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I. THE HERMES
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AUDIO LOG ENTRY: MISSION DAY 698
[MARK] So it turns out that after months of talking to myself for hours on end, I kinda miss the sound of my own voice! Actually, I'm not sure what they'll be doing with these logs. Release them wholesale? Edit the more colorful swearing out of them? Just put 'em in a room somewhere for PhD students to listen to fifty years from now? I know there's a couple of bad days I wouldn't like my mom listening to, but anyway … uh, so here we are on the joyous Hermes, and it's weird as balls being here again. Having people around, too. Uncanny. I freak out every time someone says my name. Beck walked up on me yesterday—poor guy is trying to get me to eat solids again—and I knocked the tray clear out of his hands.
[MARK cont.] I'm very wary of doors. Doors are omens of doom. Hab doors opening on their own meant I was going to die really quickly. Red means stop, green means go. Of course, on the Hermes we don't use the built-in airlocks, except when we're depressurizing. So: no red. No green! How am I supposed to know I'm not going to suffocate if the little lights don't turn green!
[MARK cont.] Anyway. The food is alright, although right now it's not really 'food' so much as a lot of liquids and nutrients and vitamins. Most of that is intravenous, which sucks, by the way. According to Mama Beck, I am severely undernourished, which, no shit, you try eating a diet of potato for breakfast, potato for lunch, and, wait for it, potato for dinner, and not being slightly skinnier than you used to be in your youthful and pre-Martian days. I guess I got used to the bruises. They all looked pretty shocked. I'd kill for a burger. Maybe if I'm very good I could get the NASA guys to swing by a McDonalds before they lock me up in a hospital for a few decades.
[MARK cont.] I look old. I wasn't expecting that. I look old. The guys all look the same. Well, Beck has a glow, and I'm pretty sure Vogel managed to put on a couple of pounds somehow, but none of them have got gray in their hair—
[pause]
[MARK cont.] Anyway. Apparently I get to talk to my parents tomorrow, which'll be a doozy. It's not everyday you bury your son and then he pops back up out of the blue. Dad's going to cry, and then mom is going to cry, and then I am going to cry, and everyone is going to tiptoe awkwardly around me for a few hours before they remember how much they like taking the piss. So that'll be fun.
[MARK cont.] Meanwhile, here I am in the medical deck, puttering around. I don't have no duties. There's nothing for me to do, which is, honestly, rather alarming. I've alphabetized all of Beck's medical records and blood and urine samples. That's how bored I am.
[MARK cont.] Now that I mention it, it's really pretty creepy for a dude to keep blood and urine samples of his girlfriend close at hand where he's working, right? That's not just me?
[door opens]
[MARTINEZ] Hey, buddy. You okay?
[MARK] Sure.
[MARTINEZ] Headed to the deck. You wanna join?
[MARK] Depends, man. What's in it for me?
[MARTINEZ] Well, I got a copy of BABY ZOMBIE OCTOPI: THE UNDERWATER RECKONING and a bag of that dehydrated popcorn and butter thing. Also beer. Well, kinda beer. It's not beer. It sorta tastes like root beer. Or maybe just a root canal, can't be sure.
[MARK] You clear that with the doctor yet?
[MARTINEZ] Ehhh, chances of vomiting half of it are in the low 8%.
[MARK] The sweet-talk comes out! Yeah, alright.
[END RECORDING]
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TEN THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP BRING MARK WATNEY HOME
First, go look at this adorable kitten dressed in a spacesuit.
Second (feeling better?): yes, Mark Watney has been rescued—alive—from his solitary confinement on the Red Planet, and yes, he appears to be in (arguably) good health. Yes, the flyover above the Ares IV landing mission site went over smoothly, the entire crew of the Hermes is currently safe and sound, and yes, they are, as of right now, on their way back home. But the trip isn't over. They still have over 200 million km to go before they reach us. And everything can go wrong—engine failure, computer failure, depressurization, loss of air—in the meantime. We're all familiar with the feeling of helplessness tied to sitting here while the rescue was going on millions of kilometers away IN SPACE, but we can still help them get home safe. Here are ten ways you can help the Ares crew, despite the distance. (And the SPACE.)
