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.
This is actually a similar idea to the latest novel by Andy Weir (Author of "The Martian"), "Project Hail Mary", which is great and I highly recommend if you liked "The Martian".
Never realised he had another book out - thank you. After being less interested in the drama presented in Artemis, I'm thrilled he seems to have another problem->fix type book I can read.
Note that Hail Mary is much closer in plot and style to Artemis than The Martian. I loved The Martian (9.5/10), but only passably liked Artemis (6/10) and Hail Mary (5/10).
YMMV: I liked Hail Mary just as much, if not more then, The Martian. It had the same "solo dude using science and cleverness to solve an impossible problem" with a massively more ambitious plot.
Also, the plot twists in Hail Mary are very well delivered. The book ends up being completely different then you're expecting when you go into it.
I think the Martian was great the first time through, but re-reading it isn't as much fun when you know what's going to happen. I didn't enjoy Artemis as much the first time, but I think it holds up better at being interesting and entertaining even when you know what's about to happen.
Hail Mary I haven't read twice yet, but my take is that it fits somewhere in the middle.
Interesting. For context I loved The Martian and quite often use bits of the audio book to fall asleep to. Artemis wasn't bad, but there was a lot of interpersonal and stupid decision making in the lead up to critical events which I found a little annoying and contrived.
Hail Mary I started reading last night at my first comment. 7 hours later I'm about 50% of the way through and absolutely loving it. So far we seem to be doing the problem->fix cycle in the small and large scales with an interesting overarching plot. Looking forward to continuing.
Totally disagree. Artemis sucked and wasn't very similar to The Martian, was more of a detective story and the protag was nothing like Mark Watney in any way really.
Dude in Hail Mary is basically a slightly wimpier Mark Watney and the plot is the exact same (problem --> science the problem --> repeat) as The Martian.
My ratings would go The Martian (8/10), Artemis (45/10) and Hail Mary (9.5/10). I'm a sucker for softer sci-fi elements like aliens.
That could have been so much cooler of a movie if they'd shot it from Jennifer Lawrence's POV but they probably didn't want to have Chris Pratt being super creepy (which in the story he's not a good guy).
Yeah but it wouldn't have been tempered by growing attached to Pratt's character and we would get to experience the same feeling of confusion as JLaw's character.
Funnily enough, I thought the script was better than the movie itself. I read the script back in 2014 or something and it was way better than how the movie turned out.
Andy Weir, the author of the Martian, just came out with a new book called Project Hail Marry. It’s premise is similar to what you are describing. If you liked the Martian, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best books I have ever read.
There was a story I read in the 1970s where a guy woke up in the transit and had a plan to "unfreeze" the females one by one and basically do bad things to each for one year then off them to pass the time.
Spoiler...
The second woman he unfreezes offs him.
It was both representative of the male dominated era of science fiction, and a big progressive.
When passengers ends, if feels like a cheap-o movie. Hollywood but with only two main actors and in total three actors for the whole film. So empty, no ensemble, no people. Only the two actors, production, special effects and the movie making machine.
Not to mention both actors look like Ken and Barbie and has extreamly predictable personalities. That movie could have been great if actors would have been like genuine people. Instead it became plastic and meaningless.
The movie could have been great if it was oriented around the female passenger waking up and not knowing what had already happened before instead of the audience knowing everything linearly
I liked the first 3/4 of that movie, the ending could have been way better.
Warning Spoilers: It would have been much better had Pratt died in the fusion exhaust pipe, and the movie ends one year later showing JLaw standing over another cryopod, internally conflicted if she should wake up another passenger, and only then finally forgiving Pratt.
It's only similar to your premise, but I enjoyed Mur Lafferty's "Six Wakes", which is a scifi murder-mystery aboard a colony ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Wakes
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.
