Adam Savage Interviews 'The Martian' Author Andy Weir - The Talking Room

let's go in the talking room after devouring the Martian in one sitting and then listening to it as an audio book I couldn't get Andy where's exhaustively researched AB you novel out of my head i sat down with Andy to talk about how he constructed a gripping science fiction yarn while keeping it firmly rooted in science fact if you're familiar with the movie yeah you know the sound of Bowman breathing yeah these things actually they're actually velcro like the originals but here's the best part put it on and what you'll hear is that they had to have recorded the audio from the inside of the actual helmet you're telling my glasses let it go exit and if you breathe you just hear that sound and it sounds it's cool it says just like the film I wonder if the mics picking it up I could do that is awesome isn't I really get that feeling yeah it's like Kubrick put one on at some point and said like oh I want to hear this and I want them to hear this it's just like him to do precisely that right Andy thank you so much for joining us on the talking room thanks for having me um I barely know where to begin I loved this book so much that immediately after reading it I listened to it I listened to the audiobook just to get the whole experience again and it doesn't diminish at all upon a second leaving I plan to read it a third time thanks talk to me about the genesis of this book where did it come from well I'm kind of a dork and so I really like to sit around and think about the space agency and space program and manned and unmanned Space Flight and I was sitting around thinking how could we do a manned Mars mission like with the technology we have right now like so what would it entail how do you get people to Mars how do you get them to the surface how to get them back up it takes a lot of delta-v and you don't want to be I mean you need to have a ship that can support people for months at a time but at the same time you need to land on Mars and come back and so I was working all that and now how were you working that were you reading books about NASA were you talking to NASA engineer over you know this is just me sitting around by my so this is before I even decide to write a book this is just me sitting around daydreaming going like how would a manned Mars mission work and I came up with what's basically the Ares mission just described in there and to be fair I should point out that's about 95 percent Mars direct by Robert Zubrin right I made some change plain what Mars direct is okay the concept behind Mars direct is you well zubrin's concept was you send a ship to Mars and then on Mars you you make fuel using Mar using the Martian atmosphere or another it's called in situ resource utilization you basically make fuel there okay and that saves and that Mendes amount of payload right getting some stuff there right and his idea was that you would you would send people there in one ship and you would have a ship there in advance and it makes fuel and you send them back in that ship that's roughly what zubrin's idea was but he came up with that before ion engines existed ion engines are real technology they're not just invented for the book basically they're particle accelerators that shoot argon out very very fast so fast that the particles gain relativistic mass so they Wow yeah so that means with less matter you're getting more momentum change so you need very very little reactant mass to get a good distance and this means that it accelerates very slowly but consistently over a long very long time and you need a lot of energy to do that so you need a reactor aboard which my fictional ship has and then you accelerate her knees as I designed it can accelerate at two millimeters per second per second so that's like about like as my hands coming apart at that rate would be like that's the acceleration but that's and they would get going faster and faster now if you do that for like months you get a pretty good head of steam know just what's ahead of wow you end up going very fast pretend like tens of thousands of miles per hour uh well I think of it in terms of kilometers per second okay you need a delta V of about five kilometers a second to put yourself on a Mars intercept or actually you need a Delta V of two and a half kilometers a second which is 2500 meters per second which is about five thousand miles an hour okay well it's a delta v delta v everything you do in space because you're not you don't have any ground or air or anything to push against it all comes down to Delta V you want to go to the moon you're going to need to pick up enough velocity to escape Earth's gravity and get to the moon's gravity area I see and you need a certain amount of velocity to do that and there's no way around it you can't cheat the system in any way you know physics demands that you pay the price and you have to have this Delta V okay everything comes down to Delta V and the amount of fuel you have on your ship determines the total amount of Delta V you can have period so a like the curiosity probe that we sent to Mars it had a certain amount of possible Delta V that it could do for everything related to the trans-mars injection burn which is where it left earth left Earth's gravity well and started on its trip to Mars and then another burn to slow it down so that it fell into Mars orbit and then the the insertion burn where it the EDL burn entry descent and landing where it you know came in slowed itself down enough that it would could get caught in Mars's atmosphere and land all of the delta v that there was a certain maximum amount of velocity change that it could do during that entire trip and those things need to be under that if there'd been an error that was more than their Delta V counter then they would have failed okay so I'm gonna go back even further okay are you an engineer by training uh well I'm a computer programmer by training okay but I've always been deeply interested in space space travel and I especially like orbital dynamics too since when since since all my life it's all yeah this is like for I Goti my dad is a particle physicist oh so like I mean I grew up with this stuff about like I'm so working it out work it out on a napkin is a genuine family value oh sure and he would always encourage me to do all this stuff and my mom electrical engineer also encouraged me to you know although I'm terrible at that so I'm really I'm awful at electronics I can't do it at all I'm also pretty bad at chemistry so everything in the book that had to do with electronics in chemistry was tons of research for me okay the physics was also a lot of research but I started with a fair amount but it grows just out of a deep hobby and being able to understand this stuff mm and so is the book the the end result of an exercise book is the end result of an exercise in your head of like how would this be possible and what would happen well yeah so I was basically saying okay how do i how would we put together a Mars mission the way I want to do it you know and and so I figured out oh this is how the Mars mission would go then you need to start thinking about you