Benedict Wong: Bruce Ng

The Martian

Bruce Ng

Annie Montrose: What the hell is 'Project Elrond'?
Vincent Kapoor: I had to make something up.
Annie Montrose: But 'Elrond'?
Mitch Henderson: Because it's a secret meeting.
Annie Montrose: How do you know that, and why does Elrond mean secret meeting?
Bruce Ng: The Council of Elrond. It's the... it's from The Lord of the Rings. It's the meeting where they decide to destroy the One Ring.
Teddy Sanders: If we're going to call something Project Elrond, I would like my code name to be 'Glorfindel'.
Annie Montrose: [pause] I hate every one of you.

Mitch Henderson: He's not even got to the bad parts yet.
Vincent Kapoor: Well, let's get to the bad parts.
Bruce Ng: We need to remove the nose LR, the windows, and the whole of panel 19.
Vincent Kapoor: You want to take the front of the ship off?
Bruce Ng: Sure. The nose alone is four hundred kilograms.
Vincent Kapoor: You want to send a man into space without the front of his ship?
Bruce Ng: Well, no. We are going to have him cover it with HAB canvas. The hull is mostly there to keep air in. Mars' atmosphere is so thin, you do not need a lot of streamlining. By the time the ship is going fast enough for air resistance to matter, it'll be high enough that there will be practically no air.
Vincent Kapoor: You want to send him into space under a tarp?
Bruce Ng: Yes. Can I go on?
Vincent Kapoor: [exasperated] NO!

Annie Montrose: But if something goes wrong?
Vincent Kapoor: Then we lose the crew.
Bruce Ng: So what, we either have a high chance of killing one person, or a low chance of killing six people. How do we make that decision?
Vincent Kapoor: We don't.
[pointing to Teddy]
Vincent Kapoor: He does.
Mitch Henderson: Yeah, bullshit. It should be Commander Lewis' call.
Teddy Sanders: We still have a chance to bring five astronauts home safe and sound. I'm not risking their lives.
Mitch Henderson: Let them make that decision.
Teddy Sanders: Mitch, we are going with option one.
Mitch Henderson: You god damn coward.

Bruce Ng: Okay, um, I'm going to start by stating for the record, you are not going to like this.
Vincent Kapoor: Oh yeah.
Mitch Henderson: Yeah. The problem is the intercept velocity. The Hermes, well... it... it... can't enter Mars orbit, otherwise they will never have enough fuel to make it home. The MAV is only designed to enter low Mars orbit. So in order for Mark to escape Mars' gravity entirely to intercept with Hermes...
Vincent Kapoor: He has to be going fast.
Mitch Henderson: Exactly.
Bruce Ng: Which means we need to make the MAV lighter. A lot lighter. Five thousand kilograms lighter.
Vincent Kapoor: But you can do that, right?

Vincent Kapoor: [Reading and citing from the panels that Mark put in front of the camera of the Pathfinder Mars robot] "'Are you receiving me? Yes - no.'
[to Tim]
Vincent Kapoor: OK, point the camera at 'yes'."
Tim Grimes: 32-minute round trip communications time, all he can do is yes/no questions and all we can do is point the camera. This won't exactly be an Algonquin round table of snappy repartee.
Vincent Kapoor: [Stares incredulously] Are you kidding me?
Bruce Ng: Tim, Tim.
Vincent Kapoor: Just point the camera!

Bruce Ng: Alright. Ah, thanks to my uncle Tommy in China, we get another chance at this. Now, we finished the Iris probe in 62 days, and now we are going to attempt to finish it in 28.

Bruce Ng: [after hearing their timeline for building the probe] Okay. Well, I'm going to need a change of clothes...

Teddy Sanders: Bruce, what's the earliest we can get a pre-supply there?
Bruce Ng: Well, with the positions of Earth and Mars, it'll take nine months. And it'll take six months to build it in the first place...
Teddy Sanders: Three months.
Bruce Ng: Three? That's impossi...
Teddy Sanders: You're going to say it's impossible and I'm going to make a speech about the blinding capabilities of the JPL team and you're going to do the math in your head and say something like "The overtime alone will be a nightmare."
Bruce Ng: The overtime alone will be a nightmare.
Teddy Sanders: Get started. I'll find you the money.