(booming)

[Narrator] The storm had escalated to severe.

(crashing)

And we had no choice but to abort the mission.

(booming)

I'm Ridley Scott, and I'm the director of The Martian.

And probably a few other films that you've heard of.

I think I landed first on real dystopia.

You've got to move on.

You've got to move forward.

Because The Martian was a more optimistic view,

I thought it was kind of interesting.

I liked the dry humor.

I liked the gallows humor.

You can joke about nearly having died.

[Male] I'm entering this log for the record.

This is Mark Watney, and I'm still alive, obviously.

NASA looked toward the landing on Mars in 2025,

maybe 2030 in The Martian.

That's why everything's slightly futuristic,

but not a lot.

I mean, the suits look like they could be today.

The ship is an evolution of fundamentally

the International Space Station, because once

you're up there, you don't need aerodynamics,

'cause it's a vacuum.

If I'd known about Martian water, which we now believe

to be salt or brackish, that may have affected

the story a little bit.

Keith would have actually been trying to work out

how the hell do I turn brackish water into drinking water?

It would be a pity to have lost the sequence

where he blows himself up.

(crashing)

Mars right now is about eight months there

and eight months back,

so it's impractical right now at the moment.

They just evolved what they call a plasma engine.

So you might change a journey to Mars from eight months

down to three months, four months.

Does that mean a journey to the next planet

is not impossible?

There's a lot of reasons why I think that it's important

to go to Mars, to spend that kind of research,

intense research and planning,

because it teaches us something

every time we do something as monumental as that,

and it's monumental.

And that learning curve could evolve into

all kinds of information.

And the fact they now know there's salt water on Mars,

that will tell them a lot once they go into the water.

What evolved there?

How did it evolve?

Was Mars like here?

If Mars was like here long ago,

are we heading in that direction?

Mars now is the stepping stone off into what I call

deep water, because once you're beyond Mars,

you're gonna go into deep space, where you have to

come to terms with flying close to the speed of light.

There will be people who will be definitely willing

to go off into space and never return, for sure.

Probably got a list now of half a million people

who say, I'll do it.

[Female] Would you want to go to Mars if you could?

Absolutely no way.

But I wouldn't need to.

I've just done it.