For those of us not expert in the commercial space industry, it might be more helpful to point out some reasoning outlining the impossibility of these claims or pointing to resources that do instead of simply scoffing at them. An eyeroll is not a very educating comment (especially coming from a relatively new account with low karma and no clear expert credentials on this matter presented, though I am assuming you have them) and this is an area I think many of us on HN would like to learn more about as well as improve our critical thinking on such matters. We'd love to hear more about why you think what you think.
Agreed, I'm curious if the scoffing was at the claim of 100 metric tons to LEO or the pricing for such a launch ($55/kg would mean a $5.5M/launch cost). I'm assuming the latter since the Saturn V could put 140 metric tons in LEO, but the F9 costs roughly an order of magnitude more.
The latter, of course. Launch prices have been fairly consistent for about 50 years. Promising a sudden 20x cost reduction over SpaceX's already exaggerated figures without any real innovation is ludicrous.
Yup! The Saturn V cost $5k per kg to LEO. Best case, SpaceX has a ~2x savings over the tech we had in the 1960s. The Soyuz 2.1a is competitively priced and it's still launching, though we can't really compare since we only know the price and not the actual cost of the launch.
The tradeoffs SpaceX has made have some real cost savings. Problem is that it's not anywhere even remotely close to what they want you to believe it is.
> Saturn V cost $5k per kg to LEO. Best case, SpaceX has a ~2x savings over the tech we had in the 1960s
NASA begs to disagree, showing Falcon 9 at $2,720 per kg and Falcon Heavy at $1,400 per kg [1]. This is the cheapest launch platform on the planet, apart from, perhaps, the PSLV [2].
And those are their prices, not costs. The runners up are Proton, Long March 3B and Ariane 5G at $4,320; $4,412; and $9,167 per kg respectively [3]. There simply isn't competitive pressure to push SpaceX's prices down. Particularly in heavy.
Ignoring the tremendous leaps we've made in launch economics over the past two decades, largely as a result of SpaceX, is naïvely dismissive. Yes, they talk a bigger game than they bring. But they're still bringing some big fucking game.
I googled. It seems they're at a 40% reduction as of Oct 2020 [0] for Falcon launches of government satellites, and could go lower but there's politics involved - as always in government-funded anything.
Is that correct? If so, then that's not "nowhere close", it's another order of magnitude away, for sure, but the high-volume approach of Spaceship could do that? Or not?
Market competition sets prices. Marginal cost = price only when you have competitive. Otherwise, you cannot use the advertised mission prices to determine their costs.
They could invent a rocket that does $500/kg to LEO and it wouldn't matter one iota to their actual costs if 1) demand doesn't go up and 2) competition doesn't exist.
I don't remember if they promise 99% cost saving as you mentioned, but even if that's correct it's about Starship, at some unspecified point in future once they have flown regularly. They definitely didn't promise any such saving for 2021 launches. If Starship hasn't flown, how can they be "nowhere close"?
> So far I've seen them achieve everything they set out to achieve.
That's not true. They've achieved parts of what they set out for, yes. The important parts, too. But far from everything.
Just one example, because that irks me every time someone brings up nonsense like Starship point-to-point as a realistic option: SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.
I won't get into why faster turnaround times are actually irrelevant for F9, but it goes to show that reality and plans don't always align even with SpaceX.
Now with regards to the turnaround time, people with be quick to point out that this beat the Shuttle record of 54 days, but then again the F9 in question wasn't a crewed mission and doesn't reuse its upper stage, so...
Another reason for healthy scepticism is the lack of cold hard numbers regarding the system. We cannot know the total system cost yet or the launch cost, because neither the final spec system nor its launch infrastructure exists. The number can also be very deceiving: the STS had an estimated $2000/kg to LEO goal and that was realistic back in he 1970s. Why? Because the calculation assumed ~50 launches per year and lots of cargo missions.
Instead, the shuttle launched only 4.5 times a year and the launch cost increased dramatically after the 1986 Challenger disaster and again after the 2003 Columbia accident due to safety procedures and maintenance.
