I’m a little behind on my reading of The Space Review, but last week, Eric Sterner cautioned (as Keith Cowing has been doing repeatedly) space enthusiasts not to imagine that the movie will somehow sell NASA programs or budgets. Note the discussion about lack of redundancy in comments. Weir’s scenario assumes that NASA is going to do Apollo to Mars. The purpose of my Kickstarter project is to show why that shouldn’t and probably won’t ever happen. And there’s also this:
Do people who support NASA's fake #JourneyToMars realize how few astronaut opportunities it entails? https://t.co/n4mugagjsr
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 14, 2015
In the book Andy Weir really doesn’t get into the history of the development program itself. Yeah some of the vibe is Apollo style but then again the books doesn’t preclude the fact that all the launches could be done by commercial providers with NASA payloads. Plus we don’t know who built the Hermes which could have been done commercially.
Given the legacy of Apollo I don’t think NASA will ever be the same as the NSF is with the Antarctica program. I can see them going getting the stuff up with commercial providers, possibly getting assembled with commercial astronauts. But the mission themselves would be run Apollo style from Houston and the NASA Astronaut corp. There may be commercial expeditions alongside the NASA Ares program like there are private expeditions along side the official Antarctic program.
Also Weir started writing it in 2009 when SpaceX along with the COTS program was getting off the ground.