The Martian does a decent job with the basics—soil mechanics, rover navigation, and life‑support calculations. But the book skips a lot of the gritty details: the radiation shielding design, the telemetry delay strategies, and the exact redundancy schemes we have in the Mars Science Laboratory. The engineers who sent Curiosity and Perseverance spent months modeling the power budget for every solar‑panel orientation and fine‑tuning the heat‑shield geometry for the entry phase. In the book, those things are simplified to keep the story moving. So while the core concepts line up, the real engineering is far more complex and unforgiving.