A couple of questions

The captain is clearly an idiot. No wonder they have so many issues...



I agree with #1 and #3 especially.

1) A number of reasons:
a. If you enter Mars orbit, you need to spend a non small amount of fuel to slow down. By flying the entire ship into Mars atmosphere you let the atmosphere slows you down, thus saving fuel. You couldn't do this on Moon missions since the Moon has no atmosphere.
b. If you use all chemical propulsion Mars architecture, you'll need to refuel on Mars otherwise the fuel needed to launch from Earth would be too much due to rocket equation. If you leave the mothership in Mars orbit there's no easy way to refuel it.
c. Landing the whole ship also allows you to carry out maintenance on the surface (either on Mars or on Earth), servicing is much easier to do with gravity.
d. This ship not only lands on Mars, it also lands on Earth using the same method, so it's multi-use and this saves engineering efforts (avoid having multiple designs).

2) They go zero-g all the way, it's only 6 to 8 months one way, well within the zero-g experience we have on ISS.

3) This part is just lazy writing, no sane mission planner would only leaves 3 days of oxygen reserve.

Yes, totally. I had this thought watching them leave a perfectly good ship with an injured guy.

Commander is dumb, should have said he was injured, proposed this thing, get minimal treatment on the ship. And then Lay Down on the rover.

Do not see why this would be less dramatic, either. Time, O2 etc the normal dramatic countdown issues. Add medical treatment in. It works.

Might manually drive the rover back to the ship for second trip though. More options, can go faster.

Thank you. Thank you.

I was giving the benefit of the doubt on the oxygen supply, allowing for drama.

But the risky move of loading an overweight vehicle instead of multiple trips made no sense to me either.

How was the vehicle overweight?

I had such questions and more.

Hi Thomas

I had the same questions. I think that drama is OK in series like this but is should not get stupid.

Before landing they should have checked all the systems. In the Apollo program each critical mission point (leaving orbit/start the descent) would have had a complete systems check on both sides. They would have discovered the engine failure and could have corrected that while still in orbit without endangering the mission.

They could not see where they were landing, but that is a guess. A spacecraft like this with small width and large height would haven been no ideal choice for a landing on an unknown planet. It could have easily toppled even with modern guidance computers en retro rockets. Landing on the belly with struts would have been a much safer design option.

The rover question is also something that immediately came to my mind. The rover arrived. When the five astronauts transferred it would be 2000 kg overweight. You saw what they took. Some small equipment. Lets say each astronaut would be 150Kg with suit and equipment on earth. On Mars that would be prox. 60kg times 5 = 300 Kg so the rover was 1700kg overweight 'be design'. Really?

If a pinpoint landing was required. They should have had contingency plans for if that for some reason failed.

When the commander left his seat to repair the circuit boards he took a risk. That is OK but he should have seen that there was no time left to get back to his seat. So he should have climbed down/stay down instead of going up. If he would lay flat on the surface that would not be ideal in 5G but less dangerous that the action he took. A trained real astronaut would probably seen the risks and take the right action.