I read the book and that was one of the least believable parts, that they were already into the third Mars landing mission without any cheap reusable launch veh

I read the book and that was one of the least believable parts, that they were already into the third Mars landing mission without any cheap reusable launch vehicles! Like seriously, how much that must have cost so far ?? Not just money, but all the time thousands of people would have invested into producing maybe hundreds of booster stages that would then be just dumped to the sea. Such a colloidal waste it must have been! No wonder every margin is so thin in the book and even just launching a module with food is a major hurdle... Also there is really no apparent orbital infrastructure mentioned anywhere in the book, likely again due to the stupidly high ELV launch costs. In a proper RLV/Starship world Watney would either most likely not get stranded due to the whole operation being done by a fleet of ships, with some likely kept in reserve as spares. And even if he managed to get stranded and was lacking supplies to last to the next synod (say the crate with emergency supplies turned out to by logistic mistake contain chainsaws instead) you could very likely get a sacrificial starship with a couple tons of payload, fueled from one of your propelant depots in Earth orbit, to Mars very quickly.