The atmosphere is very thin, so can you get high enough that the atmosphere becomes irrelevant before you’re going fast enough that the atmosphere is a threat? It depends on the thrust profile.
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Would you need windows in a rocket to survive a launch from Mars? It’s an interesting question. So Minovitch had to get out the chalk and walk them through it and convince them that it would actually work. The managers making the decisions are typically people who were once engineers but haven’t done it in a while and perhaps are not so good at maths any more. He was a very junior person, somewhat analogous to the character in the movie. He was a trajectory analyst at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1960s and he came up with the idea of the gravity assist that became the basis of the Voyager programme to go to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. It may appear to be a Hollywood device, but in fact there is a basis in history for such a person.
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One thing in the movie that is possible, and perhaps the producers knew the story, is the character of the nerd (played by Donald Glover) who comes up with the gravity-assist trajectory that rescues the mission. Martians are not going to get their water by importing hydrazine from Earth and burning it with precious cabin oxygen, they are going to bake it out of the soil. Martian soil is about 5% water by weight at low latitude, and up to 60% water near the poles. Water is available in its natural state on Mars as ice, permafrost, or soaked into the soil. That’ll certainly work, but if I was stranded on Mars I would just make water out of the soil. Matt Damon’s character took hydrazine from the rocket fuel and dissociated it into nitrogen and hydrogen, which you can do, and he burned the hydrogen with oxygen to make water. Even climbing the ladders in the initial scenes, they seem to be exerting themselves. As far as I can see they didn’t bother with that in the movie. If you’ve got a 150lb person with a 150lb suit, that’s going to feel like 100lb on Mars – lighter than the person alone on Earth. Mars has about one third the gravity of Earth, which is an asset to explorers because you’re wearing a heavy space suit, but it doesn’t feel that heavy. But if Columbus had waited for ocean liners, or even clipper ships, he never would have gone anywhere. There’ll be ships like that some day, just like there were ocean liners a few hundred years after Columbus made his voyage.
Going to Mars is not about realising the vision of a giant science-fiction spaceship, it is about sending a payload from Earth to Mars that is capable of supporting a small group of people, and then sending that or a comparable payload back. It’s just that the ship was so big and elaborate and expensive-looking. The diameter of the torus and the rate of rotation on the Mars Orbiter spacecraft looked about right to create an artificial gravity level somewhere between Mars and Earth, so that was OK.
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