Conclusion: I don't need the water reclaimer at all. I'll drink as needed and dump my waste outdoors. Yeah, that's right, Mars, I'm gonna piss and shit on you. That's what you get for trying to kill me all the time.

Problem is (follow me closely here, the science is pretty complicated), if I cut a hole in the Hab, the air won't stay inside anymore.

Mars and my own stupidity keep trying to kill me.

I'm so close to Schiaparelli I can taste it. I guess it would taste like sand, mostly, but that's not the point.

The planet’s famous red colour is from iron oxide coating everything. So it’s not just a desert. It’s a desert so old it’s literally rusting.

Mars is not Earth. It doesn't have a thick atmosphere to bend light and carry particles that reflect light around corners. It's damn near a vacuum here. Once the sun isn't visible, I'm in the dark. Phobos gives me some moonlight, but not enough to work with. Deimos is a little piece of crap that's no good to anyone.

I stumbled up the hill back toward the Hab. As I crested the rise, I saw something that made me very happy and something that made me very sad: The Hab was intact (yay!) and the MAV was gone (boo!).

They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially ‘colonised’ it. So technically, I colonised Mars.In your face, Neil Armstrong!

By my reckoning, I'm about 100 kilometers from Pathfinder. Technically it's called "Carl Sagan Memorial Station." But with all due respect to Carl, I can call it whatever the hell I want. I'm the King of Mars.