On the subreddit, I once read a good argument that perhaps the backstory is actually more sinister. Supposedly you're crashlanded … but you launch a satellite? (Instead of ever escaping?) The poster supposed that, what if the narrator is a faulty narrator, and in reality, our character has been sent as a sort of advanced terraforming agent send to prepare the planet for colonization or such. After all, the engineer needs no sleep, no food, never seems to tire, can somehow research a wide range of complex technology on his or her own. Perhaps the PC has simply been led, or programmed, to believe that he's crash landed (or perhaps that's even the truth, just the crash landing was on purpose, to deliver him to the planet), and programmed such that he can't recognize the cognitive dissonance of getting to a rocket but never leaving, always expanding …