In addition all launch facilities, infrastructure costs and R&D are priced into the Shuttle launch cost (e.g. total program cost divided by number of missions), which is impossible to do for Starship since we don't know the R&D or infrastructure costs.
Just throwing a number like $1000/kg into the ring is pretty meaningless as you need to provide context as well (number of launches per year, unit- and infrastructure costs, R&D costs, etc.). It's also important to keep in mind that this is the number SpaceX wants to achieve eventually, e.g. not with the first launch.
F9 launch costs haven't decreased either and NASA and the DoD in particular still pay a hefty premium compared to business customers. We'll see.
F9 launch costs haven't decreased for customers. That in no way implies they haven't decreased for SpaceX. Why would Space X reduce the cost for customers below what they are willing to pay?
They're not going to decrease them unless they have competitive. As it stands, every decrease is just more margin. As long as they keep winning contracts by being slightly cheaper than the competition, they can just pocket the benefits.
Look, they've flown block 5 boosters 10 times with minimal refurbishment. Given the cost of Merlin engines, it's obvious they're saving money over expendable designs.
> SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.
SpaceX's original plan was to further evolve F9. Then they decided to build Starship instead, at which point they decided to stop making any more than minor improvements to F9. If they hadn't decided to work on Starship, they probably would have made further improvements in F9 turnaround time, and other metrics. Citing they fact that they are now never going to deliver on their original objectives for F9 doesn't tell us anything about whether they can deliver on their objectives for Starship.
> SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.
They didn't plan to achieve this. It was an Elon's tweet when they only started recovering F9 booster, even before B5 (please correct me if I remember incorrectly).
SpaceX can be anything, but they're still a business. There is no reason whatsoever for 24 hour turnaround for F9. First of all they have a fleet of eight F9 boosters. Boosters are waiting for payloads, not the other way around like in the past. Even with Starlink, 2021 cadence has only been a launch every 10 days so far, and with that SpaceX already put more payloads into space than everyone else combined in 2021, governments or commercials. Why invest in something with no return, just for bragging right?
Second of all, and this is more important, F9 is the past, Starship is the future. Why invest in a dead end product when the future is such a game changer? They are on the cusp of launching SH/SS in the near term, according to Gwynne Shotwell just a few days ago.
> There are people working for NASA who actually believe we will be able to launch to LEO for $55/kg.
I mean, that works fine if you have something like a space elevator:
$ units # assuming 10cent/kWh[0]
You have: 300 km gravity * (.1$/kWh)
Definition: 0.081722083 US$ / kg
You have: sqrt(G earthmass/earthradius)
Definition: 7911.1468 m / s
You have: (9km/s)^2 * (.1$/kWh)
Definition: 2.25 US$ / kg
You have: ((9km/s)^2+300 km gravity) * (.1$/kWh)
Definition: 2.3317221 US$ / kg
So lifting stuff to LEO should cost ~2.50$/kg in energy at current retail prices. Adding (merely) a factor of twenty in overhead to actually deliver that energy is significantly more iffy, though.
SpaceX doesn't have to hit those price targets in order to be successful, they just have to have the cheapest per-rocket costs versus their competitors.
They also don't have to pass all those costs savings to their customers: they can charge exorbitant prices and people will still happily pay if it's the best deal around. I'm sure many people at NASA and JPL are aware that SpaceX has some pretty good fallback positions if their marketing materials turn out to be inaccurate predictions of the future and that their bargaining position against SpaceX is weak up until they have multiple vendors and competitive bidding.
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.
Did you read the book? The limitation was that it takes 6 months+ to get there. Assemble a mission from scratch in weeks - it'll still take you six months to get there.
With a big enough rocket, you're no longer constrained to use a minimum energy trajectory. You can cut down the travel time but you'll need to do additional burns to speed up and slow down (with corresponding additional risks).