ONE: DONATE TO NASA. NASA may have gotten funding from private and public entities lately, but they still need all the money they can get to finish landing gear preparations and make sure the crew is given the appropriate care they'll require after nearly seven hundred days in space. Not to mention, you'll help fund future Ares missions and make sure an incident like the one that left Mark Watney stranded won't happen again. One dollar can make all the difference.
TWO: Go on the #BringHimHome YouTube channel and upload a video of your own. These little messages of hope are selected by NASA personnel and sent on to the Ares 3 crew to boost up their morale during their long journey home. Record your encouragements, advice, and/or bad jokes and NASA will make sure Mark gets to read them.
THREE: Donate to nutrition and physical therapy research. Because Mark Watney was forced to survive on a regimen of potatoes, potatoes, and more potatoes, he is now in a state of severe malnutrition. Reports indicate he has to be fed nutrients and vitamins intravenously on a daily basis. His body is also in constant danger of organ failure and brain damage. Dr. Chris Beck monitors his vitals closely with the help of specialists back on Earth to ensure his continued survival and well-being. Donating will create better opportunities for researchers to understand how best to nurse him back to health.
FOUR: Sign online petitions. Campaigns like …
READ THE REST AT BUZZFEED.COM
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II. EARTH
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LOG ENTRY: EARTH 69
Life is still pretty boring.
They did lock me up in the hospital for a month and a half, thank you very much, but after a lot of begging they've finally let me have a laptop. Apparently it's important that I keep recording my reactions and responses to dynamic day-to-day interpersonal relationships, yadda yadda, which somehow you'd think they should have realized before they put me in a nice white room all my own and only let people visit for about an hour every day. I swore up and down Beck hooked me up with the good stuff on the trip home, and by the time we'd landed I was already doing a fair amount of physio in the Hermes workout facilities, but the good doctors just wouldn't believe me.
Sigh.
Anyway.
It turns out people have been talking about me a lot. I've been catching up. It's not all positive, which I knew. NASA tried very hard to hide it from me—they've been extra careful about screening out all the criticism that could send their Martian into a depressive spiral, which is nice of them, but. Hey. I'm not stupid. I know they spent a lot of money on saving my ass—the kind of money that was probably taken out of other, more valuable, programs. Even the Ares IV mission will have to be delayed, by years, because, wait for it: I've hijacked their MAV!
So, needless to say, some people out there aren't too happy about my continued survival.
Apparently there was a little while right around the time the first probe NASA sent failed mid-launch when #LEAVEHIMBEHIND was trending alongside #BRINGHIMHOME, and—yeah, a whole four million people signed a change.org petition to get the President to issue a law against rescuing me. Ow, my poor, damaged self-esteem.
I can't even blame them. Maybe I've turned into a responsible adult at some point.
Today I thought as much for two whole hours before I was told that about a week from now I get to go to the White House, where President Hodge will present me with—wait for it—the Congressional Space Medal of Honor on behalf of Congress and NASA and, like, the entirety of the United States government, apparently.
I've just pulled up the Wikipedia page.
Feats of extraordinary accomplishment. First recipient: Neil motherfucking Armstrong.
Hah! Take that, suckers.
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INTERVIEWER: Hello.
ALEX VOGEL: Hello.
BETH JOHANSSEN: Hi.
CHRIS BECK: Yeah, hi.
RICK MARTINEZ: 'sup?
MELISSA LEWIS: Hello.
INTERVIEWER: So—just to get this out of the way—no Watney today?
M.L.: No, Mark is in the hospital. He has a daily appointment for check-up and physical rehabilitation.