know this is a manned mission so you you can't just have a failure kill the crew yes say what happens if this fails how does the how do you ensure the crew survives how do you abort at this point in the mission how do you abort here how do you make sure they survive so in each of these things you're trying to think like NASA would think enjoy right worst-case scenario plan how do we make sure that the crew doesn't die and you're going through space history to see how NASA solved these types of problems in the past sure absolutely and also the fun part is thinking of like this is a problem that's never been solved what what can I do to make sure it gets solved what if they have to abort when they're halfway to Mars what if they have some critical failure on their ship well can is there an orbital trajectory that just brings them back to earth fairly quickly without ever going to Mars etc so I was working on all that and I thought of all these things that could go wrong on the surface this could break that could break these two things could break at the same time how do we deal with that and then I started realize the increasingly desperate solutions I'm like well theoretically they could survive if they did this and that I realized that makes for a pretty interesting story so I created a poor hapless main character and subjected him to all of them Wow and and and you said in one interview that he's basically you he's basically mutt well okay so he's his personality is all of my good parts and none of my bad parts right so we've all got we've all got good traits and bad traits I've got plenty of downsides that I did not put into mark did you set out when you wrote this is the thing that I found most exciting about it was it might be the first science fiction and I'm not even sure this qualifies as science fiction because everything in it is pretty much doable with today's technology did you set out to make it all absolutely that way or I mean it was a challenge like I don't want to make any leap of technology to something that's not currently feasible yes basically I did want to make it as accurate as possible so all the technology that you see in the book actually exists however some of it is better than our current incarnations so we don't we don't have ion engines anywhere near as powerful as Hermes has but there's nothing preventing us from making it just like I don't know how do we put it how do I put it if we wanted to we could make an aircraft like four times the size of a CA five a galaxy and make it functional right we haven't but we know how to do that right okay and so we could scale it up there are a couple of hand-wavy places in the book where I where I sacrifice scientific accuracy for for narrative is one of them in the spacesuits themselves I felt like this basic technology letter-spacing I am a total space guy and I'm thinking they're not that easy to move around so to make those of you watching this jealous I'm gonna get to see his toys oh yeah after this you don't and I know you have a reproduction Apollo spacesuit at least you did i do i do i do so i'm interested in yeah yeah it's pretty crunchy his face to my other yeah well it sounds awesome um and i want to see it but the okay so his spacesuit is is like kind of next-gen spacesuit one thing that as a spacesuit buff i'm sure you know is that it's it's practically impossible to put on a spacesuit by yourself yeah okay so this is a scenario where they design spacesuits that can be put on by themselves and i figured their reasoning behind it was for just such an occasion they go like well we have a crew of six they're on mars they're not always going to all be together they're going to go off and do sample missions something could happen we need one guy to be able to suit up by himself it makes all sorts of sense to have that be be a thing I just I built a glove box last year mmm at negative 3.5 psi with a glove inside it and I that thing is near and I had three bolts of different sizes with three nuts in the box and all you have to do is put a thread the nut onto the bolt and it's exhausted it's very hard it's really really difficult it's naked oh I see so you're you're you're feeling the resistance of the of the glove exactly oh yeah one one it's just one glove one right up to here and then kind of get this thing up and hewed on it it's crazy so you you posit here that they've mostly fixed the difficulty of moving around and of putting it on by yourself right and that and that I even I mentioned in the book and that's another case where I'm a little hand wavy about it it's like oh he can he can bend down he can kneel down without too much trouble if you ever watched the Apollo astronauts I mean they're gummy they're trying to reach down with these little like grabbers stick things and then they stumble and fall over and so I'm assuming that like you know close to a hundred years of technological advancement since the Apollo days should be sufficient okay so is that what you're thinking that this might be about forty or fifty years in the future actually no I so I'll tell you I'll show it to you I'll show it to you later I can I can show you a video that I posted online but I actually calculated the orbital trajectories that they take to get from Earth to Mars and from Mars back to earth and all the stuff that you build it oh you wrote a program I wrote a software lay the orbital in Kenya because of constantly accelerating craft you can't just or I certainly can't just calculate with math I need to make it simulation I was getting stuck on the math I'm like okay I know exactly how to calculate orbits just from a point thrust in other words you get a change in your velocity and now you're just moving around the Sun right but I could not for the life of me figure out the math be behind like constantly accelerating trajectories I'm like that's is hopeless and so I went online of course try to figure out well how do people do it how does NASA do and the answer is always simulation they just do simulation with like smaller and smaller time slices and supercomputers so I figured well lives aren't actually depending on my work so I can be really inaccurate like so if you agree to call NASA and ask for their help well I never had yeah I had no contacts of the aerospace industry at all I can't believe I'm that I dunno the most surprised I figure we're getting to that but that's one of the most surprising things I find about this book is that this is all research you've done without talking to NASA engineers I'm gobsmacked oh well I really enjoy doing research I enjoy doing a science and sitting down doing the math it's like that's fun to me okay but no in looking through the history of NASA are you is your reference library like 20 books or a hundred books or 500 books it's one computer you know okay you're just looking through I just Google around to find what I want and make sure I get good sources instead of like you know Bob's you know space page sometimes sometimes the best time response page has amazing stuff on it I've been there some sometimes those are the best things I found one thing like most of the stuff I learned about like orbital