As NASA Hall of Fame astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz was recently being honored with the Buzz Aldrin Quadrennial Space Award in New York City, an author in the United States was accumulating accolades for his science fiction novel about a botanist stranded in Mars. The engine, so to speak, that propels Andy Weir’s novel The Martian is VASIMR, the revolutionary space propulsion system partly developed in Costa Rica under the direction of Mr. Chang Diaz.

Aerospace luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and space cartographer Maria Zuber were also honored at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner. Mars exploration was clearly front and center during the awards ceremony. Ms. Zuber has created navigational maps of the Red Planet, Mr. Musk is very interested in developing affordable missions to Mars, and Mr. Chang Diaz continues to develop his own Variable Space Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), a project that is supported by NASA.

Readers of the Costa Rica Star who are familiar with VASIMR know that various components were developed in Guanacaste, precisely at the Ad Astra Rocket Company facility near the Daniel Oduber Quiros International Airport in Liberia (LIR) as well as the EARTH University campus, also in Guanacaste. VASIMR is considered by many aerospace analysts to be the most viable propulsion system for future manned missions to Mars.

VASIMR is at the heart of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian. Mr. Weir is a “hard sci-fi” author; this means that for him, “first comes the science, than the fiction.” Writing for online magazine Salon, Mr. Weir explains:

I started working up a manned Mars mission in my head. I even wrote my own software to calculate the orbital trajectory my imaginary crew would take to get from Earth to Mars. And not some boring Hohmann Transfer, either! I envisioned a constantly accelerating VASIMR powered ship […]

Here’s part of a review of The Martian by an optical engineer and flight enthusiast:

The story takes place on a NASA manned Mars mission (you immediately see the fiction here!), perhaps 30-40 years in the future. An ion-engine-powered (VASIMR actually) Mars transfer vehicle (the Hermes) has been built and used on two previous manned missions. These are short-term missions (about a month on the surface), using fairly extensive infrastructure delivered to the surface by multiple unmanned supply ships.

That hard sci-fi writer Mr. Weir chose a space propulsion system created by a Tico space entrepreneur and partly developed in Costa Rica is an encouraging sign of VASIMR acceptance among the space community. In late 2011, the Costa Rica Star interviewed Mr. Chang Diaz with regard to criticism launched by naysayers who think that the commercial aerospace industry is relying too heavily on fantasy:

All these commercial space initiatives are more than welcome, and they tell us that innovation is still very much alive and strong. Besides, VASIMR serves to complement these space systems with a propulsion method designed to be operated exclusively in outer space. There’s no science fiction here. Both are indispensable elements of a space transport infrastructure that is efficient, viable and economically sustainable.

At the time of that interview, there was no science fiction literature related to VASIMR, but now there is. You can pick up The Martian at Amazon in various formats.