In this chapter, Mark Watney can now E-mail back and forth with NASA, so they can talk to each other. The only problem is, now that NASA can talk to Watney, they won’t shut up… The botanists on Earth have been telling Watney what he needs to do to grow the potatoes, but finally they admit that Watney is doing everything right. Watney also gets an E-mail from Commander Lewis, who was in charge of the Ares 3 crew, which Watney was a part of. Watney also e-mails Commander Lewis back too. Later, Watney gets to harvest the second round of potatoes. Also, Watney receives an E-Mail from Venkat, the man in charge of the Mars Missions. The water reclaimer acts up and he sends an E-mail to NASA about it, but they don’t want him to do anything, but he takes it apart and fixes it anyway, despite having NASA telling him not to take it apart. The airlock also explodes, forcing Watney to figure out how to fix it.
Chapter 14.
In this chapter, Mark Watney works on fixing the airlock after it explodes. Watney tries to find the leak, but he can’t so he builds a fire to use the smoke to figure out where the leak is coming from. He tries four times to make a fire, and finally on the fourth try he finds the leak. He puts duct tape over the leak to try and fix it. The duct tape seems to hold, so he goes to fix the EVA suit, which was also damaged in the explosion. He cuts the arm off of the suit, and uses a resin to fix the faceplate of the suit and the hole in the arm. He also figures out how to get the airlock back to the HAB and how to equalize the pressure. He also exchanges his helmet with Martinez’s helmet, which helps a lot so he can actually see, since his helmet is covered by the sealing resin. He also spells out the message “A-Okay” in front of the camera so NASA knows he’s okay. He also retrieves the potatoes that survived the blast and stores them outside. He figures out he only has enough food for 200 sols-(days)-which might not be enough to survive until NASA can rescue him. He only has a grand total of 600 Sols worth of food. By Sol 856, he’ll die of starvation.
Chapter 15.
In this chapter, Mark Watney and Venkat Kapoor talk to each other about the situation Watney is currently in, and how much food Watney has to survive. The department heads of JPL talk about how they can get food to Watney so he’ll survive until they can rescue him. They come up with a plan, and they tell Watney. He is happy with the plan. The plan is to send a probe with food and a radio to Watney. The department heads of JPL talk about how they will get the probe to Mars, and what they need to do. They talk about how soon Watney will die and how much his health is declining. They also discuss how soon the probe can be launched. Then, they launch the probe successfully, and it starts it’s trip to Mars to bring supplies to Watney, but it crashes and stuff goes sideways. They end up having to start the post failure procedures. The launch is a failure.