R.M.: Yeah, he hates it. 'I had to suffer under Beck's mother-hen act all the way home and you're telling me I gotta do it some more?'
INTERVIEWER: Okay, that's fine. We knew it was only a possibility. It's great we got you guys onboard anyway. [long pause] So, uh—I assume he knows about your decision to turn the Hermes around against NASA instructions—
B.J.: Wow, getting into the deep stuff right out of the park, aren't you?
M.L.: Yes, of course he knows. We told him immediately.
C.B.: And carefully.
INTERVIEWER: What was his reaction?
A.V.: He was not pleased.
R.M.: Pissed as hell.
B.J.: And then he said, "Hey, does that mean we're all space pirates?"
R.M.: Which, gotta say, is pretty cool.
INTERVIEWER: So how'd the trip back go?
A.V.: Slowly.
INTERVIEWER: We heard there were issues with the cooling vanes—
M.L.: There were. We fixed them.
INTERVIEWER: How does that feel like, that kind of vulnerability?
R.M.: Careful, man, she's gonna tell you the submarine story all over again.
B.J.: Obviously it was pretty awful. We'd gotten used to awful by then, though.
INTERVIEWER: How so?
C.B.: Well, you know, for one thing, we'd just left a teammate behind. On a different planet.
INTERVIEWER: Was that something that you all struggled to face, on a day-to-day basis?
R.M.: What the hell do you think?
M.L.: I think I speak for the entire crew when I say that Mark's loss was deeply felt by all of us. We all experienced a great amount of guilt and horror during those long months before we found out he was alive after all.
B.J.: Commander—
INTERVIEWER: Is that why you all unanimously decided to go back for him? How did that decision come about?
A.V.: It was no real struggle. No choice.
INTERVIEWER: There weren't any issues within the crew itself? Did you put it to a vote?
B.J.: If we'd had to put it to a vote, no one would have gone at all.
C.B.: Yeah, we were all pretty clear on going.
INTERVIEWER: You all knew you were going against explicit orders by NASA, though.
R.M.: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: That meant possibly court-martial—
M.L.: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: —and your chances of going back to space were significantly lessened.
C.B.: I mean, space is great, and all, but I for one am looking forward to some sweet times back on Earth.
R.M.: I bet you are, boyo.
[pause]
INTERVIEWER: And we heard some rumors about an interpersonal relationship between two members of the crew—?
M.L.: Are you serious?
A.V.: That is highly personal.
INTERVIEWER: I'm sorry. I was told to ask.
C.B.: Yeah, sorry, but that's none of your business.
INTERVIEWER: Surely that kind of thing would be a hindrance within the scope of a spatial mission. Emotional responses in an environment that requires logical and detached thought—I mean, you wouldn't leave your girlfriend behind on Mars—
M.L.: If this were a regular spatial mission, regular parameters would apply. As it stands, a relationship between two members of the crew within the scope of an extended and highly dangerous rescue mission would have been the least of our problems. You can rest assured the entirety of the ARES crew remained wholly professional throughout the course of our trip, and whatever emotional responses were expressed in that environment were in no way a hindrance to Watney's rescue or to our all coming home safe and sound.
R.M.: And, like, if you're worried about emotional responses, wait till you see Johanssen beat Vogel's ass at Grand Theft Auto.
C.B.: Oh, yeah. We got that on camera, right?
A.V.: [dramatic groan]
R.M.: And many a lonely space evening became truly magical.
INTERVIEWER: Alright, let's move on. A couple of weeks ago, one of you posted a picture of Mark Watney sitting at the control panel of the Hermes to the official Ares 3 crew twitter—that picture has been retweeted over two million times—
C.B.: Oh, yeah, that was me.
INTERVIEWER: A lot of people have been wondering why he was sitting there. As a botanist—
R.M. I was teachin' him how to drive.
[pause]
INTERVIEWER: You were … teaching Mark Watney how to drive the ship? The expensive, one-of-a-kind spaceship that kept you all alive? The one monitored by a state-of-the-art autopilot?
