10/2/2015 NASA and 'The Martian': It Was Written in the Stars

NASA and 'The Martian': It Was Written in the Stars

BY GOGO LIDZ / SEPTEMBER 20, 2015 10:50 AM EDT

Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, the titular hero of Ridley Scott's "The Martian," about an
astronaut who struggles to survive while stranded on the red planet. NASA scientists and
engineers consulted on the film. AIDEN MONAGHAN/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

FILED UNDER: Culture, Mars, Space Exploration, Movies, Matt Damon

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Updated | Eight months ago I mashed my boots into 4,000 tons of

dirt the color of a pumpkin spice latte. All around me stuff was being
blown up, huge Lego­like vehicles teetered, and lights flashed
brighter than the Las Vegas Strip.

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10/2/2015 NASA and 'The Martian': It Was Written in the Stars

No, this wasn’t Burning Man. I was on Mars.

From inside a mysterious black tent on my right, a voice boomed in a

Yorkshire accent: “Tilt and backwards!” Earthlings in the dirt
scrambled. “The tilt is too jerky. There’s a jerk!”

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This Mars was inside a dust­covered studio soundstage just outside
Budapest, Hungary. The voice belonged to Ridley Scott, the British
director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiatorfame (and Exodus:
Gods and Kings infamy). The orange dirt under my boots was the
setting for his latest project, The Martian, a Matt Damon vehicle (and
his vehicle is a Mars rover) scheduled for theatrical release October
2.

The 3­D epic, a Robinson Crusoe­esque survival tale set two or three
decades in the future, is based on a 2011 online serial book turned
best­selling novel by former AOL computer programmer Andy Weir.
Mark Watney (Damon), an astronaut exploring the fourth rock from
the sun, is impaled by an antenna during a dust storm and left for
dead by his crew. Since he has no way to communicate with NASA

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10/2/2015 NASA and 'The Martian': It Was Written in the Stars

and the next mission to Mars isn’t due to arrive for four years, he
must tough it out in a brutal environment with just 10 months' worth
of supplies. Watney uses all of his scientific know­how to grow food,
secure water and alert NASA that he’s still alive. A resourceful
mechanical engineer, he figures out a way to turn his pee into rocket
fuel.

Matt Damon sitting on Mars. Greensman Roger Holden mixed three types of Hungarian soil
by machine and by hand to find just the right pumpkin spice latte shade to match the Wadi
Rum landscapes. AIDAN MONAGHAN

NASA might be the book’s biggest fan, and Weirtold Wired the
agency views the project “as an opportunity to re­engage the public
with space travel.” Last May, The Washington Postobserved: “Andy
Weir and his book The Martian may have saved NASA and the
entire space program,” citing NASA's struggle to get enough funding

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for Mars missions and the huge PR boost the novel gave the agency.
NASA is hoping that the film adaptation of The Martian will be a
Jupiter­sized smash and that its success will trigger renewed interest
in space exploration, just as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey did a half­century ago.

From 1959 to 1974—the space race era—NASA launched Mercury,

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Gemini, Apollo and Skylab—30 manned missions in 15 years. But

since then, the agency hasn’t done much new exploration with
humans, instead focusing on the International Space Station, a $150
billion shared laboratory whose biggest recent contribution to science
may have been allowing astronauts to eatlettuce while orbiting 200
miles above Earth.

According to a 2013 poll commissioned by Boeing and the nonprofit

Explore Mars, 75 percent of Americans want to double NASA’s
budget to ensure humans get to the red planet soon. NASA hopes to
send people there by the 2030s andinsists it could meet that goal if
the Senate approves President Barack Obama’s proposed $18.5
billion NASA budget for the 2016 fiscal year (a $500 million
increase from 2015).

At a National Press Club breakfast in September, two retired NASA

astronauts, Colonel Terry Virts and Captain Mark Kelly, said that to
get to Mars, NASA needs to goose America’s interest in theplanet.
Getting to Mars is “more a question of political science than it is

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rocket science,” said Virts. In 1989, as part of his Space Exploration

Initiative, President George H.W. Bush proposed a Mars mission as
NASA’s long­term goal, but it was later abandoned. (During the next
administration, Bill Clinton said human missions to Mars were too
expensive and favored robotic probes instead.)

Bran Ferren, a former Disney Imagineering chief who has served on

government advisory boards for science and technology, says NASA
is “kind of lost at the moment” and “needs to be reinvented and
reorganized and get on with this notion of exploration.” He says, “It
needs some vision and some passion. If that comes from a movie,
then good.”

Can a film about a man on Mars really help a man get to Mars?

Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, may seem like an unlikely
fount of space exploration wisdom (he's afraid of flying). The book
—essentially a 369­page math problem with a funny protagonist—
began as a serial posted on his website. The novelist intended the
book as a “technical book for technical people,” according to a
statement. Eventually, it became a hit Amazon e­book. Random
House came knocking. Then Hollywood. Drew Goddard (The Cabin
in the Woods, World War Z ) wrote the screenplay. As of September
14, it was the No. 1 trade fiction paperback on the New York
Times best­seller list,where The Martian has sat for 45 consecutive
weeks. The science that informs the story is surprisingly spot­on,
considering that Weir says his research was conducted mostly on
Google.

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NASA headquarters as depicted in a scene from "The Martian."TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Ferren thinks the best kind of space movies capture the public’s
imagination with “the correct sensibility.” He was first inspired by
Kubrick’s2001, a 1968 sci­fi classic that plenty of astronauts,
engineers and scientists cite as the launchpad for their careers.
According to Bert Ulrich, NASA’s film and television liaison,
because Kubrick and his team did extensive research with futurists
and scientists and even IBM (at the time, the world’s largest
computer company) to envision what space exploration might look
like in the 21st century, they were able to predict a lot of what really
came to be.

