The Martian

I had to guess at the weight. The heaviest thing I’ll bring with me is the water. 620kg worth. My freeze-dried potatoes will add another 200kg. I’ll probably have more solar cells than before, and maybe a battery from the Hab. Plus the Atmospheric Regulator and Oxygenator, of course. Rather than weigh all that shit, I took a guess and called it 1200kg.

Half a cubic meter of basalt weighs about that much (more or less). After two hours of brutal labor, during which I whined a lot, I got it all loaded in.

Then, with both batteries fully charged, I drove circles around the Hab until I drained them both.

With a blistering top speed of 25kph, it’s not an action-packed thrill ride. But I was impressed it could maintain that speed with all the extra weight. The rover has spectacular torque.

But physical law is a pushy little shit, and it exacted revenge for the additional weight. I only got 57km before I was out of juice.

That was 57km on level ground, without having to power the regulator (which won’t take much with the heater off). Call it 50km per day to be safe. At that rate it would take 65 days to get to Schiaparelli. But that’s just the travel time.

Every now and then, I’ll need to break for a day and let the Oxygenator use all the power. How often? After a bunch of math I worked out that my 18pn budget can power the Oxygenator enough to make 2.5 sols of O₂. I’d have to stop every two to three sols to reclaim oxygen. My 65 sol trip would become 91!

That’s too fucking long. I’ll tear my own head off if I have to live in the rover that long. Anyway, I’m exhausted from lifting rocks and whining about lifting rocks. I think I pulled something in my back. Gonna take it easy the rest of today.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 201

Yeah, I definitely pulled something in my back. I woke up in agony.

So I took a break from rover planning. Instead, I spent the day taking drugs and playing with radiation.

First, I loaded up on Vicodin for my back. Hooray for Beck’s medical supplies!

Then I drove out to the RTG. It was right where I left it, in a hole 4km away. Only an idiot would keep that thing near the Hab. So anyway, I brought it back to the Hab.

Either it’ll kill me or it won’t. A lot of work went in to making sure it doesn’t break. If I can’t trust NASA, who can I trust? (For now I’ll forget that NASA told us to bury it far away.)

I stored it on the roof of the rover for the trip back. That puppy really spews heat.

I have some flexible plastic tubing intended for minor Water Reclaimer repairs. After bringing the RTG in to the Hab, I very carefully glued some tubing around the heat baffles. Using a funnel made from a piece of paper, I ran water through the tubing, letting it drain in to a sample container.

Sure enough, the water heated up. That’s not really a surprise, but it’s nice to see thermodynamics being well-behaved.

The Atmospheric Regulator doesn’t run constantly. The freeze-separation speed is driven by the weather outside. So the returning frigid air doesn’t come as a steady flow. And the RTG generates a constant, predictable heat. It can’t “ramp up” its output.

So I’ll heat water with the RTG to create a heat reservoir, then I’ll make the return air bubble through it. That way I don’t have to worry about when the air comes in. And I won’t have to deal with sudden temperature changes in the rover.

When the Vicodin wore off, my back hurt even more than before. I’m going to need to take it easy. I can’t just pop pills forever. So I’m taking a few days off from heavy labor. To that end, I made a little invention just for me…

I took Johanssen’s cot and cut out the hammock. Then I draped spare Hab canvas over the frame, making a pit inside the cot, with extra canvass around the edges. Weighing down the excess canvass with rocks, I now had a water-tight bathtub!

It only took 100L to fill the shallow tub.

Then, I stole the pump from the Water Reclaimer. (I can go quite a while without the Water Reclaimer operating). Hooking it up to my RTG-water-heater, I put both the input and output lines in the tub.

Yes, I know this is ridiculous, but I hadn’t had a bath since Earth, and my back hurts. Besides, I’m going to spend 100 sols with the RTG anyway. A few more won’t hurt. That’s my bullshit rationalization and I’m sticking with it.

It took two hours to heat the water to 37°C. Once it did, I shut off the pump, and got in. Oh man, all I can say is “Ahhhhhh.”

Why the hell didn’t I think of this before?

LOG ENTRY: SOL 207

I spent the last week recovering from back problems. The pain wasn’t bad, but there aren’t any chiropractors on Mars, so I wasn’t taking chances.

I took hot baths twice a day, laid in my bunk a lot, and watched shitty ’70’s TV. I’ve already seen Lewis’s entire collection, but I didn’t have much else to do. I was reduced to watching reruns.

I got a lot of thinking done.