But it still makes no sense at all. TLJ character is a half-blind grandpa just after half of the sheduled time while the travel time back to earth is just 80 days? Why not replace the personel at least every 5 years or just send an unmanned drone.
Maybe less expensive to leave a self-sufficient crew in place and not constantly have to rotate the personnel in and out.
SpaceCom was probably reluctant to risk further personnel to rescue the Lima Project after it went radio-dark, at least until it became clear that the malfunctioning station was causing the dangerous surges.
An unmanned drone would have been unable to recover from a surge the way human crews could, seeing as people would be able to take manual control over the ship in the event of damage to the computers.
And why did he have to send his message to mars? I mean ok its a plot device but was it explained that otherwise someone could intercept the message of doom?
I believe it was explained during the debrief on earth that Mars had the last functioning secure-communication terminal that could contact Lima, the messages had to be sent from there.
There are a lot of things that were only vaguely explained in the movie, it was probably a conscious decision to keep the film focussed on the theme of "overcoming despair", and not get bogged down in hard sci-fi jargon that would probably still not be able to adequately explain away all the inconsistencies. The film is basically an elaborate metaphor for a "journey into the heart of darkness" a la Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Fountain, or Sorcerer (1977). You have to make a choice as to whether you can get over the ambivalent aspects or not; it's something that's up to personal taste.
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