Not only that - with cheaper launches you could have more frequent launches. At any given time there would be at least one supply ship on its way to Mars that could be diverted to a different landing site. Even if the capability for multiple launches a day never materializes, it'd be safe to assume there could be a vehicle ready to launch in weeks. With a payload capacity of 100 tons, it could do a significantly higher energy trajectory with supplies for a single person. With 5 tons of food and replacement parts per flight, you'd still have 95 fewer tons to push to Mars. Not sure about my math, but it looks like it'd have about 11 km/s of extra delta-v, which seems to be a lot (more than twice what you need for an optimal trip from the Earth to Mars).
And that is if the only upper stage developed for Superheavy is the reusable Starship. An expendable upper stage could carry a lot more fuel and cargo. On a mission you don't expect the vehicle to return, it'd be fine to use a lighter one. I'm thinking a truncated Starship with a Red Dragon lander, doing a burn to slow down enough the lander can get safely to the surface with the supplies needed.
Finally, with that much launch capacity, I'd be pretty sure there would be more than one crew on Mars at any time. Watney's rescuers could probably just drive to his door with food from over the hills.
You do not necessary need more fuel to slow down. Mars atmosphere can absorb few extra km/s above 5 km/s with typical landing maneuver as long as the heat shield can handle that. On Earth Starship must handle 8 km/s re-entry and potentially up to 11 km/s if direct landing from Lunar orbit will be feasible.
I read the book and that was one of the least believable parts, that they were already into the third Mars landing mission without any cheap reusable launch vehicles!
Like seriously, how much that must have cost so far ?? Not just money, but all the time thousands of people would have invested into producing maybe hundreds of booster stages that would then be just dumped to the sea. Such a colloidal waste it must have been!
No wonder every margin is so thin in the book and even just launching a module with food is a major hurdle...
Also there is really no apparent orbital infrastructure mentioned anywhere in the book, likely again due to the stupidly high ELV launch costs.
In a proper RLV/Starship world Watney would either most likely not get stranded due to the whole operation being done by a fleet of ships, with some likely kept in reserve as spares.
And even if he managed to get stranded and was lacking supplies to last to the next synod (say the crate with emergency supplies turned out to by logistic mistake contain chainsaws instead) you could very likely get a sacrificial starship with a couple tons of payload, fueled from one of your propelant depots in Earth orbit, to Mars very quickly.
The original Ares 1 dumped also an expensive hydrogen upper stage, all that while barely bringing the crew capsule into orbit, ideally not shaking the crew to death (IIRC the main reason for it bring canceled in the end).
But maybe the society in The Martian universe is just so unimaginably rich they can pull that all off even using those super inefficient expendable rockets. :)
> The limitation was that it takes 6 months+ to get there. Assemble a mission from scratch in weeks - it'll still take you six months to get there.
I'm pretty sure the plans are for ~4 month Starship trips to Mars. The real limitation may be in launch windows. But with SpaceX's "shotgun approach" the real solution would probably be to use an already landed cargo Starship.
I don't think that's all that strange, but it is at least fairly convenient for when people start going to Mars.
What I find a whole lot stranger is that Earth, Venus, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus all have a surface gravity of around 10 m/s^2 plus or minus about 14%. That's either a heck of a coincidence, or there's something about planet formation that favors that particular outcome.
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.
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...
83 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadFeel 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.
Also, the plot twists in Hail Mary are very well delivered. The book ends up being completely different then you're expecting when you go into it.
Hail Mary I haven't read twice yet, but my take is that it fits somewhere in the middle.
Hail Mary I started reading last night at my first comment. 7 hours later I'm about 50% of the way through and absolutely loving it. So far we seem to be doing the problem->fix cycle in the small and large scales with an interesting overarching plot. Looking forward to continuing.
Dude in Hail Mary is basically a slightly wimpier Mark Watney and the plot is the exact same (problem --> science the problem --> repeat) as The Martian.
My ratings would go The Martian (8/10), Artemis (45/10) and Hail Mary (9.5/10). I'm a sucker for softer sci-fi elements like aliens.