R.M.: Yeah.
[pause]
INTERVIEWER: Is there any truth to the rumor that claims Watney was the one who performed the landing back on Earth?
C.B.: Nope.
A.V.: Nein.
B.J.: No.
M.L.: None whatever.
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to: Johanssen
soooo … would you have eaten beck, if it came down to it?
to: Johanssen
on second thought, don't answer that.
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Tonight on the Late Show: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mark Watney, and NASA director Teddy Sanders tell Antony Nieves about Mars, potato survival, and the future of space exploration … — 11:35 pm on CBS
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AUDIO LOG ENTRY: EARTH 283
[MARK] They're callin' me a survivor. You know? Mark Watney, survived Mars. I'm pretty sure that's the first line in my Wikipedia entry.
Did I? Did I? Am I still back there, day-dreaming all this shit? All those hours I spent thinking about coming home, back in the Hab. In the rover. Maybe I'm hallucinating the whole thing. Earth. Maybe I hallucinated telling that nurse about the night sweats and pain cramps last week. Maybe I hallucinated the doctor who very kindly told me my chances of dying of stroke were up by 45% now. Maybe I'm hallucinating this whole fucking recording! What the hell do I know!
Maybe I am back there, on Mars, with that antenna still sticking through my upper abdomen, and this is just—the last minutes of my life stretching themselves out thin and spinning a nice little bedtime story for my brain to believe before my last neural cells blink out. Mark Watney, hero. Mark Watney, survivor. Mark Watney, somehow managed the impossible and survived for two years in a Habitat meant for thirty days, on a planet pretty much designed to kill him in a half-second.
Mark Watney, botanist extraordinaire, grew potatoes on Mars.
Right.
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 37%.
[pause]
[MARK cont.] Man, I'm a depressive dickhead today.
[END RECORDING]
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FACULTY PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: "Reexamining the Flexibility and Versatility Of Objects and Near-Liquids in Motion Under 2G Gravity"
By Dr. Christopher Beck, in collaboration with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, April 2040.
Christopher Beck graduated cum laude from the Yale School of Medicine and is a NASA alumni. He was the recipient of the Norma Bailey Berniker Prize, the Air Force Commendation Medal, and the 2039 NSBRI Pioneer Award. He is, however, best known for his role as flight surgeon in the Ares 3 mission to Mars in 2035.
researchgate.net/publication/297867867_Reexamining_the_Flexibility_and_Versability_of_Objects_and_Near-Liquids_in_Motion_Under_2G_Gravity
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from: Mark
you wrote a book about your sex life, you big nerd
from: Mark
neeeeeeerd
from: Mark
you didn't have sex on my bunk, though, right?
from: Mark
dude. i was DEAD
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MEET THE COMMANDER: MELISSA LEWIS ON MARS, WATNEY, AND LEAVING A MARK
To this day, Cdr. Melissa Lewis's name is perhaps best known for the two decisions she made during the Ares III Mars Mission. The first was her choice, in November 2035, to leave behind a presumably fallen teammate who would later turn out to have survived—a choice she was subsequently commended for, as indicating strong leadership quality and a will to save and preserve the rest of her team. The second was her decision, less than a year later, to employ the now-infamous Rich Purnell maneuver to return for Mark Watney in spite of NASA's direct instructions. When she presented the plan to her crew (pilot Rick Martinez, computer engineer Beth Johanssen, flight surgeon Chris Beck, and astrophysicist Alex Vogel), Lewis was well aware that she was risking her life and career to rescue a single man on the off-chance that a recluse statistician's hunch about orbit trajectories would not be incorrect. She was also aware that she was committing mutiny.
After this trip, she would never return to space.