trajectories and calculating stuff like that I learned from this I wish I could remember the name because I would love to give him the credit but it's this high school teacher who had posted like this stuff on a website for his students to look at and say like let's say you want to calculate this Delta V from her and I'm like that's how I learned how to do it because this guy bothered to post it but anyway so I made this simulation and so naturally I had to have a launch window I need to know the locations of Earth and Mars right and so there are lots of launch windows I just Earth and Mars have Co centric orbits but Mars is is much more eccentric so if you look at Earth and Mars their orbits together is like earth as a circle and then Mars is more elliptical and so that's a really fat distance here in a really thin distance on this side and so variance between their Apogee and perigee is that the way you describe yes excellent excellent yeah a lot of variable things from high speed if the the ratio of let's say the ratio of the long axis of the ellipse to the short axis of the ellipse is the eccentricity okay and in s intricity of 1 means you have a perfectly circular orbit Earth's orbit is very close to 1 Mars is is a little more eccentric although still pretty pretty close to a point ok now so I had to calculate this trajectory where you have earth moving bars moving and then my ship trying to match speeds and location with Mars so did you choose a year that I had to choose a date I had to choose a specific date so for any day and I'm not going to reveal it because I may someday have a contest or I might have people like from clues in the book I want you to figure out the launch date of Ares 3 but I so great this is exactly the kind of level of detail I go into with my project well it's because also because of plot reasons they're originally scheduled mission has to overlap Thanksgiving right right right so I had to choose a launch date such that they would be there on Thanksgiving of that year and Thanksgiving floats around so that's kind of a pain in the ass too did he build a program for that I know what I did was I figured out for for an angle Delta between Earth and Mars right so I figured it out basically how to how to get that trajectory and then I can kind of rotate both Earth and Mars around in their orbit such that their angle difference is the same and then I can adjust it a little bit as needed to deal with the a centricity problems and so I found out okay like when our Earth and Mars this angle distance apart and I had this list of candidates and so I I'm like okay well that one would not put them there on Thanksgiving that one does put them there and Thanksgiving but it's not for 200 years okay they slide and so on and I finally found one okay so you first wrote this book and you just put it up on your website yep I'm free yep um so I tried for a long time to give this thing away um so just going back in time a little bit further when I was in my so I've always wanted to be a writer that's always been my dream since I was a kid everything my dad had well see this collection of books you have my dad had a probably about like two of these shelves high bookshelf - too wide sorry bookshelf packed with 1950s sci-fi paperbacks well 50s 60s 70s and 80s it was the 80s so nothing beyond that and I would just you know pull one out I read it when I was done with it I'd pull another one out and so I I grew up loving classic like sci-fi my favorite authors are Clark as a mom Heinlein and then um I don't know why keep looking back at your books I'm expected my dad's collect whole tree on the left end in place movie screen right there we go um but so I always wanted to be a writer and then but I also like eating regularly and I like having a place to live that is not a cardboard box in an alley you know stuff like that so I'm a computer programmer I was a computer programmer by trade I came into some money in my late 20s because I worked for AOL and they laid me off and they laid me off at a time that forced me to sell my stock options when they were at their peak so I assure you I would not have made a wise financial decision if I hadn't been forced to Wow but so I took three years off and I said like I'm going to do it I'm going to be a writer okay so I I wrote a book called theft of pride which was actually my second book there's another book from before this is my third book I wrote theft of pride I spent like I spent some time writing it and the rest of the time just trying to get it published trying to get an agent trying to get a publishers interested no one was interested eventually said like well I gave it a try I don't have to wonder what would have happened now I can go back to being a computer programmer and then the internet started to get more and more popular and I'm like well I can now write I can write and have an audience it's not gonna be my profession right but I can write short stories and stuff like a feedback and yeah exactly and so I did that for like ten years just writing things posting it up there and slowly accumulating an audience and so I have thousands of regular readers by the time I started writing the Martian which helps a lot because that started this word of mouth thing readers were they come back to your site and see updates you were sterilizing the writing process yeah so when anybody liked my stuff they could they could sign it for my mailing list and stuff like that a few hunters back realizes it has a long and illustrious history right things doing Mark Twain he realized several of his books so did dick and Dickens yeah it was all about serial and the Sherlock Holmes yeah stories Conan Doyle so anyway a few years back I wrote a short story called the egg which was really popular like millions and millions of page views and people post the entire content it's a thousand words long it's like a page and a half but people really liked it it's a good digestible story for the internet era it's something you can read in five minutes and be done with and people liked it so that brought a lot of readers to my site anyway the Martian was just one of the things I wrote it was just like okay I'm going to write a serial about a guy trapped on Mars if you think about it is it is kind of a 1950s serial oh no its and it's relentless each thing you're like ah oh my god this poor guy had to did you put up a few a chapter at a time chapter at a time so I post a chapter and then like when I was done yeah when I was done or the next one I do a brief editing pass post the next one I told every would fans actually come up with corrections absolutely the manuscript absolutely especially TIF Icarus II was great people like oh you got the chemistry wrong on this and I'm like of course I did I suck at chemistry and I'm like tell me what I did wrong and then now all of a sudden I had a subject-matter expert to talk to right so I posted it chapter by chapter and I told the fans I'm like I want to be clear this isn't exactly a serial I reserve the right to go back and make changes to earlier chapters so this stuff isn't like set in stone cannon if I come up with like oh I point here but I need to set