Date: 3 April 2016
Location: Reynolds & Linda
The Bookers journeyed out into the county for this month’s meeting at the home of Reynolds and Linda. We usually have our December meetings here, and it was nice visiting with them on a beautiful spring day. They fed us a delicious meal of rice and ribs, with a lot of other good stuff brought in by the rest of the group.
Only about eight of us had actually read the book The Martian, but it seems that those who did read it found it very enjoyable. This was especially true for the more technically oriented readers. Some of the others admitted to getting a little bogged down with the technical details in places, but they plowed on without missing the essence of the story.
A few had also seen the movie, which followed the book fairly well, and Linda had set up her laptop to display images from the movie. We also had a special treat in that Reynolds is a real-live (retired) NASA astrodynamicist. He showed us a collection of technical reports which he authored back in the 1960’s describing low-thrust propulsion trajectories from Earth to Mars. His reports were highly technical and very impressive (although I think I found one minor sign error but decided not to make a big deal about it).
The book itself is a survivor tale, with astronaut Mark Watney being left for dead and stranded on Mars. The next scheduled mission is years away, and of course he does not have nearly enough food and water to last that long. To make matters worse, his communication systems are down so that he cannot let Earth know that he is still alive. Most of the rest of the book describes his efforts to produce water, grow food and establish communications with earth. Naturally he is beset by all sorts of difficulties and suffers many set-backs, but in general most everything seems to be plausible.
The narrative switches back and forth between Watney and folks on Earth, describing how NASA finally came to realize that Watney was still alive and their efforts to launch an emergency re-supply mission. When these efforts fail, the crew who had abandoned Watney on Mars decide to undertake an unauthorized and risky mission to return to Mars and try to rescue him. Exciting stuff ensues!
Also, Gina reminded us that today was Joe Dabb’s birthday. We all miss Joe and Merilyn and wish they were still with us.
— Bob