>>Here we go!

[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]

? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow

? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around

(Dr. Regina) Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. My name is Regina Barber DeGraaf and I teach astronomy and physics at Western Washington University. I’m here with my cohost today Western Washington University student and science reporter for the Science Magazine, Jonathan Flynn. We are super excited to interview best-selling author of novel turned film, The Martin and with his newest book coming out, Artemis, Andy Weir, welcome to our show.

(Andy) Thanks for having me.

(Regina) Spark Science is basically, we have this conversation and we’re very chronological on this show. We’re very past, present, future because I’m a scientist and that’s how my brain works. We’re going to go in the way back machine and I’m going to ask you questions about your childhood. I was reading about you and your dad is a physicist. A particle physicist.

(Andy) OK, since you’re an actual physicist I have to make the distinction. He’s a linear accelerator physicist. He’s not going down to the quantum level on anything. He’s not that kind of particle physicist. He works with particles.

(Regina) We all do right? [Laughing.]

(Andy) Are we not all working with particles? He’s fine, he’s just retired.

(Regina) How was that though? My parents didn’t go to college, I didn’t know what a physicist was. I liked astronomy and kind of fell into physics. As a kid you knew what physics was, pretty soon I’m guessing. What was your first like, I know what physics is and maybe I don’t want to do that or I do want to do that?

(Andy) It was my dad’s profession. It’s like growing up, your dad’s a cobbler, you’re going to know about shoes.

(Regina) But we wear shoes. My dad worked for a phone company.

(Andy) You live in the physical universe.

(Regina) That’s true. But I didn’t it now the difference between physics, chemistry, biology, and all of that kind of stuff. When you were a kid . . .

(Andy) Those are all just applied physics.

(Regina) Oh God. Did you ever want to be a physicist then? Were you like, I want to be like my dad?

(Andy) No, I never wanted to be a physicist. No slight on dad. I liked math a lot when I was younger and in high school. My first year of college or so, I was really into math and I thought I would go into peer math. I always wanted to be a writer as long as I could remember, even when I was a wee tot.

(Regina) Was your dad like, “Yes, a writer!”

(Andy) My dad was like, “Whatever you want, man.” My mom was a big influence. She was an electoral engineer. I grew up in a nerd household. For dad, science was really a passion. For mom, electrical engineering was a job. Now that she’s retired, she doesn’t have any interest in it or the field. She did it to pay the bills. I think I got the literary side from mom. She loves to read.

(Regina) Maybe that was her secret passion too.

(Andy) It wasn’t so secret. She loved reading. Loves, present tense. Still alive, my mother.

(Regina) Did she write as well?

(Andy) No she didn’t write. She just liked to read. Also, my father was big into science fiction stories and he had a shelf jam packed full of sci-fi novels from the 50s and 60s, his youth. I grew up reading those. I’m Gen X. I’m 45 years old but it turns out I grew up reading Baby Boomer science fiction. I’d be reading a science fiction book, this was the 1980s, and at the half way point there’s an ad for Kent Cigarettes. You know, you just kind of keep going. [Laughing.]

My dad had a poster that was a map of the moon but it’s just the near side. I was like, “Why is there no map of the far side” He’s like, “Check the date.” The map was printed in 1959. We didn’t know what the other side of the moon looked like in 1959. Not until the Soviets sent a probe around it.
That’s all they knew about the moon!

(Regina) I haven’t even thought of that. I want to let Jonathan ask questions too.

(Andy) Awe, screw him. [Laughing.]

(Jonathan) I am curious, did you have a defining moment in your life that pushed you towards the sciences where you said, “That’s what I want to do! I want to be a programmer.”?

(Andy) No specific defining moment. I’ve just always had an interest in science. I’ve always wanted to be a writer but I like regular meals. When I was going to college I chose software engineering as my major.

(Regina) There’s also that issue of, not computer science, but other science where people wonder if they’ll be poor forever. I remember that you had a job offer fairly early in your life to do computer science.

(Andy) I was a computer programmer at 15 working for a national lab. It was anomalous, it was sort of weird. Basically that makes it sound like I’m some child prodigy but really that lab, Sandia Labs, just on the edge of the town I lived in, Livermore California. They did this program where they hired local teenagers to clean test tubes or whatever. I was one of them.

The lab I ended up being put into said they didn’t really need anybody to clean test tubes but they did need somebody are write softer to do big operations on large data sets. This was before Excel existed or anything like that. This is a computer, here’s a book on how to program computers, go over there.

(Regina) You didn’t really even know it. You were thrown into that.