up for it in these previous chapters I reserve the right to make those changes and I eventually finished and I'm like okay I'm done now on to my next project and I started get emails saying like oh hey I really like the Martian but I really hate reading it in a bunch of web pages can you make an e-reader version right and I'm like sure so I figured out how to do that and I made an ePub and a Moby version and post it on the site I'm like okay you can read in the web pages or you can read it on the e-reader knock yourself out then I got other emails from people saying hey I really like the Martian and I glad that you made it into an e-reader format but I'm not very technically savvy and I don't know how to download a random file from the internet and put it on my e-reader can you just post it to Kindle Amazon Kindle so that I can just push a button on my Kindle and get it I'm like okay and so I worked out how to do that that turns out it's really simple they have the same Kindle direct publishing KDP where you just post it up there you set what you want the price is to set what you want the price to be set what you want your royalty to be and then that's it and so I'm like oh no problem I want the price to be zero and I want my royalty to be zero I there we go but it's like no no you can't do that it really they don't allow you to make it free right they're not they're not they're not a free cloud service right that they want they want to make money right so they make their money off their content so you must charge at least $0.99 and well basically it works out to be the lowest you can set your share to is 30% and the lowest price you can set is $0.99 so I'm like okay $0.99 my royalty is 3030 big pennies per copy there you go so I say alright everybody now you can read it my website or you can download it for free for your e-reader here or you can pay a buck to have Amazon put it on your e-reader for you basically think of it that way and within a month or two more people had bought it from Amazon than had done load it for free that's because that's hilarious that's just the volatile convenience yes there and I guess people a buck is not a big barrier to entry for a lot of people but I assume I assume it very quickly started getting reviews on Amazon yes started getting reviews it started doing really well word-of-mouth and then it finally made it into the top sellers and was significant yeah there's a lot well I didn't even realize at the time how well it was selling I was like its selling but I don't know you know they have the daily reports hence like oh here's how many copies you've sold I'm like but I don't know what that means I don't know what good sales are bad sales yeah or what it's like oh I'm selling about 300 copies a day I don't know what that means and so I go there's this forum that they had for all the KDP authors where you're automatically a member and you can chat about it and stuff like that and people are like oh today was a great day I sold five copies of my book I'm like okay I think then my must be selling abnormally well and then it made it into the like sci-fi top 10 and you know technical top 10 and stuff like that once it gets there then it's really spikes because it makes people hate yeah people are like oh I don't know what I want what are the top 10 sci-fi oh I'll take it and then from there that got the attention of Random House do crown publishing which is part of Random House and they said you know they wanted to make a print edition so there's an editor at at crown named Julian Padilla and he he was like whom I want to make a print version of this book I like it but I wanna I wanna I want an opinion from someone outside the company and so he talked to a colleague of his name David Fugate and David's a literary agent he said David I want you to take a look at this and tell me whether you think this is something that is publishable I want external opinion David read it and said like yes I think it's publishable then he came to me and said like do you need an agent I'm like yes he's like okay and he turns around of Julian let's talk about how much you're gonna pay for this Wow but Julian knew that was again I mean part of the reason Julian talked to David was he goes like this guy's going to need an agent you know it's it's such a great it's such a great story for being able just to do something and then you have any personal risk like without any personal financial risk it's not a vanity press or anything right oh and then that's same week that we closed on the book deal we closed the movie rights deal with Fox so that was a really eventful week right Wow I went it's currently being made into a movie right in fact Ridley Scott they're like filming soon Ridley Scott is directing Matt Damon is starring as Watney Donald Glover as rich Purnell which I'm really excited by because I love that guy or else don't go anywhere well yeah yeah steely-eyed missile man seriously yeah yes are what no I mean I really love like Donal globe yeah me too me too it says the cast sounds great the only thing I worry about is well I'll state this and then I have a question but I worry but they can't fit everything into the book into it even a three-hour movie yeah you think you'd be surprised they see mr. play I've seen the screenplay or I've seen a version of screenplay from a long time ago they're always making changes and so they're gonna send me another one fairly soon for comments and stuff are you gonna get to visit the set they haven't invited me well uh so here's another thing people like to point out so I'm afraid of flying ah so I'm actually like very much afraid of flying and so it's being filmed in Budapest which that's a long way to go by boat that's a long walk yeah and so yeah so I don't know they haven't invited me so I don't have to have that existential crazy yeah right but if they do invite me then I'm gonna have to really think about it so um we've done stuff here untested with commander Chris Hadfield from the International Space Station he wrote a blurb for the back of your book yeah you did that was exciting um and Chris is a friend of ours and I asked him first I asked him how did you like the book he's like I just loved it I mean he was super vigorously enthusiastic about how much he loved it but I texted him and asked him do you have any questions just if I'm talking to Andy and he said wait where is it he said yes is but his wife wants to know what's your next book but we'll get to that at the end okay but he said how did you get the realistic sense of being an astronaut so right does he know any of us no I don't not not time that I wrote the book now I have talked to a lot of them I've gotten like emails and gone back and forth with a number of astronauts I didn't know any at the time it's just I'm a space dork so I've seen like a million documentaries like if it is a documentary that has anything to do with space flight or manned space flight I will watch it but the thing that I find surprising about the way you cover the astronauts and I know that there's lots in the literature of NASA about their evolving understanding of the personality type that makes a good astronaut