I’m in my space suit on Mars and I’m navigating with sixteenth-century tools. But hey, they work.
I now risked dying from oxygen toxicity, as the excessively high amount of oxygen threatened to burn up my nervous system, lungs, and eyes. An ironic death for someone with a leaky space suit: too much oxygen.
I already knew that, of course. But there’s a difference between knowing it and really experiencing it.
I’m all wired up, but if I don’t go to sleep soon, Rocky will start hassling me. Sheesh- you almost ruin a mission one time and all of a sudden you have an alien-enforced bedtime.
I spend a lot of it sitting around on my lazy ass watching TV. But so do you, so don’t judge.
Despite what you see in action movies and comics, bigger really is better. A six-foot man just has too much of an edge over two slim women.
It hurts like a motherfluffer!
This is one of those things I frequently have to explain to my students. Gravity doesn’t just “go away” when you’re in orbit. In fact, the gravity you experience in orbit is pretty much the same as you’d experience on the ground. The weightlessness that astronauts experience while in orbit comes from constantly falling. But the curvature of the Earth makes the ground go away at the same rate you fall. So you just fall forever.
I was approximately as critical as toilet paper.
I can’t blame it. Its whole purpose is to prevent the atmosphere from becoming lethal. Nobody at NASA thought, “Hey, let’s allow a fatal lack of oxygen that will make everyone drop dead!
You’re sending him to space under a tarp.” “Pretty much, yeah.” “Like a hastily loaded pickup truck.” “Yeah. Can I go on?” “Sure, can’t wait.
Cool thing about pendulums: The time it takes for one to swing forward and backward – the period – won’t change, no matter how wide it swings. If it’s got a lot of energy, it’ll swing farther and faster, but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time.
The questions are many: How long can he last? How much food does he have? Can Ares 4 rescue him? How will we talk to him? The answers to these questions are not what we want to hear. “I can’t promise we’ll succeed in rescuing him, but I can promise this: The entire focus of NASA will be to bring Mark Watney home. This will be our overriding and singular obsession until he is either back on Earth or confirmed dead on Mars.
If we do this,” Vogel said, “it would be over one thousand days of space. This is enough space for a life. I do not need to return.
And have you ever heard of Skype?!
Your face opening is in sad mode.
Snowblowers are expensive,” he used to say. “You’re free.
With hundreds of millions of bacteria, it only takes one survivor to stave off extinction. Life is amazingly tenacious. They don’t want to die any more than I do.
The walls were lined with thick plastic sheets, all held together with some kind of special tape.
Okay, I’ve had a good night’s sleep, and things don’t seem as hopeless as they did yesterday.