There’s an interesting article in The Guardian by Dr Robert Zubrin, a leading aerospace engineer, about how they got some of the science bits wrong, and one of the points is the Hermes. Basically the spaceship looks too spiffy. It’s just a delivery vehicle to get the crew to and back from Mars.

Are you a white penis owner, by any chance?

Don’t agree with your assessment of Scott’s racism at all. Park may be a Korean surname, but in the UK, where Scott is from, it’s a common native British surname, you know, as in Nick Park of Wallace and Gromit fame. There isn’t a sizeable Korean population in the UK. So Scott might have read it with his own…

You can’t eat the foliage of a potato plant, it’s poisonous. So he’d have brought some of that back at least.

But the major plot hole I saw was why take a botanist in the first place when you’ve only got space for six scientists on your mission? Wouldn’t a soil scientist be more useful? There’s lots of soil on Mars but precisely no plants. So a soil scientist would be able to make a better study of what was there and its…

Could have brought the leaves back. They’re inedible so he wouldn’t have used them for food.