A lot of the story is a consequence of how limited access to Mars is. With Starship on full-scale, a resupply mission can be diverted from a future landing site or assembled from scratch in weeks. Even an already landed Starship could probably still hop enough to take supplies to Watney.

Starship, if it pans out as planned, is a huge game changer.

I was hoping this article would be about "The Hail Mary" which is an amazing book by the author of The Martian that involves a starship. I listened to the audio book and basically binged the last quarter of it. It's rare to find something so good I prefer it over streaming TV shows & movies.

I saw the title and imagined a scenario where someone combined the idea of "The Martian" with interstellar travel. Basic idea: interstellar colony ship with colonists in cryo-sleep. One of the colonists is inadvertently awakened mid-journey and has to attempt to survive the multi-year journey in solitude without jeopardizing the whole colony's travel.

Feel free to write this if you like, any of you. Ideas are cheap and I have more than I'm likely to use in what remains of my life.

I think they should use m/s for wind speed.

This premise would make a delightful text adventure game.

Brilliant fan fic!

Having played Kerbal space program... the heavier something is the more difficult it will be to put it in orbit. Also trying to land something very tall will be difficult...

Everything on Casey's blog is pretty great.

in a real world future chinese nuclear module would save him quite fast :)

I used to be confused by SpaceX marketing. Why do they talk about 90%+ cost reduction per KG to LEO? Maybe the general public will fall for it, but the general public doesn't often launch satellites. The actual experts will just laugh them out of the room. There's no way their marketing can fool anyone who is in a position to give them money.

Apparently I was mistaken. There are people working at the JPL who seriously believe we'll be able to send payloads to the Martian surface using a human-rated vehicle and bring it back to Earth for $1,000/kg. There are people working for NASA who actually believe we will be able to launch to LEO for $55/kg.

What the Hell?

I guess it's no wonder NASA is doing so badly if these are the sorts of people they're hiring.