what an utter garbage of film.... potato on dust? Purnell maneuver? Decompressing air RETROGRADE* in order to fly closer to Mars? This trash got 8/10 imdb score. What a money waste!!

*it should be in radial direction!

I guess that's what you get for playing KSP; every space movie is automatically flawed. :P I was about to watch it with my buddies last weekend, but last minute we switched to a horror film (Carrie). Maybe I'll watch it this weekend to see what's the fuss about.

On Kinopoisk (rus. IMDB equivalent) one review has labeled this movie as "Mr. Tape it", because Matt's fixes all kind of stuff with tape and tarpaulin - from helmets to base walls and capsule cupola.... -_-

Haha, now that should be fun! Smells like Apollo 13 mission to me where the astronauts went DIY and used hoses, tape & papers (or something like that) to fix critical stuff on board the ship (see "the mailbox").

Interesting, thanks! The mailbox looks like just a fan connected to the box, which is connected then to the hose of the oxygen recycler in the space suit; which is of technical difficulty of fixing vacuum cleaner hosing.

But Matt created a whole wall out of tape film and tarpaulin, which apparently withstands 100 bar pressure difference.... : / He then reused the same tarpaulin and tape to cover the capsule for ascend... :/ And then randezvous'ed with main ship at (at least) 1000 m/s speed difference (because starship was "slingshotting" without breaking for stable orbit).... using a hole busting compressed air from his suit as propellant.... :///

Voskhod vehicle once had emergency decompression in space via a small hole unterneath the damn chair. Everyone lost conciousness within 10 seconds (and its a big ship compared to volume of suit) and unfortunately died. One of the crewmen was found dead near the hole, apparently he was trying to cover it, but was few seconds too late.

The technical difficulty is one thing; the ingenuity it requires though, in order to get the job done is the crucial part in my opinion, especially with limited tools/stuff to use and maybe a panicking status. But if you have Matt Damon among the crew, i guess you shouldn't worry about any problems. :P Didn't know about Voskhod; sad incident especially due to the fact that they were only too close to fix the problem... I'll read about it in detail when I get home, thanks for mentioning it!

I stand corrected, it was Soyuz 11.

Yes, Matt is more capable than Jebediah... lol.

Err... Earth sea level pressure is 1 bar, so Earth P - Mars P < 1 bar... Pressure don't care that it's "1/100 the pressure", 1 bar = 1 bar. The reason why the movies showing people exploding in space or on Mars are silly. The pressure differential will do some pretty ugly damage, given some time, but not instantly transform you in a blood balloon or a fountain of gore.

What will get you first is anoxy, but if I remember correctly, an exposure to vaccuum will take more than 1 minute to do irreversible lethal damage. 10 seconds is the time you will remain conscious and able to act on the problem.

Yes, but he was not hyperventilating all the time, so the air pressure must be similar to earth. And they had that pressure exchange chamber.

I tell you, forget mars, that tape he was using is the ultimate answer! :)

I don't believe any space mission has ever placed humans in anything approaching "Earth normal", if by that you mean air pressure at sea level. Heck, even commercial aircraft don't maintain sea level pressures internally, as it's wholly unnecessary. In space, it is even less so. Commercial aircraft have to make do with the standard oxygen-nitrogen mix of the Earth's atmosphere, as well as being safe for infants, elderly, and people of various states of ill health. On space missions, these limitations do not apply. As such, the oxygen mixture is much richer, allowing the overall pressure to be far less, which in turn requires far less infrastructure to safely maintain the differential with low external pressures.

While Mars's atmosphere is minuscule in comparison to Earth, it is still a long way from being a vacuum. The pressure differential between the minimum pressure required for human life assuming control over the mixture, and that of the average surface pressure on Mars is certainly significant, but maybe not as significant as it may first appear. I certainly raised an eyebrow at the duct tape and plastic solution, but not so much so that I would condemn it out of hand. It is perhaps a bit of a strain on my credulity, but as a movie shorthand for a jury-rigged solution, I could live with it. I doubt it would be made a better film by having an added scene where Mark Watney mixed some adhesive to laminate the plastic as well as secure it more effectively.

If it weren't a fictional story, but instead a documentary of a real-life event, then a focus on that kind of minutiae would perhaps be a key element of the narrative. But The Martian is first and foremost a character drama using Mars as a setting.

Well, montage foam exists since ages and would be by far more plausible.

There already is a lot of fast cutting to give tempo and drama to scenes that in effect take place over a longer period of time. The theatrical cut is 2h 24m. Not to mention, I remain unsure as to whether it's actually an issue in the first place. As I lack expertise in any of the relevant fields (including film-making), I don't want to venture into Dunning-Kruger territory and make any absolute assertions here.

I can only say that the scene in question certainly piqued my intuitions about the plausibility of the solution, but I've been surprised by real-world physics in the past, so I don't even know that there is an actual problem in this case.

Sure, there are a ton of film-making techniques that could have been applied to extend the amount of work Mark Watney put into to fixing the habitation module. But making a film can be something of a zero-sum game. Pacing of scenes is important. Not only for how long they run, but also for how much information you are attempting to convey at any given moment. You have to work within the constraints of what an audience can follow without getting fatigued or bored.

And then there's also the question of set up. If the film presented a whole array of complex materials being used to patch the hole, it would likely require some degree of set up somewhere earlier in the film. That affects the pacing not only of the repair scene, but of earlier parts of the film as well.

Well, yeah - its like power rangers lol. Most of KSP streamers show more realism and drama. >:-)

Btw, this belongs here too.

I think the problem is, first the airlock is blown away while filling, then that tape/plastic door I wouldn't feel safe behind in winter night here on earth is installed to replace it. While the later is probably much more closely depicting real possibility, both are certainly in different sides from reality. I could more easily accept constant bias in one direction - and the air-as-propulsion nonsense they later act in orbit tends to suggest the alternative physics of this film overpowering pressure difference up to eleven. But that makes the door scene only stay out even more.

It's worth pointing out though that NASA has actually endorsed a lot of the science behind the story. The author of the book did a ton of research and writes a pretty realistic story, with some artistic license. Admittedly, the book is more realistic than the movie (the whole air-jet in space thing at the end doesn't happen in the book).

Let's just remember that ultimately this is a work of science fiction though, so it's okay for it not to be a documentary.