some of the early Apollo missions were evidence of them not getting that right and yet there is a lot that they keep close to their vest about things that have gone wrong so it's hard to find those stories and you know I've met a lot of space nuts but rarely have I come across someone who clearly loves every aspect from the technology to the engineering to also the psychology and you get deep into the psychology of the entire Ares crew in a way that that I that I find really fascinating so you must all of that's fascinating it's all really exciting to me of course I mean that the people who are doing a manned space flight I mean astronauts are just universally acknowledged as like a cut above like the rest of humanity I mean they're just they're so awesome and you say like what makes a good astronaut right and one thing if you're gonna have a mission that's going to take you know an entire year you know from start to finish you better have six people who work together that's one thing is like I've never liked it well not never liked it but I usually don't like it when I'm watching a movie or reading a book and there's a crew of space crew and they have like these this tension and these like personal issues and stuff like that and I'm like no like astronauts are unbelievably professional right right they do you take the top one-tenth of one percent and then shave off 99 percent of those yeah astronauts right exactly and then just so the things I wanted to do for the crew as shown in the book are first off obviously everybody's extremely good at their technical skills right everybody knows exactly what they're doing right nothing on the ship catches them off guard they don't have to like try to figure they know how everything works and that's the way astronauts were that way through every worst-case possible right number two a very good esprit de corps like they have no personal issues no arguments or problems with each other they don't they don't they don't butt heads on anything they're really they're really professional and very they get along very well and then third a deep and profound confidence in their commander so commander yes I was pretty impressive it's like nobody ever questions what she has to say ever and not not because they're afraid of her but just because they respect her that much and that's and they have complete faith in her and you need that in it you know in a crew of anything from a fishing boat to a spacecraft I mean so you had you had posited the crew and posited Watney and the book is I guess four or five chapters you spend in the first person and then we cut to a third person perspective yeah did you know that you were going to do that narrative Lee or did you come to that like I want to talk about what's happening on earth how NASA would respond to such a thing exactly well my original plan was as I started I didn't really have a full like outline or layout when I started my plan was just he's gonna we're going to see his log entries from the start all the way to the end like and it's just going to be everything from his point of view right but then I realized it's getting progressively less and less likely that NASA wouldn't notice right I mean and I'm like they have to notice and this is that's interesting like that's something that's cool right is watching like an entire like space complex go like right yeah yeah when they see sort of moving things have changed and so I realized that it's not like they just be sitting around doing nothing even if they couldn't communicate with them they'd be like can we send a probe with supplies can we can we send a radio can we do anything to help this guy and so even down to some of the institutional mechanics of managers making safe decisions versus dangerous decisions right they have to juggle the safety of the remaining of the five crew that are on their way back from Earth right you know they have to compare that any risks that are going to take with them versus the risks they want to take to help Watney I'm sure that you read you've read fineman's analysis of the space shuttle yeah yeah I mean just in terms of him talking specifically about the difference between the way the engineers look at risk and the way the managers of the engineers look at risk right well in that the the kind of like red alert status of this problem gets diminished over time with every level up and management you go that was his main conclusion right right yes yeah engineers are like this is a big problem their managers like this is a problem and then those managers are like we may have a problem and then those guys are like there are some problems but yeah one of my favorite bits in the book regarding watney's emerging like damn the torpedoes I can take kind of anything is when he's on his way to skipper alley and he just starts naming stuff after himself yeah because why the hell why not yeah Ed's dead again I wanted to know is like as you're writing this you just you're putting yourself into watney's head and you're just thinking yeah what would I do right yeah well a funny story about that when I went down to JPL earlier this month and gave a talk there and they that was awesome it was like one of the most awesome days of my life it's just like getting to take a tour of the place like the the you know spacecraft Assembly Rooms and like look at their mission control room and we sit at the seats and take pictures and it was awesome but after after my talk you know people came up and talked to me a bit and one of them was a guy who works in the kind of the graphics department and JPL has like a graphics department stuff like that and they'll they'll you know if they're going to have a meeting about something like oh we're gonna have a meeting and we're going to talk about what we're going to do with curiosity tomorrow right and it's like a high-level meeting it's not for the engineers it's for the managers saying like okay here's the map of the area and here's where curiosity's gonna go and they have some software that they use to like show a map of like a region of Mars or whatever and an emotion trace and stuff like that and so he made a map of Mark watney's movements all using using that software and he gave it to me ah and also like he you know the map points things out of like whether what they're calling with are you and he denoted like the Watney triangle yes so like that and that that I thought was awesome another thing was the in the book there's a Watney invents a physical unit called a pirate ninja which is my son and I bonded over how much we love pirate news as a shorthand for kilowatts per did use kilowatt kilowatt hours per sol kilowatt o which is if you if you do the unit analysis on it is actually just a power write it you could just say what's right but but kilowatt hours per soul is poignant because it's like how many can you generate how much does he use and there's day night and they said like we the the I had lunch when I was there I had dinner with a bunch of the Curiosity guys yeah and they said like we use that all that we need to know that all the time it's just for them it's watt hours per soul right that's like watt hours per Sol