“Science fiction, especially in films, is continually an influence on

real science,” Ulrich says. The mellow­voiced HAL could easily sub
for iPhone’s Siri. The tablets used by the Jupiter mission look
startlingly like iPads; the videophones foretold Skype; and the design
of the space helmets, spacesuits and space stations was remarkably
prescient.

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The amazingly accurate futurism of 2001 may have spurred NASA

to partner with Hollywood in the years since. Recent partnerships
includeGravity (astronaut Cady Coleman called actress Sandra
Bullock from the International Space Station to advise her on the
part), Tomorrowland(Ulrich says NASA helped give director Brad
Bird a “general visual context” for the retro­futuristic saga, drawing
from 1960s NASA culture) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (the
film crew practically moved into Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for
a week, largely because director Michael Bay had worked with
NASA on 1998’sArmageddon).

Yet NASA employees have spent more energy onThe Martian than
possibly on any other Hollywood collaboration. Staff from many
NASA departments consulted on the film, from script development
through principal photography, and are now helping with marketing
timed to the theatrical release. Ulrich says NASA’s collaboration on
the design and technical details was “more intense” than on other
films.

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EXCLUSIVE: NASA JPL staff as depicted in a scene from "The Martian." GILES KEYTE

NASA seems to be squeezing every last proton out of the

opportunity. Producer Mark Huffam says that he and Scott phoned
NASA during their first production meeting and that he was “very
pleased to learn that they knew the book and were enthusiastic about
an open­door relationship and free exchange of ideas.”

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The partnership began with Ulrich but soon expanded. Among the
NASA staffers who served as technical consultants on the script were
James Green, the NASA director who works with the Obama
administration and Congress on all robotic space travel—including
the planning for future Mars missions—and Dave Lavery a NASA
exec who works with Mars rover missions like Curiosity and
Opportunity, as well as the future rover mission Mars 2020. Rudi
Schmidt, a scientist with the European Space Agency, was hired as
an on­set technical adviser.

As a result, NASA left its mark all over the production. Screenwriter
Goddard visited the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally
funded center owned by the California Institute of Technology that
develops robotics for the space agency. NASA also facilitated a
meeting between costume designer Janty Yates and a curator of the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which houses a
fascinating collection of spacesuits dating back to the beginning of
theMercury program. Jessica Chastain, who plays a NASA space
crew commander in The Martian,shadowed astronaut­chemist Tracy
Caldwell Dyson, a mission specialist on Space Shuttle Endeavour
Flight STS­118 in August 2007 and part of the Expedition 24 crew

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on the International Space Station in 2010. Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor,

who plays a NASA director, says he spoke to staffers at NASA and
the JPL to beef up for the role.

Production designer Arthur Max was given extensive tours of NASA

facilities in Houston as well as the old Mercury and Apollo mission
control centers and the current center that tracks the International
Space Station. Max, who has worked with Scott since 1985, admits
he wouldn’t have been able to create The Martian sets without
NASA guiding him. More recently, NASA astronauts and
administrators have appeared on panels at Comic­Con and at the JPL
with Scott, Weir and Damon, often comparing The Martianto
NASA’s plans.

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Matt Damon as Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut stranded on Mars who figures out a way to
turn his urine into rocket fuel.TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

The film’s overlap with NASA’s current goals is undeniable. Damon

just signed up to have his name etched on a silicon chip on NASA’s
InSight lander that’s scheduled to reach Mars a year from now. Both
the NASA and 20th Century Fox Twitter handles are using the
hashtag #JourneyToMars to promote the fictional mission to the
planet and the real potential one. In October, NASA will host a
workshop to choose 10 possible landing sites on Mars for human
missions. The workshop is intended to help connect the movie The
Martian with actual Mars exploration progress.

The agency even allowed the movie’s production team to film

launches at Cape Canaveral—one of which was the December 2014
liftoff of the Orion, a spacecraft designed to take humans deep into
space. The Orion has been touted as a first step toward Mars
journeys. Lockheed Martin, which built the capsule, even sent Orion
into orbit carrying a tribute to The Martian: the first sketch Scott

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made of Watney. It was featured on the cover page of the script,

emblazoned with the astronaut’s most Web­beloved quote (recently
Tweeted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson): “I’m going to
science the shit out of this planet.”

Of course, the best movies about Mars have been filmed by NASA’s
rovers, Spirit, Curiosity and Opportunity—the ultimate collaboration
between science and art. Mars is the only planet on which robots can
become auteurs, and, in fact, actual rover footage has been
incorporated into The Martian. 20th Century Fox brought U.K.
company Territory (Spy, Mission: Impossible–Rogue Nation)
onboard to work with Scott’s graphic designer. Lots of graphics,
high­resolution satellite imagery and stock footage from NASA
appear on control screens and monitors in the film.

“There have always been interesting collaborations between the

sciences and the arts when it comes to space exploration,” says
Ferren. “Before you could go to space, people had to imagine what
all the dots were in the sky at night. People get curious and tell
stories. Human curiosity is the bond that unites art and science.”

At the end of my day on the Budapest set, I watched Damon’s

character shimmying into a space capsule. “It’s fun to play a
character who’s smarter than you,” he says. “He gets to the right
answers quicker than I would. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve
sat in my surface suit on­set thinking, I wouldn’t last 20 minutes on
Mars.”

NASA is praying The Martian will last a lot longer than that in
theaters.

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Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that

the Mars 2020 mission will be manned. It will be an unmanned
rover.

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