Summary Essays (918 words) - Spaceflight, Science Fiction

Summary The book I chose to read this marking period was The Martian by Andy Weir. The book starts out with the entire Ares 3 space crew on the planet Mars, only six days into their mission. Soon to be hit with a massive dust storm with extremely high speed winds, much higher than their base is made to withstand they debate abandoning the mission. They end up deciding to do so, but the dust storm hits them before they can leave. The crew rushes to the ship, but Mark Watney is struck with a large piece of flying debris, and goes flying back, swallowed by the dust storm. The ship captain wants to go back for him, but the crew assumes he is dead and leaves the planet. Turns out he lived. Spaceman Mark Watney is now stranded on Mars all alone. Instead of giving up hope he continues on, thinks things out, and devises a plan. Their base, called the HAB is still intact, so Mark still has some supplies and even a large rover, but not nearly enough food or water to last forever. Marks sol ution to his food problem is filling his temporary home with space dirt, fertilizing it with his own waste, and growing potatoes. For water, he finds a way to extract water from rocket fuel, a very dangerous process which almost ends up blowing up the HAB, but Mark makes it work. Eventually, the folks back at NASA realize Mark is still alive when they see things on satellite images like the solar panels being cleared off daily(it's a very dusty planet), and things being moved around. Mark is able to set up a rudimentary way to communicate with NASA, and they then are able to instruct him on how to build something to get a better form of communication allowing Mark to send and receive messages to and from NASA. His former space crew, still on their way home from Mars is informed that Mark is still alive, and a plan is constructed to pick him up. The crew slingshots around earth using its gravitational pull, and heads back to Mars. When they get there Mark has to use a smaller pod spa ceship to get out of the atmosphere of Mars, and get as close the the crew as possible. Mark ends up just short of where he needs to be, and almost ends up watching his evacuation opportunity pass by. Instead, he punctures the hands of his spacesuit and is able to fly to his crew member Iron-man style and is pulled in to the ship. He becomes a hero back on earth Childhood of Mark Watney As a kid I never wanted to do anything but learn. I excelled in school, and my elementary teachers always wanted me to skip a grade but I didn't so that I could stay with my friends. Even back then though, when education was not a priority of mine at all I still wanted to be an astronaut, ever since I learned that Earth isn't the only planet. I never really thought it would happen though, and I definitely didn't think it would turn out the way it did. Getting stuck on Mars for two years completely alone was not part of the plan. Although I never really thought my dreams would materialize, I always dreamed of being a part of a human exploration to Mars. People always talked about going to Mars back then, but it never happened. Infact, after the Apollo missions human space exploration seemed to have stopped. This all seemed to change overnight. I was in 7th grade when it happened, I was sitting down watching the news after school one day. A news report came on about the discovery of microbial life on mars by a rover. Three days later NASA was granted the funding by Congress for the Mars mission. Although as a child I had no clue that I would end up being a part of the mission, the discovery is what sealed the deal for becoming an astronaut. After that I took school very seriously. I reached the potential that the teachers knew I had. Eventually my