Melissa Lewis was the first woman ever to man a mission to Mars. Her degree in oceanology, her military background in the Navy, and her participation in the Submarine Arctic Science Program made her uniquely prepared to take on the responsibilities and unique requirements this mission would entail. Talented, fearless, and smarter than everybody else in the room, Lewis's no-nonsense approach to leadership immediately endeared her to those who would become her loyal and unfailing crew. This may be why, when she put the Rich Purnell maneuver up to a vote on the Hermes in late 2036, they all, unflinchingly and despite the danger involved, chose to go rescue their stranded comrade.
Returning for Watney meant sabotaging their careers in the most damaging way. Not only did they believe they would thereafter be barred from ever participating in another space mission, going against direct orders could be enough to land them in jail. More importantly, it could get them dead. If they missed the rendezvous with the Taiyang Shen, which would refurnish their fuel and food supplies, they would die. If any directive on the Rich Purnell maneuver was miscalculated along the way, they would die. If they missed the intercept with the Ares IV MAV above the Martian surface, Mark Watney would die, and would be left to float about in space, a slowly disintegrating corpse in a space suit.
And yet not a single man (or woman) on board the Hermes that day hesitated before agreeing.
We were lucky enough to obtain an interview with the infamously-private Commander in her hometown in Missoula, Minnesota…
READ MORE AT VOGUE.COM
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LOG ENTRY: EARTH 589
I miss Mars. Is that weird? It's probably weird.
I mean, Mars nearly killed me. It tried its goddamn best. I survived by the skin of my teeth (or, well: by the skin of my potatoes, which is, by the way, where all the nutrients are, but also pretty damn disgusting once you hit the 100th mark and you've run out of salt. You never think of rationing the salt. Earthling kids: salt is a miracle and ought to be be worshipped. Always pack salt).
But I still miss it, and I'm not sure why. I was bored a lot. I also nearly died a lot, which made up for the monotony. I don't get many explosions anymore, unless you count the ones happening in my lower intestine, which still kicks up a fuss sometimes at four-thirty in the morning. You get used to explosions.
I like teaching. I like that I can pick up the phone and call my mom. I like that Martinez drops by with beer sometimes and that Vogel always makes sure to send a New Year's card with a picture of all his kids, which seem to multiply every time I get to see them. I like the look on my students' faces when they come to class—first they go, 'wow, that is Mark Watney, space pirate and survivor on the Red Planet'—really, that is a thing that I have heard, I'm not making this up—'I must do my best to honor his wise teachings'.
And then they go: 'did he just make a Your Mama joke?'
(I did. I'm not sorry.)
But I think I miss my sunsets.
.
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sunuvarick | 17:48
… unpopular opinion: i don't think we should have any more ares missions
like what's the point? ares iv never made it past halfway point and ares iii a) was a bust, scientifically, and b) cost the earth an easy couple billion dollars just to rescue one dude who's probably gonna die of radiation or some shit in a decade or two
so they found water in '15, big deal? they're been scamming us all on '15 for thirty years
it's not like we're ever actually live there? anyway
mark watney isn't even a real scientist, why was he even on that rocket
mrssparklepoo | 17:49
shut the fuck up rick you degenerate dog-arse licker
teddysanderssux | 17:50
@mrssparklepoo l m a o you tell em
tl.d | 17:53
i wouldn't put it as directly as mrssparklepoo, but tbh rick you've just basically proven you don't understand shit about the ares program or really anything about the drive and ambition behind it. so what if we never get to live on mars? we get to visit. we get to be there for a little while and maybe learn more about it, which is all we need to want, frankly. we don't need to pollute it the way we're doing earth right now. but we can study it, respectfully and with the care it deserves. a whole different planet!
in what world does 'botanist' not = 'scientist'? i know the guy likes to make fun of his experience on mars, and yeah he farmed potatoes in his own shit but do you have any idea how fucking terrified he must have been all the time? there have been studies about men who get stranded on their own for any length of time and don't get any human company for years, mark could easily have gone insane or offed himself to save time and instead he got up and got the job done, i don't know if i would have been able to say the same.
and it's not a fucking rocket, do you know anything?
to conclude: go back to whichever markwatneylied dot com forum you've crawled out of & stop posting in a space that's DEDICATED to CELEBRATING the work of the ares crews and scientists, and yes, that includes the ares iv crew, that engine failure wasn't in anyone's plans and they're so so lucky to have all made it back home alive. so you can go and fuck yourself.
