About the resupply missions in "The Martian".

[Robert Clark]

Two instances were discussed in the film where unmanned cargo ships were
mentioned to send up supplies to extend the time Whatney or the crew of the
Hermes could survive.

This brought back painful memories while watching the movie. It's such an
obvious answer. In the space shuttle Columbia disaster NASA rejected a
possible rescue because Atlantis could not be readied in time within the 16
days the Columbia's supplies would run out.

So since "nothing could be done anyway" there was no need to do accurate
imaging to even find out if the wing damage was survivable.

Note in the movie they had to use China to do the resupply mission to the
Hermes. If NASA had ordered the Columbia imaging, finding the damage
unsurvivable, all the space-faring nations in the world, which are at least
five, would have been working hard to send up a cargo mission to meet up
with Columbia within the 16 day time frame.

But they never were even given a chance to try.

BTW, since this is in regards to "The Martian", for you chemistry heads out
there, are there some foods, liquids, or common materials that might be on
the shuttles that could have filtered out the CO2 in air other than the
lithium canisters? For instance perhaps the solubility of CO2 in water is
different than in O2 and there could have been a way to separate out the CO2
from the air that way.


Bob Clark

[Endy0816]

Fats and water can somewhat. Not sure NASA meals would still have the same capability though.

 

Main issue for anything that continually removes CO2 would be the bulk.

 

In the movie/book he also has the fictional Oxygenator, a device that produces Oxygen from CO2. In real life, NASA has developed MOXIE which does the same(though at only about 50% the rate as the Oxygenator).

Edited November 4, 2015 by Endy0816

[Robert Clark]

Fats and water can somewhat. Not sure NASA meals would still have the same capability though.

 

Main issue for anything that continually removes CO2 would be the bulk.

 

In the movie/book he also has the fictional Oxygenator, a device that produces Oxygen from CO2. In real life, NASA has developed MOXIE which does the same(though at only about 50% the rate as the Oxygenator).

 

Thanks for that. I had not heard of that before.

 

Bob Clark

[pavelcherepan]

I think that with the case of Columbia NASA management has gone down the road of "If it ain't broke don't fix it". There has been several cases before when there have been foam strikes recorded but they never caused any real damage, hence while it was not something that tiles were designed to survive, it's been considered that no harm can come. Even when during the investigation the experiment was performed NASA management was reluctant to supply tiles to get tested because they were adamant that it was not the cause of the incident.

 

I highly doubt it were possible to organise a resupply mission within the limited time, unless there was already a rocket ready to leave, which there wasn't. On the other hand, if NASA management listened to engineers and allowed to take satellite images of the impacted area some repairs potentially could've been done, although its likely that those wouldn't have saved the shuttle, but at least they could've tried.