USA TODAY International Edition
Andy Weir: One scientific leap needed for moon resorts
‘Martian’ author’s latest eyes another space rock
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Andy Weir flops into a plush chair, pulls a lever to recline and throws his arms out wide as if to embrace his recently purchased home on a Silicon Valley culde-sac.
“Martian money!” says a beaming Weir, 45, whose self-published 2011 book The Martian eventually sold 5 million English-language copies and spawned a 2015 Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon that has earned more than $600 million worldwide.
“The apartment I rented before gave me a sweetheart deal because I used to do the maintenance, but now I live in this house, which is pretty cool,” he says. “You could say my life has changed dramatically.”
And things could well change some more for the onetime software engineer turned full-time writer. If The
Martian was his runaway version 1.0 hit, it remains to be seen if his 2.0 offering vaults him into a new income bracket or pegs him as a one-hit wonder.
Weir’s new novel, Artemis, out now, again takes to space to anchor a story that features another inventive protagonist, this time a Saudi-born woman who makes ends meet as a smuggler.
Instead of Mars — where Damon’s marooned astronaut character had to find ways to science his way off the barren planet — the setting now is the moon and the vacation resort of Artemis that is home both to rich tourists and to a squalid underworld.
One scientific leap
As with The Martian, Weir says
Artemis is not only heavily researched but also based on technology that exists today — with one notable exception.
The price of shipping heavy things to the moon such as nuclear reactors — critical to turning the natural ore on the moon into the metal used to build the novel’s spherical habitats — is prohibitive right now. If that plummeted, Artemis the resort could be a reality, Weir says.
“Artemis is built on the conceit that the price of putting mass into low-earth orbit comes down to the equivalent of what we see today with the airline industry,” he says, noting that his research revealed that airlines spend about 16% of their revenues on fuel.
Weir says that if the space industry got that efficient, “putting a kilo of freight into space would cost $35,” or a lot less than one of today’s most costeffective delivery systems, Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets. SpaceX’s price list says a Falcon 9 launch costs $62 million to put 22,000 kilos into a low earth orbit, or about $3,000 per kilo.
Speaking of Musk, Weir’s first tome got significant lift by all the talk of Mars colonization spearheaded by the Tesla and SpaceX boss.
He might get lucky again with Artemis, which lands as Musk is promising to send tourists around the moon in his rocket next year — and even has designs for what he calls Moon Base Alpha, which conjures images of Weir’s own lunar city.
Being a self-proclaimed geek, Weir dove into his Artemis world-building on a granular level.
He’ll tell you that most of the rocks in the lunar highlands are anorthite, which when smelted (“which takes a lot of energy, hence the reactors”) produces aluminum for building.
He’ll rattle off the fact that Gen4 Energy’s nuclear reactors would likely be the smallest and lightest to get to the moon. And he can rattle off the precise construction of the dome shells that make up his world: “6 centimeters of hull, a meter of crushed lunar rock, and another 6 centimeters of aluminum.”
That sort of specificity, which was integral to the success of The Martian, likely is why Artemis already is in Hollywood’s sights. The directing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego
Movie, 21 Jump Street) has been attached to direct a possible film adaptation.
While the success of The Martian has afforded Weir easy access to scientific minds and institutions, he says he actually conducts all of his research online.
“People expect that I have this big network of scientists, but it’s still faster just to look stuff up online,” he says. “I love all the science; the hard part is the writing.”
Weir says he typically writes in the daytime so that he can hang out with his engineer friends at night. His goal typically is about 1,000 words a day, but that varies.
Some days the words flow; others he winds up playing with his cat or doing some word-working. Despite his Martian lucre, the house he shares with his new girlfriend is modest.
“I guess the only thing worth stealing here is our TV,” he says, and the walls are mostly bare except for a huge The Martian poster signed by the entire cast. “You’re not going to see any Ferraris here, no,” he says. “I still have my old Mazda.”
‘I couldn’t handle the trip’
Another perhaps unexpected detail from the Weir files is that he wouldn’t take a trip to the moon if it were offered. He hates to fly.
“I may write about brave people, but I’m not one of them,” he says, adding that he’ll have to take planes to promote his new book. “I just load up on happy pills. I think it would be neat to go to a place like Artemis, but I couldn’t handle the trip.”
That said, Weir hopes to return to his lunar city many times over the coming years. If Artemis is a hit, he plans to write a series of thrillers all set on the Earth’s grey satellite.
“What I love about this world I’ve built is that it’s its own society without a lot of external influences, like a frontier town,” he says. “Plus, they’re on the freakin’ moon!”