A few months ago I went to Johnson Space Center-it was the best week of my life. That’s how, for example, I realized Watney wouldn’t have enough water to grow potatoes, by sitting down and going, “Wait a minute, how much water does it take to grow those? Oh, he doesn’t have near enough.” So that gave me the whole plotline of “How do you create water?” I was actually too pessimistic on space-suit technology. I would always start with the science and work forward to the plot. Did thinking about real suit tech inspire these plot points, or did you have a plot turn in mind and then worked out technology to match?Ī.W.: It was based on real space suits. S.C.: The abilities and limits of space suits are critical to the plot. As far as I can tell NASA does it through simulation, and I thought, “Well, I can do simulation!” The math for calculating a constantly accelerating ship was just way beyond me-once I was in my 10th nested integral I went to see how real space agencies did this. It was important for me, defining things like how long did it take them to get there, and so on. Why go to so much bother?Ī.W.: I really wanted scientific accuracy.
S.C.: You wrote your own software to model the trajectory of the novel’s Hermes, an ion-drive-propelled spaceship that shuttles astronauts between Earth and Mars. I’m less about astronomy than stuff like spacecraft: I’ve spent my whole life watching documentaries and anything I can find out about that. How did a software guy come to write about hardware?Ī.W.: I’ve spent a lifetime being a huge space nerd. S.C.: The Martian is packed with detailed and plausible aerospace technology.
Movie Mars: Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded on the Red Planet, in the Hollywood adaptation of the The Martian. And it worked! That was probably my shining moment in software engineering. I gambled my reputation at the company on this gigantic redesign. When I started on it, the code base was something that had kind of been thrown together and just kept having new stuff glued to it. But the thing I’m proudest of was mobile device management software for MobileIron, the last company I worked at. That was pretty fun because the AI had to be good at bowling, but not great. Mobile games, back in the days before smartphones, were very simple. And there were a few really fun small projects, because I spent a lot of time working for mobile gaming companies.
I was good at it-I did it for 25 years! When the time came to quit to go full time writing, it was bittersweet: I liked my job, I liked my boss, I liked my coworkers.Ī.W.: The most famous thing I’ve ever worked on was Warcraft II. Stephen Cass: Tell me about your engineering career.Īndy Weir: I really liked it.