(Andy) Yep. And I loved it! I was like, “I really like doing this.” 25 years as a computer programmer I really enjoyed that career. When I quit my last engineering job to go full time on writing, this was after The Martian was selling well, it was clear I could live off of it, it was not a “take this job and shove it” situation. I was actually really reluctant to leave. I held on to that job a lot longer than I had to just because I liked it.

(Regina) I know I have this problem where I still teach and I still do this stuff because I still want to be seen as a scientist instead of doing other things I do, I do like, inclusion work and outreach and stuff like that. Was there any part of that in not wanting to let go of being a computer scientist?

(Andy) I don’t think there was any particular urge to not let go of the profession. I can always do side projects of my own at home. I kind of have to make a rule not to do that because if I do, that’s all I’ll do. I’ll do that instead of writing because I’m really bad at self-discipline.

(Regina) Then your editors would call you and yell at you.

(Andy) There would be some of that yeah. I didn’t want to leave my office mates and stuff. I liked my coworkers, I liked my boss. I enjoyed that company. It was called MobileIron. It’s still called MobileIron. It was a good place to work. That’s the biggest adjustment for me transitioning from being an engineer to being a writer full time was the lack of coworkers. Now you’re by yourself all day and I’m a social guy. That was rough on me. I don’t think too many people feel sorry for me. This is a zeroth world problem but it was an adjustment.

(Regina) It’s very real. My husband is an attorney and he’s not an extrovert. He does not like talking to people but he’s had to work in an office by himself for multiple years and it’s actually gotten to him too. I think it’s a human thing that we want to talk to people, you know?

(Andy) I also like being part of a team. A collect effort against a common problem. All of us working on the same software was neat. Now I’m by myself on the book. I wouldn’t want to work, I don’t think I’d want to work with 6 other authors on a book. I think that would be bad.

(Regina) One would be good though. There’s the Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman right, Good Omens. Great book.

(Andy) Actually I like the straight Terry Pratchett books better.

(Regina) I don’t. I actually like . . .

(Andy) I love Terry Pratchett. I’m a big fan.

(Regina) I do too. The Night Watch Series is the one I love the most.

(Andy) Yeah, like the Park City.

(Jonathan) Going back to we were talking about, the transition of going from being a scientist to being a writer.

(Andy) We’re not there yet. Go on.

(Jonathan) What I’m curious about is that it’s very, very challenging to communicate complex scientific topics like chemistry especially that are in engineering and physics to the common reader. What did it take for you to get to that point where you could comfortably do that?

(Andy) For The Martian, and also for Artemis, I needed basically humor. If you’re going to do a massive exposition dump on the reader, you need to give them some reason to want to keep reading it. For the Martian especially and for Artemis also, make it funny. If they’re going to learn something make it funny. That’s the first person narration smart-ass style that both books have that lets me get away with that somewhat.

(Regina) Did you train on how to make things funny?

(Andy) I think being a smart ass has always come naturally to me. [Laughing.]

(Regina) I know you’ve researched really hard with all of the science. I remember you saying that the main character in The Martian is the person you would like to be, the kind of scientist that you would like to be.

(Andy) The idealized version of me.

(Regina) Right.

(Andy) He has all of my good qualities and none of my many many flaws.

(Regina) I should say, “Right, your flaws.” [Laughing]

(Andy) He’s considerably more attractive than you Andy, for instance.

(Regina) I don’t want to go down the Matt Damon train. [Laughing.] I’ve talked to authors before, not just about researching the science part of it, which Jonathan was talking about, but there’s also that aspect of science communication and that’s a skill that people have to actually learn. There are other things you can research like, social dynamics, working in a team, how certain people exist in certain societies and different groups, etc. Do you research all of these other things too?

(Andy) Mostly I research the science and I make up the rest. Wright or wrong my goal is to entertain, not educate as much. If I accidentally educate people, fantastic, but my number one objective is that I want you to enjoy the book. That’s it. No message, no moral, no lesson, just please like the book. If you don’t I’ve failed and if you do I’ve succeeded. It’s as simple as that.

(Jonathan) Similarly then, when it came to doing the research for the books, obviously The Martian took a lot of research and a lot of knowledge to get it as accurate as it could be, where did you draw the line and say, “Alright, I need to stop researching and I need to start writing this book?” Or was it all kind of a combined process?

(Andy) I think I never drew that line. I just went way further down the rabbit hole than I needed to for The Martian. I calculated the orbital trajectories to get from Earth to Mars with a constantly accelerating ion craft engine. I had to do it all in simulation. I wrote my own software.

(Regina) Like the transfer orbits and all of that stuff?

