Chapter 21

Watney plans cargo placement between rover and trailer, prioritizing vital gear in the rover and cold-tolerant items in the trailer. He stages food externally, loads life-support hardware into the trailer, and routes the AREC and heat reservoir correctly. He verifies CO2 scrubbing via a deliberate CO2 spike, then leaves systems to run overnight.

His first inflation test of the Hab-canvas bedroom catastrophically fails at a seam; he reinforces it with patches and double resin. The second test holds, and he runs an eight-hour seal test while route-planning through Mawrth Vallis into cratered Arabia Terra. He also adapts a rover fan to distribute RTG heat into the bedroom.

At NASA, Mindy captures a rare image of Watney; Venkat reassigns her to continuous Ares 3 monitoring. A meteorologist, Randall Carter, reports a slow dust storm in Arabia Terra that will cut sunlight to ~20%, potentially turning a 45-sol drive into ~225 sols, and obscuring satellite views. They cannot warn Watney.

Watney conducts a full-up test: loads the rover and trailer to travel mass (using rocks as ballast), runs a power “plugs-out” test, then drives multi-sol loops near the Hab, averaging 93 km/sol. He refines daily procedures for stowing/deploying solar panels and the bedroom, and performs an “Air Day” to convert stored CO2 using the oxygenator.

Aboard Hermes, the crew reports mounting maintenance issues: VASIMR cable repairs, reactor power limited by tarnished cooling vanes, life-support filters degrading, and failing cabin cooling. Lewis orders bunk rearrangements, acknowledging Beck and Johanssen’s relationship, to mitigate risk.

Before departure, Watney cooks and refreezes potatoes to improve caloric yield and palatability, runs final diagnostics on all systems, then performs the formal Hab shutdown as a nod to the original mission plan. With full batteries and supplies aboard, he leaves for Schiaparelli on Sol 449.