watt hours for Sol so they're like they're they're just saying like we should call that like a mill appear at Newton that is awesome yeah you know I I found the the first-person stuff on Mars super exciting and involving and when we bumped a third person I remember going oh oh like what Nair why haven't read a book where we do this and then realizing what NASA and then the world following NASA would be doing you know spending billions of dollars to rescue one guy why would you do it and you talk about that in the book but I found that that whole aspect super moving in fact most of the stuff I found arresting and emotional to read was the way earth would be responding to watney's ordeal yeah and I think I mean I did that on purpose and the reason why your my intended reason why you feel that way is because it puts you you you more empathize with the people who are watching helplessly like because that's what you're doing as the reader when you're going through watney's segments you're you're helpless you can't help him right but now you when you when you're reading the parts that take place on earth you feel like oh well these I'm one of these people yeah I'm one of the people who's like gathered up in Times Square or watching the things play out and it took so you can really feel like you're part of it yeah okay so you write this book it gets published it's doing really really well you must have let's go back to the first time a NASA engineer writes to you it's probably before the book is published right huh so somebody who worked first time that sort of came across the book yeah I mean I had people who are like engineers scientists and people who worked for NASA or JPL would send me email with a you know either critiques or like hey this is or just like hey good job yeah the ones that I really liked are the ones where they sent like hey you got the math wrong yeah because then I feel really good about it because it's been like double checked right right right by the best source yeah um then so go home there's one there's one seen early on in the book where he's reducing hydrazine yeah and so he loved this so he's reducing hydrazine to liberate the hydrogen and then he's burning the hydrogen with oxygen to turn it into water this does not go as smoothly as he'd like but that's putting it mom he does end up reducing a certain amount of hydrazine and turning it into water over a certain period of time and I got an email from a chemist saying like okay you did this much hygiene you used tell me how much hydrazine he changed how much water he made which is Stoke it is correct right right and he said like but you have also in the past told me the atmospheric pressure of the hab and the general dimensions of the hab from which I can calculate the volume yeah and he's like and you told me how long it took him to reduce all this hydrazine so I know how much it's extremely exothermic to do that reaction and from that I can calculate basically he had enough information to calculate the temperature increase in the hab that would happen as a result of him doing it over the time right that's fine he said like you'd go up like 400 kelvins so he would have died you would have like roasted himself alive and I'm like I didn't find out about that until like after it was already in print so I'm like well I can't fix it there they're a million ways I could have fixed that right like I could say he doesn't slow or overtime he he brings he could just bring boulders in from outside and they're just holding yeah right but there are a lot of solutions but I thought like I like this guy he he likes sat down did the he's just like you yeah yes okay so then the book does really well and you start getting calls from I guess you start moving up through the hierarchy to right you get calls from managers and other people at NASA and then astronauts yeah have have any of those interactions caused you to want to go back and change things that you had originally put in no um no really not so oh so 99.999% of the interactions I have with them is just positive feedback yeah and I think they're used to reading like hand-wavy silly sci-fi so just something that takes it seriously at all to them gets an immediate plus 50 points Hadfield was totally I mean that was the thing he found the most exciting he's said to me I ran into him in Sydney Australia a few months ago and he said I want to find out who his source was at NASA because he knows things that are really hard to learn I guess I that would just be a combination of luck and watching a million documentary but yeah so tell me about it tell me about the first interaction with an astronaut that must have been exciting um so I guess actually the first interaction I had with an astronaut I wish I could remember his name he was a Space Shuttle astronaut I was really excited at the time and though I forgotten his name but he was like oh hey I was facial and he said like oh I really liked your book and stuff but just so you know you can actually bake the co2 out of lithium hydroxide canisters just by heating it up I'm like I didn't know that so Marc like theoretically there's this whole part where he has to bring the oxygenator with him on this long trip and stuff like that and I'm like if I'd known he could just bake the co2 out that would have been much simpler Wow yeah and he's like but the books good I like yeah but that was cool one of the earliest feedbacks I got was from commander Hadfield because they they had sent out a advance copy in a RC to lots of people and Hadfield came back with a poll quote right away that's cool that was so awesome an air that but that was exciting but remember for me and my dad's bookshelf the most exciting poll quote for me no no no disrespect to Chris Hadfield I mean now I was really over the moon about that but was I I got one from Larry Niven Wow that was cool wow that was call my dad and like as soon as I saw that email I'm like yeah that was exciting I can imagine um is anything that you're now that you are conversing with the very engineers who you've been you know representing in the book do you have other ideas for another space themed book I have so I have I have ideas for a for another hard science fiction book but the problem is I have a really good setting but I don't have a really good story for it and I pitched it I had a story and I pitched it and the publishers like mmm what else you got so it's not at which which is good it makes me feel good to know that they're not just going to rubber stamp it right so it has to actually be something they think is good I just I worry about that because one of the other things I love about the book is that you repeatedly show the math and I tell this to people like he shows the map and it's still narrative ly excited I don't know how that works because any editor I would imagine would be like you've got to take that section out of all that math oh that they loved that they didn't have a problem with that um I guess I'm wrong yeah well no not these editors I guess yeah they liked it although bear in mind like I had written a whole book before they'd seen it right so the editing process was pretty smooth it was not