Talk:Rich Purnell/@comment-31131540-20170124000050/@comment-7772767-20170124212643

I know nothing about space flight so i won't try to argue with what you've said, all I can say is that this is set in the 2030s where we have the technology to get to Mars and back and the Taiyang Shen the so called most advanced piece of tech from the Chinese that year was used to resupply Hermes. I'm sure in the book, like so many other things it was better explained but most of that stuff flew over my head. As for actually getting Mark at the end of the film, that didn't orignially happen in the book. In the book mark made a joke about flying around like Iron man and The crew laughed it off immidiatly and then proceeded to stick to protocol (apart from blowing up part of the ship) and having their EVA specialist Chris Beck go outside and grab Mark like the plan dictacted.

As for the soil, in the book it states that NASA sent up a small amout of soil containing the minerals and stuff of earth soil so they could test growing stuff on Mars. when Mark mixed this with the large amounts of martian soil-sorry dust, shall we say man made fertiliser and water the earth bacteria or whatever is in soil multiplied. In the book it goes into detail about the plan he made to double the dirt etc etc.

The films not a total facepalm but some of the hard science that The Martian book became famous for was cut in space for a good plot, character arcs, pacing and time constraints.

A lot of people (although most of the ones I've seen have been youtubers I have skimmed some actual sciencey ones) have checked the science and in the book at least the most inaccurate thing is the storm that gets Mark stranded in the first place which Andy Weir, the author admits whole heartedly, in the movie of course there are numourous things wrong but what can you do, it is a movie set in the future about a guy getting stranded on Mars and listens to disco.