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BREAKING : ARES V CREW ANNOUNCED
American and Chinese pilots join forces in far-reaching Martian mission
ARES III ALUM JOINS THE TEAM
Join us live at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, as Director of NASA Teddy Sanders announces ...
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[Caption: a smartphone screenshot. 597 unread messages.]
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from: Johanssen
why
from: Doc
I can't figure out if that's fundamentally insane or just phenomenally stupid.
from: Mad Al
That is a very brave thing you're doing, my friend.
from: Cdr. Lewis
Best of luck, Rick. We'll all be watching.
from: the dick
hey, brother, try not to leave a teammate behind this time
from: the dick
say hi to red from me.
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III. THE FUTURE
ADDRESS TO NASA PERSONNEL AND VIP GUESTS ON OCCASION OF THE JUPITER LANDER #850J571 LAUNCH
by Mark Watney, 20 Jan. 2045
"So, in 1994—
[scattered applause; laughter]
Why are you all laughing? I'm not kidding. I've been given a strict official warning to Not Make Jokes. Teddy Sanders still hasn't forgiven me for that one email all of ten years ago.
[more laughter]
Yeah. But I also really want to talk about 1994, which is when some guys got together and built a thing. I can't tell you what the thing is yet (although, if you're very smart, you've already figured it out), but it's going to be important later, so hang on to that thought.
Anyway.
Hi.
[strong applause]
Hey, hello! If you don't know who I am, I'd say maybe you've been living on a different planet, but these days even that wouldn't save you. I'm Mark Watney. I spent two years on Mars, all on my lonesome, mostly just sitting on my ass, and for some reason people down here liked me enough that they sent my crew back to rescue me. In a way, you know, that was a big coup for NASA. Suddenly, a lot of people cared a hell of a lot more about space, because there was one whole human in it.
(There were other humans in it, but that one human happened to be stuck on Mars with nothing but USB chip after USB chip of nineteen-eighties music to amuse him before he starved to death. Empathy is a beautiful thing.)
Here's a thing about Mars. You think it's silent? Ain't. After the Hab exploded and I had to put it all back together with, of all things, duct tape, I spent most of my nights wrapped up in a blanket, counting potatoes and listening to the dust blow into the tarp I'd set up, waiting for the little rip or hole I most likely hadn't seen to tear open and blow the whole thing—and me—to smithereens. You know, the Hab was pretty cramped when there were six of us in there, but it felt pretty damn huge when it was just me, all day long. The smallest sound gets amplified, three times, four times over. When I was working on the crop I could hear the sanitation engines doin' their job on the far other side of the Hab… and, you know, you're a scientist, you're trained for that kind of shit, you know ghosts don't real. Aliens probably don't, either, at least on Mars, unless they've been disguising themselves as rocks all this time. "Hey, can you believe what that Earth kid did this time? He picked up Carl from the basalt formation over the hill and scraped some sand off of his privates!"
But when you've been there for fourteen months, all that training goes right out the window. Because, hey, big shot botanist, you're also the little kid who read a whole lot of science-fiction when you were twelve, and who knows all about ghost zombies waiting under your bunk to eat your face off. All those aliens with death ray guns just creeping up on your unsuspecting ass.
Ghost stories. They feel a hell of a lot more real when you're all the way up there, let me tell you.
Anyway, I got to come home. That was a nice surprise; I really thought I was gonna die up there. That was nearly ten years ago, by the way, which is really odd when I think about it. And two years or so ago Venkat Kapoor—I assume you all know him, Mr. Time-Magazine-Person-of-the-Year-2044—showed up on my doorstep and said, 'So, just so you know, we're going to be sending another lander out to Jupiter.'