a lot of changes at all mostly things like oh hey here you have a scene that takes place back on earth of the NASA guys and they're all talking but you never tell me where you know you never tell me are they in a meeting room are they on the phone are they at a restaurant or they at somebody's house right it's like so give me a paragraph up here to set the setting because I was always like too eager to get into the scene okay so I have a theory and I don't think you I don't think you can probably confirm this theory but I like it so I'm going to state it anyway okay Ferran they're making a movie out of this I don't think they're gonna make them an r-rated movie out of this even though watney's language would make the movie a hard-r they're not going to make it a hard arm I'm gonna make a pg-13 that's what they're shooting for okay so if it's pg-13 they get one f-bomb yep I have a theory about where it is you're right first line I don't know if it's the first one but it's it's it's at the very beginning yeah you mentioned you use venture like you get one F word we're using in the first 30 seconds yeah that's great I'm glad to know because they belongs there like that yeah his language alone would push it into our territory but that's okay they're just gonna soften it up a little bit well and and and it really it that's one of the things that also feels genuinely real about it is that when you understand watney's want these particular character quirks that make him the ideal member of the crew to go through this ordeal on a whole host of levels did you um did you try any of stuff like this like did you try growing potatoes or eating them for a bunch of days no no I didn't although what's funny is there is a there's a YouTube video online out there RC Bray who did the audio book is the narrator of the audio but who's doesn't one does a wonderful excellent job we talked about it on our podcast he's a great voice actor he he he there's a video of him like just trying to eat just raw potatoes like he's just like this is just like I'm getting into character and some things I got a disgusting have you have you had a there must be all sorts of different fan interactions about this people cosplaying perhaps or nothing to that level you know that nothing is there I see I get the occasional like fan art people will draw pictures people make videos with like cool CGI like versions of like the have and stuff have they done mission patches I haven't seen an Ares mission patch now really no not yet yet on that well I I mentioned the studio Fox will make I'm sure yeah was there a point in which you're writing these you know as you're thinking through the exercise of what could go wrong and how would you fix it and then what could go wrong and how would you fix it were there points where you went to a dead end where you went down a path that was just too difficult to fix yeah backtrack yes it actually happened set a few times I was like oh let's here's another thing that could happen and then I'm like if that happens how did you get at it because I never started with the solution and work back to the problem I would always start with the problem right and say okay how does he solve it and I wanted each problem to be to come from the solutions to the previous problem the whole book I wanted to be kind of a cascade failure I don't want to just to get keep to keep getting struck by lightning just like oh can you believe it's luck Oh right each thing kind of I wanted to lead to the next at one point I considered when he's on his long drive - skipper le yeah I thought like what if the RTG develops a problem what if it leaks or something like that and he has to live without it and so I throws it away and he has to drive away without it there's just no way you survive that's really you are dead now that you're dead you you need you will either freeze to death or just not have enough power to make it to your destination in time so one of the problems I found most surprising in watney's execution of the solution was the dust storm hmm mostly it was there's a problem coming I now understand what the problem is I'm exhausted it's been however many hundreds of days on Mars so far and yet even despite the exhaustion it was so astronaut like him to leave the monitors of the atmosphere 80 kilometers apart to be able to determine which direction the storm is moving in that is the kind of solution then only an a deeply inculcated astronaut of like this is only one solute only one way to figure this out and it's going to take me three days of staying in the same place that was shocking to me right because the whole point is like forward progress forward progress and I was like god yes yeah he has to backtrack four days in order to figure out which whether or not he's making the right forward progress that's I mean are there is there a history of a certain mission from NASA that helped really inspire or guide your thinking obviously Apollo 13 right right so Apollo 13 is like my favorite scene in Apollo 13 is when they're making the the co2 scrubber adapter yes basically the mailbox yeah it was called right that's like one of my favorite scenes of any kind in cinematic history and so I like to yeah I'm like so basically I wanted to make a whole book of that yeah that's what I was going for ah as for other NASA missions there were there were a lot of them there were not not just NASA but also the Soviet space agency they had a lot of missions where like wow they almost all died do you have an example of yeah this thing stands out yeah Jim and I I want to say eight I might be wrong but there is Gemini where it was Neil Armstrong was the pilot and I don't know who the other guy was but it'll be somebody famous like yeah it'll be one of the is they one of the Gemini astronauts but they had basically one of their attitude thrusters turned on and Glock Don and it's just like and so the ship just started spinning and spinning and spinning and so they're they're in this wild spin and it just keeps getting worse you it's like Armstrong was a pilot and he he couldn't zero it out because whenever he tried to fight it he like you know did this malfunctioning thruster would keep screwing with it so it's not like he was in a bad spin and just had to zero it out it was like it's actively fighting him man and so he jettisoned the basically there they were attached they were the purpose of the mission was to attach to this other unmanned module and detach and reattach and just test docking and so he ditched that and that dumped a lot of his rotational inertia and then he managed to zero it out and get it so that the ship is just spinning on one axis just to spin on one axis just keep going like that and so he's like this like this we can control right we can if we're going to spin wildly out of control we're going to spend we're going to spin wildly in control and and so he got that to zero out and they were able to get in to basically get do reentry and when they detach from that that's where the bad thruster was was the was the other model was the other module so that the catch from and it's just like a lesser astronaut you know the Neil Armstrong they would