(Andy) Yes. Orbital dynamists at JBL checked my work and said that I was right within 1-2%. That’s pretty good. Of course if you were off by 1-2% you would miss Mars entirely but this is a book. [Laughing]

(Regina) I think Jonathan was actually telling me that his mom was reading it. I’ll let you tell that story.

(Jonathan) She was reading it. She has never really taken chemistry before, I think she took it a long time ago in high school, but she understood the whole process when it came to making water out of the rocket fuel because it was so easily explained. How were you able to do that?

(Andy) I don’t know. You have to read the books. Great interview guys! [Laughing]

(Regina) I don’t know, next question. [Laughing.]

(Andy) Hell if I know. I just knew I had to get the information across so I decided to explain it in layman’s terms and also throw a bunch of humor in there just to keep the reader engaged in the content. I didn’t want it to read like a Wikipedia article. No offence to Wikipedia, they’re great if that’s what you’re looking for. If you want to be entertained, unless you’re me, I can read a Wikipedia article, you know how it is. “I need to know when the 7 Years War ended” but then ten minutes later, giraffe mating calls. It’s a wiki wonder.

(Regina) I want to bring us back to your short story though, The Egg. I watched one of the fan created videos, it’s so good! The instant I saw the title I thought of H.G. Wells The Crystal Egg, it’s a short story. It’s so good. It’s about Mars actually. The egg itself is basically this window to Mars. It’s a short story that is totally different from yours.

(Andy) That’s good! It’s totally different. [Laughing.]

(Regina) No no!

(Andy) Edit that out.

(Jonathan) Oh, no that stays. [Laughing.]

(Regina) It’s a totally different plot and a totally different premise. They’re both good. Backing it up! It made me think of the kind of genre of the short story and talking about sci-fi. I liked your perspective that we are everyone.

(Andy) Spoiler! It’s been out for like almost 10 years. We’re good.

(Regina) I almost said something else terrible about Harry Potter but I won’t. I’ll tell ya later.

(Andy) Darth Vader was his father! Rosebud was a sled!

(Regina) It’s interesting that one, rapper Logic, do you know about this?

(Andy) Yes he asked for permission first.

(Regina) So rapper logic basically started the concept of his album with your story.

(Andy) I’m on the cover. There’s a whole bunch, like a Sargent Pepper style with a whole bunch of people. I’m one of the little faces.

(Regina) We were just talking about working on a team and being isolated. The Egg and The Martian are both isolating stories. Is that like, what happened there?

(Andy) Good question. I guess, first off it’s easier to tell a story when you just have one person dealing with life. The Martian is straight up survival story. It’s a good old fashion Robinson aid [sp?] that’s the category they’re called. It’s hardly a new concept. It’s Apollo 13 meets Castaway. It’s all about Tom Hanks I guess. Tom Hanks with Matt Damon is Saving Private Ryan. Try to keep up. [Laughing.]

(Regina) I’m not that much younger than you. I’ve seen these movies and I get these references.

(Andy) [Laughing.] I understood that reference.

(Regina) I did as well. I love Captain America, I’m super excited about Infinity Wars. Anyway, see we’re just going down the rabbit holes. I just want to command you on that. I really disliked short stories. I’m going to start that, I disliked short stories but I started listening to them after LaVar Burton reads his podcast and I started reading more. I read the H.G. Well one and thought, “I get this now, I get what a short story is.” Yours is very good.

(Jonathan) Going back to the technology of The Martian, obviously a lot of it was based off of real technology that has been developed or will be developed. Where do you see the future of space technology in the next 50 years?

(Andy) 50 years? Well the most important thing is to drive down the cost of low Earth orbit. I don’t think we’re really going to get anywhere until that gets done. You have companies like Space X working on that famously and other companies are quietly doing the same thing like Boeing and Orbital ATK, they’re all working to be competitive in getting freight to low Earth orbit. Once competition drives that price down, there will be some magical point where middle class people can afford to go into space. Then there will be a whole space boom and it will be like the commercial airline industry.

Once that happens, we will start to see real space tourism, it becomes viable to have a tourist destination on the moon, which is what Artemis is about and so on. I think that’s kind of the direction we have to go in first.

As far as government missions to put humans on Mars, the flags and footprints type of missions, I really think they need to invent two things. The two things that they really need to work on are ion propulsion as depicted in The Martin and that’s real technology that exists now. The other one is they need to start doing centrifugal gravity. If you have someone in zero G on their way to Mars, then as soon as they step out on the surface they’re just going to go [makes a falling noise.] People have to be carried out of those Soyuz capsules when they come out of ISS.