Now, these days I spend most of my time teaching bright-eyed young recruits how to use rover simulators and boil potato until it's edible enough not to vomit at various NASA training centers around the country. I haven't been in proper astronaut-y shape in at least a decade. I've been medically forbidden from ever taking on another space mission, because malnutrition and PTSD and severe organ damage are things that apparently scar a guy for life. So I knew they weren't showing up to send me back up there. And yet the first words out of my mouth were: 'I'm not going to Jupiter, Venk'.
He actually stopped for a minute to consider it. NASA is a beautiful, beautiful place that warps people's brains.
Then he said, 'No, we want you to name the lander,' to which I replied, 'What.'
Hey, can you blame me? I'm the guy who got an official write-up while stuck on Mars because the email I sent back home while stuck on Mars had language that was deemed slightly too strong for the kiddies back here on Earth. After I came home, they seized all my journal logs and very carefully edited out most of the bad stuff—and there was some bad stuff, lemme tell you—before they released them to the public and made a bunch of money off the bestselling success that turned into. And the movie. And the promotional material. And the Halloween sweets. You're welcome.
As an aside, can you believe they cast Lärs Audley to play me? I've always wanted to be played by Lärs Audley. Well, when I was ten I wanted the movie of my life to be played by Matt Damon, but he's getting a little late in years these days. Still think he could have pulled it off, though.
But—yeah. If you're looking for someone to find you a snappy, inspiring, non-stupid name for your probe out to Jupiter, Mark Watney should be at the very bottom of the list, possibly in the footnotes. In font size two point five. I demonstrated this to Venkat.
As I recall, I said: 'Are you fucking crazy?'
'Trust me, I've considered that possibility,' he said, in true Kapoor-ian fashion, 'but we'd really like you to do it. Barring difficulties, we plan on launching on the tenth anniversary of the day the Ares III crew reached the Hermes. Just think about it.'
'Barring difficulties' is probably the most damning phrase any engineer can use, but that afternoon in my living-room Venkat Kapoor said it with a perfectly straight face. He was right, too: it looks like the launch will proceed on due date, no take-backs, which is probably a first in the history of the space program.
So I did what I was asked, for once, and I thought about it.
It feels strange looking back on it now, but there was about a year or so when my face was plastered all over billboards and newssites and in the bottom banner of television screens. Literally everyone in the US knew what my stupid mug looked like, down to the little scars from teenager acne. There were Halloween costumes made after me! Little kids played 'Mark Watney lost in space' in playgrounds, and when they did it wrong they got to asphyxiate or starve to death in new and inventive fashions, which I suspect they liked rather more than the other option. A phone line was created to deal with people who claimed to know how to save my skin with the power of their chakras, or who said they'd seen my ghostly form walking out of their fridge and telling them to repent for their earthly sins. And, coincidentally, there are now whole websites out there dedicated to prrrroooving that this was all a big promotional coup for NASA, I was never actually sent to Mars, and I really spent two years drinking ninety-year-old Austrian armagnac and shooting game in a homestead in Colorado.
I don't know why armagnac, Colorado, or a homestead, but hey. It sounds real nice.
So I went looking for probe names. I looked at all the rockets and launchers and probes and landers and manned and non-manned missions out there, which all were either named after various pantheon gods—by the way, whoever called the Mars exploration program Ares demonstrated a serious lack of imagination but a solid knowledge of the Greek and Roman pantheon, which I guess evens things out—or called things like Voyager and Discovery and Opportunity and Spirit and Explorer and Curiosity. Names that had punch, you know? Names that went jazz.
