The Martian

There were plenty of wires and batteries around to make a spark. But you can’t just ignite wood with a small electric spark. So I collected ribbons of bark from local palm trees, then got a couple of sticks and rubbed them together to create enough friction to…

No not really. I vented pure oxygen at the stick and gave it a spark. It lit up like a match.

With my mini-torch in hand, I started a slow hydrazine flow. It sizzled on the iridium and disappeared. Soon I had short bursts of flame sputtering from the chimney.

The main thing I had to watch was the temperature. Hydrazine breaking down is extremely exothermic. So I did it a bit at a time, constantly watching the readout of a thermocouple I’d attached to the iridium chamber.

Point is, the process worked!

Each hydrazine tank holds a little over 50 liters, which would be enough to make 100 liters of water. I’m limited by my oxygen production, but I’m all excited now, so I’m willing to use half my reserves. Long story short, I’ll stop when the tank is half-empty, and I’ll have 50 liters of water at the end!

LOG ENTRY: SOL 34

Well, that took a really long time. I’ve been at it all night with the hydrazine. But I got the job done.

I could have finished faster, but I figured caution’s best when setting fire to rocket fuel in an enclosed space.

Boy is this place a tropical jungle now, I’ll tell ya.

It’s almost 30°C in here, and humid as all hell. I just dumped a ton of heat and 50 liters of water into the air.

During this process, the poor Hab had to be the mother of a messy toddler. It’s been replacing the oxygen I’ve used, and the water reclaimer is trying to get the humidity down to sane levels. Nothing to be done about the heat. There’s actually no air-conditioning in the Hab. Mars is cold. Getting rid of excess heat isn’t something we expected to deal with.

I’ve now grown accustomed to hearing the alarms blare at all times. The fire alarm has finally stopped, now that there’s no more fire. The low oxygen alarm should stop soon. The high humidity alarm will take a little longer. The water reclaimer has its work cut out for it today.

For a moment, there was yet another alarm. The water reclaimer’s main tank was full. Booyah! That’s the kind of problem I want to have!

Remember the space suit I vandalized yesterday? I hung it on its rack and carried buckets of water to it from the reclaimer. It can hold an atmosphere of air in. It should be able to handle a few buckets of water.

Man I’m tired. Been up all night, and it’s time to sleep. But I’ll drift off to dreamland in the best mood I’ve been in since Sol 6.

Things are finally going my way. In fact, they’re going great! I have a chance to live after all!

LOG ENTRY: SOL 37

I am fucked, and I’m go

Okay, calm down. I’m sure I can get around this.

I’m writing this log to you, dear future Mars archaeologist, from Rover 2. You may wonder why I’m not in the Hab right now. Because I fled in terror, that’s why! And I’m not sure what the hell to do next.

I guess I should explain what happened. If this is my last entry, you’ll at least know why.

Over the past few days, I’ve been happily making water. It’s been going swimmingly. (See what I did there? “Swimmingly”?)

I even beefed up the MAV fuel plant compressor. It was very technical (I increased the voltage to the pump). So I’m making water even faster now.

After my initial burst of 50 liters, I decided to settle down and just make it at the rate I get O2. I’m not willing to go below a 25-liter reserve. So when I dip too low, I stop dicking with hydrazine until I get the O2 back up to well above 25 liters.

Important note: When I say I made 50 liters of water, that’s an assumption. I didn’t reclaim 50 liters of water. The additional soil I’d filled the Hab with was extremely dry and greedily sucked up a lot of the humidity. That’s where I want the water to go anyway, so I’m not worried, and I wasn’t surprised when the reclaimer didn’t get anywhere near 50 liters.

I get 10 liters of CO2 every fifteen hours now that I souped up the pump. I’ve done this process four times. My math tells me that, including my initial 50-liter burst, I should have added 130 liters of water to the system.

Well my math was a damn liar!

I’d gained 70 liters in the water reclaimer and the space-suit-turned-water-tank. There’s plenty of condensation on the walls and domed roof, and the soil is certainly absorbing its fair share. But that doesn’t account for 60 liters of missing water. Something was wrong.

That’s when I noticed the other O2 tank.

The Hab has two reserve O2 tanks. One on each side of the structure, for safety reasons. The Hab can decide which one to use whenever it wants. Turns out it’s been topping off the atmosphere from Tank 1. But when I add O2 to the system (via the oxygenator), the Hab evenly distributes the gain between the two tanks. Tank 2 has been slowly gaining oxygen.

That’s not a problem. The Hab is just doing its job. But it does mean I’ve been gaining O2 over time. Which means I’m not consuming it as fast as I thought.

At first, I thought “Yay! More oxygen! Now I can make water faster!” But then a more disturbing thought occurred to me.

Follow my logic: I’m gaining O2. But the amount I’m bringing in from outside is constant. So the only way to “gain” it is to be using less than I thought. But I’ve been doing the hydrazine reaction with the assumption that I was using all of it.

The only possible explanation is that I haven’t been burning all the released hydrogen.

It’s obvious now, in retrospect. But it never occurred to me that some of the hydrogen just wouldn’t burn. It got past the flame, and went on its merry way. Damn it, Jim, I’m a botanist, not a chemist!

Chemistry is messy, so there’s unburned hydrogen in the air. All around me. Mixed in with the oxygen. Just…hanging out. Waiting for a spark so it can blow the Hab up!

Once I figured this out and composed myself, I got a Ziploc-sized sample bag and waved it around a bit, then sealed it.

Then, a quick EVA to a rover, where we keep the atmospheric analyzers. Nitrogen: 22 percent. Oxygen: 9 percent. Hydrogen: 64 percent.

I’ve been hiding here in the rover ever since.

It’s Hydrogenville in the Hab.

I’m very lucky it hasn’t blown. Even a small static discharge would have led to my own private Hindenburg.

So, I’m here in Rover 2. I can stay for a day or two, tops, before the CO2 filters from the rover and my space suit fill up. I have that long to figure out how to deal with this.

The Hab is now a bomb.

CHAPTER 5

LOG ENTRY: SOL 38

I’m still cowering in the rover, but I’ve had time to think. And I know how to deal with the hydrogen.

I thought about the atmospheric regulator. It pays attention to what’s in the air and balances it. That’s how the excess O2 I’ve been importing ends up in the tanks. Problem is, it’s just not built to pull hydrogen out of the air.