has no plans for a sequel to The Martian, since Watney would most likely not travel in space again. The Martian 2: Watney Runs Out of Beer at Home and the Store is Closed isn’t a particularly compelling tale. “The problem is, the things people like about The Martian, to have them happen again in another book would really strain plausibility,” Weir explained. “But, OK, let’s say I found a reason for him to get back into space? What are the odds that he’d be there for another serious problem?”

“This would be like Die Hard in space!” I interjected.

“Exactly! And you can get away with that, if this was like ‘The Adventures of Spaceman Spiff,’ or something like that. You just accept that Buck Rogers is going to get into trouble every day, but the point of this is realism, right?”

So no Martian 2. But what happens to Watney? It’s unsurprisingly a popular question.

“I’m really surprised by this,” replied Weir, “but numerous—many, many readers and fans have e-mailed and said Mark should end up with Mindy Park,” referring to the NASA imaging technician who first notices signs of Watney’s survival and becomes instrumental in tracking his activities and helping him get off of Mars. “And I’m like, I never even thought of anything like that! And you think about it, once things settle down back on Earth they’d be coworkers… And also, if they did that, the name of that couple would be ‘Mark and Mindy.’”

“I promise,” he laughed, “if I ever make a sequel to The Martian, Mark and Mindy end up together. But I don’t have a plot for the book!”

“I promise if I ever make a sequel to The Martian, Mark and Mindy end up together.”

Weir does have plans for other novels, though. The Martian’s success has enabled him to quit his software development job and become a full-time author, a career that’s been a long time coming. “When I was in my late twenties, I took a three-year sabbatical off work to try to break into writing,” he explained. “I wrote a book—not The Martian but a previous book—and spent three years, but couldn’t get a literary agent, couldn’t get any publisher interest—you know, the standard writer story. So at that point I’d given up and said that my writing would just be a hobby. So it was interesting that after trying three years to get even an agent, later on in life I’m just minding my own business and an agent and a publisher comes to me. And then that same week, Twentieth Century Fox comes in and buys the movie rights!”