NerdWriter on youtube has a good video on how the change would look, does a better job of selling it than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gksxu-yeWcU
Spoiler...
The second woman he unfreezes offs him.
It was both representative of the male dominated era of science fiction, and a big progressive.
I was disappointed when this wasn't the ending to Passengers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_(2016_film)
And here's an alternative take that might work better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gksxu-yeWcU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gksxu-yeWcU
Warning Spoilers: It would have been much better had Pratt died in the fusion exhaust pipe, and the movie ends one year later showing JLaw standing over another cryopod, internally conflicted if she should wake up another passenger, and only then finally forgiving Pratt.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729
Though it's not just a single person, colonists in cryosleep (or more precisely their mass at braking time) are definitely involved. ;-)
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.
Is the claim that Falcon 9 and Heavy prices, total and per kilo, are comparable to any platform from before 2010?
The tradeoffs SpaceX has made have some real cost savings. Problem is that it's not anywhere even remotely close to what they want you to believe it is.
NASA begs to disagree, showing Falcon 9 at $2,720 per kg and Falcon Heavy at $1,400 per kg [1]. This is the cheapest launch platform on the planet, apart from, perhaps, the PSLV [2].
And those are their prices, not costs. The runners up are Proton, Long March 3B and Ariane 5G at $4,320; $4,412; and $9,167 per kg respectively [3]. There simply isn't competitive pressure to push SpaceX's prices down. Particularly in heavy.
Ignoring the tremendous leaps we've made in launch economics over the past two decades, largely as a result of SpaceX, is naïvely dismissive. Yes, they talk a bigger game than they bring. But they're still bringing some big fucking game.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
What's the reasoning behind your scepticism? More information would be good, it's an interesting subject.
They built competitive rockets. That's a big deal and I don't wish to diminish that. They promised magic 99% cost savings and are nowhere close.
Is that correct? If so, then that's not "nowhere close", it's another order of magnitude away, for sure, but the high-volume approach of Spaceship could do that? Or not?
[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/05/how-much-cheaper-a...
They could invent a rocket that does $500/kg to LEO and it wouldn't matter one iota to their actual costs if 1) demand doesn't go up and 2) competition doesn't exist.
That's not true. They've achieved parts of what they set out for, yes. The important parts, too. But far from everything.
Just one example, because that irks me every time someone brings up nonsense like Starship point-to-point as a realistic option: SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.
I won't get into why faster turnaround times are actually irrelevant for F9, but it goes to show that reality and plans don't always align even with SpaceX.
Now with regards to the turnaround time, people with be quick to point out that this beat the Shuttle record of 54 days, but then again the F9 in question wasn't a crewed mission and doesn't reuse its upper stage, so...
Another reason for healthy scepticism is the lack of cold hard numbers regarding the system. We cannot know the total system cost yet or the launch cost, because neither the final spec system nor its launch infrastructure exists. The number can also be very deceiving: the STS had an estimated $2000/kg to LEO goal and that was realistic back in he 1970s. Why? Because the calculation assumed ~50 launches per year and lots of cargo missions.
Instead, the shuttle launched only 4.5 times a year and the launch cost increased dramatically after the 1986 Challenger disaster and again after the 2003 Columbia accident due to safety procedures and maintenance.
In addition all launch facilities, infrastructure costs and R&D are priced into the Shuttle launch cost (e.g. total program cost divided by number of missions), which is impossible to do for Starship since we don't know the R&D or infrastructure costs.
Just throwing a number like $1000/kg into the ring is pretty meaningless as you need to provide context as well (number of launches per year, unit- and infrastructure costs, R&D costs, etc.). It's also important to keep in mind that this is the number SpaceX wants to achieve eventually, e.g. not with the first launch.
F9 launch costs haven't decreased either and NASA and the DoD in particular still pay a hefty premium compared to business customers. We'll see.
