What should they do? Scrub the mission, return home, have the stowaway taken into custody, and start a new mission. Simple.
share"In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option, I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this."
- The Martian (2015)
They could try to re-purpose the CO2 removal in the spacesuits, I guess.
The commander says something about not having enough fuel to turn around, considering the speed they were going. I know it sounds absurd and counterintuitive , since there was obviously going to be enough fuel to go all the way to Mars and back, but there may be truth in it. This type of space vessel follows a specific pre-calculated trajectory. There isn’t a lot of room for maneuvering.
shareI suppose it's possible the fuel back home was transported to the planet first, which means they'd only have enough fuel to slow down the ship enough to land on the planet, but not to turn back.
shareFrom what I gathered there was already people on mars, from when she said cant she off herself and let someone from mars come up to blah blah, so they had established something there.
But we don't need none of that. float, grab, fly away, or not... then die in the sunlight.
Right there was already a colony on mars, and their own resupply materials had been flown up before them.
It’s in the dialogue albeit not stressed — if they’d overemphasized it, no doubt some of us would be whining about bad writing and unnecessary exposition
They couldn't turn around. The ship had already accelerated to start the trip to Mars. The obvious thing would be to cut food to half (or 3/4) rations. You can't do that with air though, so they had to climb the spindle to get more oxygen.
Just make sure you tether it to yourself next time.
It's a "cycler". Cyclers don't turn around. A cycler is a large ship in a solar orbit that intersects the orbits of both earth and Mars. To get to Mars, you take off in an orbital ship at exactly the right time and rendezvous with the cycler as is goes by earth. The orbiter has only enough juice to get to the cycler. Some time later, like a year or two, the cycler's orbit coincides with Mars. You get back in the orbiter and go down to Mars. Some time later, like a year or two, you fuel up the orbital ship with fuel manufactured on Mars, go back up to orbit, catch the cycler and ride it until it coincides with Earth's position. It's all got to be timed perfectly, and if you miss your window, you're screwed.
shareThis is great, your description contains the necessary details to understand what was going on. Too bad this wasn't properly explained in the movie...
shareToo many science fiction shows depict space travel like getting in a car and driving. I think The Expanse does this well, accelerating constantly for 1/2 the trip and then decelerating constantly for the second half of the trip,
shareThis was a terrible movie.
shareIt was meant to be a moral test or a philosophical conundrum, not a tactical one.
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Throw him out the airlock. Job done.