(Regina) Let’s talk about Artemis a little bit. The idea of tourisms on the moon has been around right? Most recently in my mind, I remember it on Futurama. Right? That’s a good episode.

(Andy) That’s a good episode. [Singing] “The whalers on the moon…”

(Regina) Exactly! Where did this first idea bubble up into your psyche?

(Andy) I think the main thing is that I wanted to write a story that took place in humanities first city that’s not on Earth. Where’s that going to be? It can either be in low Earth orbit or the Moon or Mars, right? Boring or not I want to be realistic. I realized the moon is the obvious place to put it because there are a lot of natural resources there. There are metals, plenty of oxygen trapped in the ore that you can smelt and get out, you can build your city with the stuff that’s available right there on the surface of the Moon. It’s very close.

If you were on a football field and you were standing at one goal line and Mars was at the other goal line, the moon would be four inches in front of you. That gives you an idea of the scale of distance. It’s close enough where if you get to the point where low Earth orbit is something middle class people can afford, it’s not that much more expensive to go to the moon.

(Jonathan) You’re story talks about a colony that’s on the moon. Until we get to that point, what can an everyday person do to get involved with the space process?

(Andy) Just jump really high. [Laughing] [Making a struggling sound] of course you could go into just about any field. One way or another it leads back to space technology. Just about any scientific discipline has applications in space technology. I personally thing that what space technology needs more than anything else is materials technology.

Creating new materials that can either, if you could make something that had an extremely high heat resistance, like higher than anything we have, or something that didn’t expand or contract too much due to temperature, something that could handle extreme heat and a decent amount of pressure, we’re talking about some super material, then you could make booster engines that take the full advantage of the specific impulse that hydrogen and oxygen fuel has.

Right now, if you mix hydrogen and oxygen, which is the best fuel there is in terms of chemical propulsion, you need the least amount of mass to get the maximum velocity out of your ship, if you try to do that at stoichiometric values, in other words you’re making exactly the right amount of hydrogen and oxygen to make water, if you do it that way, you’re going to melt your engine. You always have to do it at a 6:1 ratio. It’s really really inefficient because they have to do that to keep the engine cool enough to not melt. If you solve that problem, that would be solved with materials technology.

Also, if you had some super material that could withstand an enormous amount of pressure you could store the fuel in a smaller volume. Smaller volume means lighter space craft. That saves money too. And, if you can come up with something that has a tensile strength up in the 60 GigaPascal range, which we are not anywhere near inventing, then you can invent a space elevator.

(Regina) I thought that’s where you were going with that. So are you pro space elevator if we could have something like that?

(Andy) If we had the material, yes.

(Jonathan) Can you explain what a space elevator is for people who don’t know?

(Regina) I barely know.

(Andy) I can. The idea is that Earth is spinning around ounces a day. If you imagine spinning a rock around on a string, it will stay out there, right? How long would you have to make a tether so that the rotation of earth would keep a cable taught? It would keep it tight out with a counter weight out here such that now you have a line going straight up into space. Then you could have an elevator that just climbs that line.

Now you no longer need propellant to get up and down, you just need energy and that’s a lot easier. The problem is, imagine you take a rope and have an infinite pit and you’re Superman you can hold up any amount of mass. You take the rope and you start lowering it into the pit. Eventually the amount of rope in the pit is getting heavier and heavier and heavier and it’s still dangling. You have no problem holding it up.

Eventually the weight of the rope will equal the intense strength of the rope and it snaps, just from the weight of the rope alone. You think, “No problem, I’ll just braid two ropes together.” Well, then it snaps at exactly the same length because you have doubled the cross sectional surface area but you have also doubled the weight below it. So, the only solution is to use a steel cable. Now you can go further down but it will also eventually snap. So you use carbon fiber. It will go further even, but it will still snap. We are nowhere near that breaking strength, that ultimate yield strength necessary to make something like a space elevator.

(Regina) Just snapping from tensile strength, but there’s also, I was reading about this, people were worried about it also, what if it breaks for other reasons? That kind of disaster and damage that it would do if it came down. It depends on where it would break, if it would go up versus down.

(Andy) Yeah. That problem is probably less of an issue because you could probably have it self-destruct. It could break into a bunch of pieces and it would fall down slower or something like that.

(Regina) That sounds very sci-fi like.

(Jonathan) You could write a whole book on that.

(Andy) I wouldn’t be the first to write a book about a space elevator.

(Jonathan) For people who a lot of that would seem confusing to them, maybe they don’t enjoy science or math for whatever reason. What advice would you give to a student who is currently struggling with the enjoyment of math and science?

