Noisy Rhysling said:
The IRIS probe exploded because they cut corners on the testing, not because Goddard didn't know what he was talking about.
Yes, they were hurrying and they blew it, no difference in my alternate scenario. In real life this reckless behavior exists as well, it's what caused the Columbia Disaster.
Noisy Rhysling said:
Lewis had the time to try to recover Watney if they went to 60 days in your scenario. As I said, it's "dead", not "missing" that would make them leave without looking for him.
Ah, but that's just it. We're talking about a movie script. If the script states "it is impossible to move that much rock in the time we have to recover his body," then that's it. The script would also state "there is no known way to reach him." In the story he may survive against the odds, still undetectable because of his destroyed biosensor and reach the Martian surface through a previously undiscovered route (maybe something that opened up for the 1st time after the original cave in.) But since this scenario revolves around a movie script, plausibility is integrated with a fictional narrative. We could discuss it further, but it really boils down to "they could dig him out." "No they couldn't."
"Yes they could."
The only stalemate-breaker there is the imaginary script and I'll put an evil robot in there if I
have to... don't make me... :)
The idea of going all out to safeguard the lives and/or dead bodies of space explorers is also not consistent with real life. They wrote 2 speeches for the first Apollo Moon landing, one if they were successful, another if they were stranded on the Moon. The stranded speech did not state "hey, we're comin' to get you, hang tight! No man left behind! Rescue mission time!" It was a "nice knowin' ya" speech. Could they have had a rescue mission in place? Of course, you run a parallel project at another facility. They had plenty of cash and time to construct redundant nuke silos all over the country for years, a fraction of that could have paid for an Apollo beta program. Just a matter of money and material, but they chose to spend on doomsday weapons instead of rescuing stranded explorers on the Moon.
If they had been unable to talk Apollo 13 through their problems I doubt very much that NASA would've launched a retrieval mission to track the ship down and get their frozen bodies. The "aw, shucks" response would've come into play if 13 had burned up. Again, a rescue mission would've been theoretically possible, it's a 4 day trip after all. But it's never even considered - either they get back on their own ship or not at all.
Decades later they had a chance to save the Columbia crew, but chose not to because they were in a hurry, cheap and reckless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Investigation
This kind of cut-our-losses NASA culture doesn't bode well for a Watney. It's all academic anyway, NASA these days is in the unmanned probe business, not the sending people to space business.
Noisy Rhysling said:
As for the Venus probe, that was the Taiyang Shen's original mission.
1) Doesn't make it a good idea. After all, these same Chinese pollute on such a catastrophic scale they might as well be breathing in a Venusian atmosphere already. What is the real gain in going to Venus anyway, other than watching Watney be crushed, melt and burn all at the same time?
2) There is only ONE Venus probe - the covered golf cart that chased Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. Now
there's a space probe, my friends! It has a circular saw arm (very practical for Venus exploration) and sounds like a clogged Hoover vacuum cleaner. Who remembers this marvel of Soviet technology? Anyone?
Gotta love the fellow attempting to gun it down. Hilarious.