have died like they would have just been dead and that was just like one of a I think that's probably the closest that we came to losing someone in space until until 13 more until Apollo 13 yeah would have been closer yeah are you to learn that stories there is there an account are you reading the actual transcripts of the I saw that in a documentary okay and yeah another one my just talking about like what astronauts are made of I love to tell the story of so John W young right John Young yeah he was a Gemini astronaut and an Apollo astronaut he the commander of Apollo 16 and he was the first space shuttle commander like this guys using whole eras astronaut okay he's got a lot of interesting stories to him but my favorite is Apollo 16 when they're launching you know they have bio monitors on and they monitor you know everybody's heart rate and everything breathing rate heart rate blood pressure everything of course during the launches everybody's heart rate spikes right so you go like Apollo 11 when it was launching Armstrong Aldrin Connors there there a Collins like their their heart rates like spiked up to 140 150 you know normal resting heart rates like 60 70 right John Young's on the Apollo 16 launch never got above 70 so it's like what your heart rate is right now that's what he was pulling what six genes just like launching on top of a rocket so the guy is just he also had another great expression where he's my favorite astronaut by the way he had this great expression where they were talking about stage one failure for the Space Shuttle when they were launching cambia the 1st SS STS 1 right yeah and they they said like oh here all the different things you do during an abort if there's a problem here then you glide back here if there's problem here you do this well there's like a stage 1 failure is like when it's like it something goes wrong right away just almost immediately as they're weak leaving the tower and then the idea is get enough altitude that the orbital can glide back to safety and John young like looked at that and said like none of these things will work like if this happens we're just going to die like we're not going to get up we're just going to die and so and there's all these procedures and stuff that you should be doing and he just classified them all as things to keep busy while waiting to die but how about the Russian space program because I mean we're we have lots of information the us about our own space right well they had they had like series failures right they had they had I think it was so yeah no pulse tucks I forgot I forgot the name of it but one of their missions had a malfunctioning valve that basically let all the air out before it should have and so the astronauts are inside not wearing spacesuits because they could they could fit two suited astronauts or three unsuited astronauts and their ship and it this valve popped in and let the air out and they all just died in s fixation you're gathering together this information is it all in here are you using programmer Oh said what's your organizational philosophy for gathering this to be able to utilize well the cool anecdotes like I was just saying that's just up here because that's cool all the math and saying so I I had files and spreadsheets and so like I know like like I mentioned I know like what the date was right on Mars and Earth and everything so you'll notice that at various times when they're talking to Mars there's like the transmission delay well that's all accurate right to where Mars and Earth are so I had to know look what date oh the transmission delay changes depending on where Martha's Mars and Earth are in relation cuz we could be very close together or we can be like very far apart and what that's difference between what like 14 minutes and 20 minutes ah I think I can do I think it can be as high as like 22 minutes and as low as like 5 Wow I don't know maybe maybe 5 is what if they're both if you're perfectly lined up at the closest point I'm not sure what it is but it's some single-digit number of minutes so has NASA asked for your help no no no I really feel like they should we need a science fiction out there well I thought you know yeah I know that they at certain points the government contracts people who are creative to help posit worst-case scenarios that their engineers might not ever consider be ideal for such a mission I would certainly enjoy such a mission but I find it hard to believe that I would come up with anything the NASA engineers didn't I'm also curious about your book the accuracy in your book is such a key point that that is so clear what did you think of gravity well okay so I'm sure there isn't any more it has so first off I thought it was cinematically beautiful like it was just stunningly beautiful and I've heard from astronauts that that really is what things look like that and and yeah and so that I really enjoyed it for the art artistry and stuff like that and yeah there are a bunch of there are a bunch of like problems urinal mechanics orbital mechanics problems you know it's like the Hubble ISS a Space Shuttle a Chinese Space Station are all like right next to each other also the protagonist seeking debris field right it could it comes around and destroys like the shuttle then she goes ISS and it comes around destroys ISS why didn't it destroy us s the first time right okay then she goes to the Chinese space station then it's coming after again and also if something's going really really fast then with respect to you then it's not in the same orbit right even if you're both going this way if it's going this way and it's going so much faster than you then it's going to be in a different orbit with a different period ah oh right right yeah so but did that inhibit your enjoyment or were you able to just kind of like I can I can let it go I can let it go and I didn't have a problem with any of that I thought the movie was cool and I enjoyed it but yeah it's not physically accurate but you know what I also liked the Avengers you know nothing I wanted it again last night just because and you know you know the Bifrost is you know fasting light travel you can't do that I'm not I'm not complaining I like Star Trek - absolutely absolutely are you are you writing another book right now I am I am I'm working on my next book it's called check zhe kz h EK it's a working title and it's more of a traditional sci-fi so it's not the rigidly scientifically accurate it's more soft science fiction yeah like aliens and stuff like that going on I can't wait to read it any well thank you so much for coming onto the talking room thanks for having me appreciate the visit and this is an amazing book and we've been saying it for weeks untested go read it and thank us later what he said Oh CK Dexter Haven

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 546,697

Keywords: Adam Savage (TV Producer), adam savage, MythBusters (TV Program), tested, testedcom, andy weir, author, the martian, interview, ridley scott, matt damon, science fiction, film, nasa, space, Literature (Media Genre), Books

Id: 5SemyzKgaUU

Length: 55min 18sec (3318 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2015