(Andy) Well, I mean, this is not what teachers want to hear. If you’re not enjoying math or science then maybe that’s not the field for you. There’s no reason to force yourself into something you don’t want to do. But, if you like it and are struggling to understand it, then there’s a lot of tools at your disposal. If it’s something that’s interesting to you and you’re just having a hard time grasping it, there are a lot of ways to grasp it. Fortunately the internet has all sorts of tutorials and all sorts of ways to learn it if you want. But, if you’re fundamentally not interested, then if you’re fundamentally just not interested in it in any way, then it’s probably not fair to try to push yourself into it.

(Regina) I think that people may not know that things they are interested in have a base in science. There’s that issue too.

(Andy) There’s so much stuff that has a base in science. By the same token, my very life depends on medical science and I’m not going to became a doctor. I rely on subject experts to do that for me. If you’re not interested in math and science, you’re like, “Yeah I like using my iPhone but I don’t need to know how to make one.”

(Regina) Right.

(Jonathan) In The Martian you have these characters Vincent Kapoor, you have Commander Lewis, you have Johanson, all of these people who come from traditionally marginalized communities. Was that intentional on your part?

(Andy) Johnson is just a white . . .

(Jonathan) She’s a woman. When you look at mission control in 1955-60 it was all young white men.

(Andy) There were some old white men too. [Laughing.] There was a nice spectrum of old white men, young white men, etc. People who smoked this kind of cigarette and people who smoked that kind of cigarette.

(Regina) That’s very accurate.

(Jonathan) I guess my question about that is, was that a conscious on your part to include them in your books or how did they come into being?

(Andy) A lot of it was based on the realities of NASA’s demographics. It really is diverse. The astronauts are actually 50/50 men and women now. They do that on purpose. In the science fields in America, there’s a lot of South Asians and East Asians in the sciences.

(Regina) I’m half Mexican too.

(Andy) There you go! Even more diversity. You’re just a big pile of diversity.

(Regina) That’s why I have a show. I should take that out of there. [Laughing]

(Andy) It’s a pleasure to be on your affirmative action based show.

(Regina) I do, yeah. I’m diversifying it. I think Jonathan brings up a good point. You put out your chapters online. Was there anyone who was like, “Hey, it would be really nice if this character looked like me.” Did anything like that happen?

(Andy) Online, the only changes I made based on feedback were fact checking. Such as, “You made a mistake in this math,” or “You got the chemistry wrong here.” I did make those mistakes and I did correct them thanks to my readers. Not like story advice or anything like that. Or character development or character ethnicities, that was all me. When I come up with a character I tend to say, “Ok brain, I need somebody to do this.” For the commander, I don’t know why I decided to make her a woman. I didn’t have a conscious decision to be like, I needed a leader for the mission and I ended up with a woman.

(Regina) I was talking to Jonathan about sci-fi that I used to read. Those books were not very diverse at all.

(Andy) In the 50s and stuff like that the women were still in the back of the rocket washing dishes and stuff like that. I mean, they don’t stand up. They were OK for their time.

(Regina) Yeah [laughing.]

(Andy) For their day. If you read something like Heinlein, it was more progressive than you think.

(Regina) We were just talking about that.

(Andy) He got into his weird dirty old man phase until the 80s. In starship troopers the enter space navy was all women.

(Regina) Right.

(Andy) Also, tunnel in the sky that he wrote, it’s one of my favorite books, the main character is actually black. At the time, they would never have allowed him to say, “This guy’s black.” He puts in clues and hints in the book that the main character was black but so that the publisher wouldn’t know.

(Regina) I do want to say it was good and progressive at the time but also, times change.

(Andy) Not all of that stuff stands up now.

(Regina) Human is white and human is English language. Human language is English language. I didn’t realize any of this until I began picking it up again in my adulthood and I was like, “Oh man!”

(Andy) Thomas Jefferson had slaves but he wrote the declaration Of Independence. You have to grade on a curve.

(Regina) You do.

(Andy) We’re getting one of these from now on. Literally everyone behind the camera. There’s people walking by on the street. [Laughing.]

(Regina) I want to thank you for being on our show. I really do appreciate how diverse and welcoming your books are trying to be especially The Martian. I wanted to thank you for being here and talking to us.

(Andy) Thank you for having me.

(Regina) And thank you to Village Books for sponsoring you to be here. Village Books is awesome. It’s a great local book store here in Bellingham Washington. We’re done!

Thanks for joining us. If you missed any of the show go to the website sparksciencenow.com. Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE Spark Radio and Western Washington University. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us a message on Twitter or Facebook @sparksceincenow.

[?Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]

? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in

? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground

[End of podcast.]
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