The Martian Read Online Free PDF Page B

water plan.
    My idea is to make 600 liters of water (limited by the hydrogen I can get from the hydrazine). That means I’ll need 300 liters of liquid O 2 .
    I can create the O 2 easily enough. It takes twenty hours for the MAV fuel plant to fill its 10-liter tank with CO 2 . The oxygenator can turn it into O 2 , then the atmospheric regulator will see the O 2 content in the Hab is high, and pull it out of the air, storing it in the main O 2 tanks. They’ll fill up, so I’ll have to transfer O 2 over to the rovers’ tanks and even the space suit tanks as necessary.
    But I can’t create it very quickly. At half a liter of CO 2 per hour, it will take twenty-five days to make the oxygen I need. That’s longer than I’d like.
    Also, there’s the problem of storing the hydrogen. The air tanks of the Hab, the rovers, and all the space suits add up to exactly 374 liters of storage. To hold all the materials for water, I would need a whopping 900 liters of storage.
    I considered using one of the rovers as a “tank.” It would certainly be big enough, but it just isn’t designed to hold in that much pressure. It’s made to hold (you guessed it) one atmosphere. I need vessels that can hold fifty times that much. I’m sure a rover would burst.
    The best way to store the ingredients of water is to make them be water. So what’s what I’ll have to do.
    The concept is simple, but the execution will be incredibly dangerous.
    Every twenty hours, I’ll have 10 liters of CO 2 thanks to the MAV fuel plant. I’ll vent it into the Hab via the highly scientific method of detaching the tank from the MAV landing struts, bringing it into the Hab, then opening the valve until it’s empty.
    The oxygenator will turn it into oxygen in its own time.
    Then, I’ll release hydrazine,
very slowly
, over the iridium catalyst, to turn it into N 2 and H 2 . I’ll direct the hydrogen to a small area and burn it.
    As you can see, this plan provides many opportunities for me to die in a fiery explosion.
    Firstly, hydrazine is some serious death. If I make any mistakes, there’ll be nothing left but the “Mark Watney Memorial Crater” where the Hab once stood.
    Presuming I don’t fuck up with the hydrazine, there’s still the matter of burning hydrogen. I’m going to be setting a fire. In the Hab. On purpose.
    If you asked every engineer at NASA what the worst scenario for the Hab was, they’d all answer “fire.” If you asked them what the result would be, they’d answer “death by fire.”
    But if I can pull it off, I’ll be making water continuously, with no need to store hydrogen or oxygen. It’ll be mixed into the atmosphere as humidity, but the water reclaimer will pull it out.
    I don’t even have to perfectly match the hydrazine end of it with the fuel plant CO 2 part. There’s plenty of oxygen in the Hab, and plenty more in reserve. I just need to make sure not to make so much water I run myself out of O 2 .
    I hooked up the MAV fuel plant to the Hab’s power supply. Fortunately they both use the same voltage. It’s chugging away, collecting CO 2 for me.
    Half-ration for dinner. All I accomplished today was thinking up a plan that’ll kill me, and that doesn’t take much energy.
    I’m going to finish off the last of
Three’s Company
tonight. Frankly, I like Mr. Furley more than the Ropers.
    LOG ENTRY: SOL 33
    This may be my last entry.
    I’ve known since Sol 6 there was a good chance I’d die here. But I figured it would be when I ran out of food. I didn’t think it would be this early.
    I’m about to fire up the hydrazine.
    Our mission was designed knowing that anything might need maintenance, so I have plenty of tools. Even in a space suit, I was able to pry the access panels off the MDV and get at the six hydrazine tanks. I set them in the shadow of a rover to keep them from heating up too much. There’s more shade and a cooler temperature near the Hab, but fuck that. If they’re going to blow up, they can