Look, they've flown block 5 boosters 10 times with minimal refurbishment. Given the cost of Merlin engines, it's obvious they're saving money over expendable designs.
SpaceX's original plan was to further evolve F9. Then they decided to build Starship instead, at which point they decided to stop making any more than minor improvements to F9. If they hadn't decided to work on Starship, they probably would have made further improvements in F9 turnaround time, and other metrics. Citing they fact that they are now never going to deliver on their original objectives for F9 doesn't tell us anything about whether they can deliver on their objectives for Starship.
They didn't plan to achieve this. It was an Elon's tweet when they only started recovering F9 booster, even before B5 (please correct me if I remember incorrectly).
SpaceX can be anything, but they're still a business. There is no reason whatsoever for 24 hour turnaround for F9. First of all they have a fleet of eight F9 boosters. Boosters are waiting for payloads, not the other way around like in the past. Even with Starlink, 2021 cadence has only been a launch every 10 days so far, and with that SpaceX already put more payloads into space than everyone else combined in 2021, governments or commercials. Why invest in something with no return, just for bragging right?
Second of all, and this is more important, F9 is the past, Starship is the future. Why invest in a dead end product when the future is such a game changer? They are on the cusp of launching SH/SS in the near term, according to Gwynne Shotwell just a few days ago.
I mean, that works fine if you have something like a space elevator:
So lifting stuff to LEO should cost ~2.50$/kg in energy at current retail prices. Adding (merely) a factor of twenty in overhead to actually deliver that energy is significantly more iffy, though.0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail...
They also don't have to pass all those costs savings to their customers: they can charge exorbitant prices and people will still happily pay if it's the best deal around. I'm sure many people at NASA and JPL are aware that SpaceX has some pretty good fallback positions if their marketing materials turn out to be inaccurate predictions of the future and that their bargaining position against SpaceX is weak up until they have multiple vendors and competitive bidding.
Starship, if it pans out as planned, is a huge game changer.
And that is if the only upper stage developed for Superheavy is the reusable Starship. An expendable upper stage could carry a lot more fuel and cargo. On a mission you don't expect the vehicle to return, it'd be fine to use a lighter one. I'm thinking a truncated Starship with a Red Dragon lander, doing a burn to slow down enough the lander can get safely to the surface with the supplies needed.
Finally, with that much launch capacity, I'd be pretty sure there would be more than one crew on Mars at any time. Watney's rescuers could probably just drive to his door with food from over the hills.
Like seriously, how much that must have cost so far ?? Not just money, but all the time thousands of people would have invested into producing maybe hundreds of booster stages that would then be just dumped to the sea. Such a colloidal waste it must have been!
No wonder every margin is so thin in the book and even just launching a module with food is a major hurdle...
Also there is really no apparent orbital infrastructure mentioned anywhere in the book, likely again due to the stupidly high ELV launch costs.
In a proper RLV/Starship world Watney would either most likely not get stranded due to the whole operation being done by a fleet of ships, with some likely kept in reserve as spares.
And even if he managed to get stranded and was lacking supplies to last to the next synod (say the crate with emergency supplies turned out to by logistic mistake contain chainsaws instead) you could very likely get a sacrificial starship with a couple tons of payload, fueled from one of your propelant depots in Earth orbit, to Mars very quickly.
But maybe the society in The Martian universe is just so unimaginably rich they can pull that all off even using those super inefficient expendable rockets. :)
I'm pretty sure the plans are for ~4 month Starship trips to Mars. The real limitation may be in launch windows. But with SpaceX's "shotgun approach" the real solution would probably be to use an already landed cargo Starship.
I don't think that's all that strange, but it is at least fairly convenient for when people start going to Mars.
What I find a whole lot stranger is that Earth, Venus, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus all have a surface gravity of around 10 m/s^2 plus or minus about 14%. That's either a heck of a coincidence, or there's something about planet formation that favors that particular outcome.