Tiny humans! Living on a tiny planet, seventy percent of which we can't actually live in unless we all spontaneously grow gills or something, scraping together a form of survival on top of a thin crust separating thousands and thousands of miles of molten rock and lava, and the immensity of space—and still building stuff, and researching stuff, and calling all that building and researching science, and looking up at the huge, terrifying grandeur of space, and making up stories about all the horrors that could eat you in space, and realizing pretty early on that not having air to breathe is also a thing that kills you—and still thinking, 'I want to go there'.
Still thinking, 'I'm going to send a tiny spacecraft up there, and I'm going to call it after the Greek god of light and medicine and music and art. I'm gonna call it Apollo.'
Nerds.
And then I read about that time in 1994 when some guys got together and built a thing.
It was a pretty important thing. They had to prove to NASA that yes, it was possible to send a rover mission to Mars, and yes, it was actually worthwhile sending any kind of mission whatsoever to the Red Planet, which hadn't been successfully done in twenty years. They had three years to rush through development with a budget of about one fifteenth the budget the Viking missions cost. I guess they must really have wanted to science it up up there.
They did it, too. They completed the backshell, the lander, the rover, the transmitter, and the on-board computer in record time, and for just over $150 million, which was laughable even at the time. They landed it on July 4, 1997. The mission was only supposed to last a couple of weeks, if they were lucky—a month, tops—but that tiny little rover creaking around the Martian dust and taking soil samples and pictures and measuring the atmospheric pressure and temperature actually functioned for almost three whole months before they lost the signal. It took over sixteen thousand pictures, mostly of rocks.
And because this was the first of a series of planned missions that would go on to inspire and rejuvenate the entire Mars mission program, they had to find it a really snappy name. Something that would hint at bigger, greater things. Something that would say, 'We know space is huge and horrifying and can pretty much kill us all the time, but we want to go up there. We want that journey. We want to see everything that we can possibly see.'
Something that would say, 'We're small, and the darkness is big, but that just means we gotta send a light up there to see the way.'
So they called it Pathfinder.
And, forty years after it died, it helped me find my own way home.
[pause]
They're making frantic signs at me to cut this short, and I got a long drive home and some people I haven't seen in a long time coming for dinner. Don't worry, guys, I'm not going to go on talking forever. You'd think I'd have gotten sick of my own voice by now, right?
But how's that for ghosts, eh? That was the trick. The real one, I mean. Pathfinder and Johanssen's dorky video games and Rick's little wooden cross and Vogel's cooking books—I know—and the avalanche of crew pictures plastered all over Commander Lewis's laptop and desk. Hell, even Beck's dry-ass medical journals kept me awake during long nights. The traces we leave behind us. Saved my life.
Maybe in a few centuries a Martian, a real one, a third-gen Martian kid who watches the Earth set over the horizon every night—maybe they'll find my Hab, somewhere in the dust, buried, and think it's a really cool archeological dig. Or a temple to an ancient diety. Who knows?
So when they asked me to name the Jupiter lander, I had to think real hard about what I'd want to send off into space. What ghost I'd want up there, telling our story.
And then—because Commander Lewis's tastes in music have yet to stop haunting me—Life On Mars came on the radio, just as I was thinking of the best kinda modern god to go for.
So I called the damn lander Bowie.
Hey. Listen, if anyone was ever a Martian stranded on Earth …"
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[Caption: an amateur photo of the Watney homefarm in Colorado, taken so as to capture the gathering on the front porch. Mark Watney is sitting in a rocking chair, wearing an absolutely dreadful knitted Christmas sweater, cradling a whiskey in one hand. Pilot Rick Martinez is stretched out on his back on the loveseat to his left, his second baby boy in his arms. His wife Laura is talking to Alex Vogel and Commander Lewis on the other side of the porch, next to the drinks table, where Chris Beck is ladling out cucumber salad with his two-year-old grasping at his knees. Beth Johanssen is taking the picture, and therefore invisible, though we can see the tip of her red Converse poking out of the bottom left corner. There are about ten dogs roaming the grounds, and nary a potato in sight.]
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