The Human View

By Joel McKinnon

Appeared at NewMars.com January 2002


 It's tempting to think of the Mars Society and NASA as being completely separate entities; groups with similar goals and ideals, but often at odds with one another. There are, however, many members of the Mars Society who currently work for NASA, and their views can be illuminating regarding where NASA is coming from and what forms their point of view. One of these people is cognitive scientist Bill Clancey; a research scientist at the University of West Florida at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition on leave at NASA Ames Research Center. Bill has been involved for the past four years with NASA's Haughton Mars Project at Devon Island. For the last two summer seasons he has also been a crewmember of the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) and has contributed significantly to the Mars Society's efforts to educate the public, particularly children, on the potential for humans in space and on Mars. Last spring Bill hosted a very successful fundraiser at his home for the Mars Society featuring James Cameron and several other prominent speakers.

New Mars had a chance to talk to Bill recently and we asked him a few questions about life and work at the FMARS habitat and how he feels about the future of humans in space and particularly on Mars.

New Mars: How did you first get interested in Mars? Was your current Mars-oriented occupation driven my your interest in Mars or was it driven by your specialty?

Bill Clancey: My interest is more general- I'm interested in all space exploration. When Apollo 11 occurred I was not quite 16. I was very much a space buff as a kid- I tracked all the missions. I once got extra credit in a science class because I could give all these details about a Gemini mission that I knew it inside out. And I used to know all the Mercury astronauts, in order, the number of orbits... I built all the models. I had a Gemini model - it was really big - and I painted it - and put it all together. I had the whole Apollo model and I used to take it apart and do the simulation of the whole mission. So you could see how the pieces fit together and the stages break apart. I devoured all of that. 

NM: It's sad that today's kids don't have that background to inspire them.
BC: I give lectures at the Challenger Center. I ask kids, do you know what we've done with a comet or an asteroid? I show them pictures - but they've never heard of anything because it's not on the front pages. I used to give them a handout about the space station - I show them pictures of the space station and I give them the names of the modules the best I can pronounce - Zarya, Zvesdya, Soyuz and ask what language this is? They almost always say Chinese. I tell them that that's the only big country that's not a partner in the space station. So they have no concept- they don't follow it at all. I'm laying it on the media. For some reason reporters don't view it as news- even though it's equally as exciting as any of the other missions.

NM: Let's talk about the FMARS habitat and the simulations. Can you give a quick description of a typical day?

People start to wake up about 7-7:30am. We have individual breakfasts and sit around and we would begin a planning meeting somewhere around 9 o'clock or so - Commander Zubrin would call it to order. That would go on as much as an hour. We'd decide what the EVA of the day would be - the EVA du jour. There was a lot of interest that everyone had a chance to go out and that everyone's research interests were taken into account. Bob gave us the impression that it was an important thing to participate in the EVA.

Right after 11 we'd go out on the EVA - that could go as late as 3 o'clock, then you had a debriefing meeting, then you could do individual work- reporting - whatever your research was - relaxing before dinner. Dinner would be anywhere from 6 to 7 o'clock and go on to say 8, and then again more individual work afterwards. Downloading photos, writing, email- and then more often than not we watched a movie and that would go until 10 or so. I would usually go to my stateroom by about 10 if I could, just to have some private space and read. I was reading Zubrin's "First Landing" and each morning he would say "You're not done yet?" and I would say "I'm reading it carefully." What would happen is that I was very tired and I would fall asleep after a few pages. He didn't like that - that I was too tired to read it. Very often I could hear, after one o'clock in the morning, him typing away. Bob's typing is very distinctive and he'd be writing late into the night. He'd be the last one to bed. I think he was working on his logs.

NM: I was impressed with how thorough the logs posted to the internet were- and how quickly they appeared.

BC: Bob believes in the importance of that and he's totally right. If you don't write it up there's no record and you won't remember it. I think, for my own research I realize that doing a journal, what I call an interpretive journal- you have to avoid the temptation to say well at 8 o'clock we did this and then we did this and Katy did this - you have to say how you feel. Were you tired, energetic, excited, what did you see, what was fun, what did you wish would happen. You need to really do that.

NM: Did you find that the spacesuits and other limitations imposed by the simulation constrained your ability to achieve your objectives?

BC: They constrained my objectives too much, because I was trying to photograph everything that happened, and I couldn't operate my videocamera because my hands were too muddy, the gloves too wet, and I couldn't operate the controls which were too small. I didn't get nearly as much documentation as I would have done if I wasn't in the suit. Also, it's unrealistic of the limitations astronauts would really face, because they'd be wearing - like in Apollo - a camera that they could control from a different pad that would be designed for this purpose. Overall, however, I think the suits were a great idea and were a big success. They were not unrealistic, in that it was cold enough to need their protection and they gave us a sense of doing something special. We also had to go through an elaborate procedure of suiting up and the fact that it required help to do that was realistic, the 40 minutes of preparation time was realistic - same thing on the cleanup end. So the suits hindered communication with each other, but provided some protection, and were quite comfortable - a beautiful design - it was quite inspiring.

NM: Would it be correct to say that there will be less real science to do at the desert station as at Haughton?

BC: I don't know- the biology is amazingly relevant at Haughton and I think it will be relevant there too. Don't you think the connection with geology is necessary relevant? Maybe I shouldn't make that assumption- I mean it's not a crater - it's also not been covered recently by glaciers. There's not permafrost and there's no erosion - you're right - the features are not the features of Mars.

NM: What I'm getting at is, if that is the case, the research you do on human factors would seem to be more important?

BC: Yes and no. It could be more relevant in some ways but the work I do is only relevant if people are doing real science - if people are bored- then my observations are irrelevant for Mars. They have to be doing science, they have to be collecting data, and they have to be interacting with colleagues back on Earth- the whole gamut. If they're not doing that- I don't need to be in the desert looking at six people living in a tin can.

NM: I wonder if there would be any tendency of the astronauts- particularly on a longer mission - to blow off mission control and decide things on their own?

BC: I think that if you have six people on Mars, you really are going to want some help. You're going to want help to fix equipment, to learn how to use new software, you're going to want help in transcribing your observations, organizing your website, and you're going to want peer advice in your analysis for confirmation. I've come to think that the bandwidth is going to be more important than we might have thought. The time delay becomes a hindrance and there's going to be a separation in mental state and there will always be people who have long term relations to people in mission support and outside. They're not likely to really get angry with those people, and if they get to the point where they stop talking to people who are life-long friends then something very serious has happened. What it suggests to me is that the people who do the communications on Earth must be people who have proved their ability to communicate very well.

NM: What is your confidence level that the work you are doing will eventually be useful for a real mission to Mars?

BC: The first thing I have to be sure of is that my work is published and is going to be found by other people in NASA and outside when that time comes. If I'm fortunate that it's in my lifetime and I'm involved then I can hand over the reports. But one of the things I'm looking at right now is the procedures for having NASA technical memoranda entered into reports and whether it would be appropriate to package say my last four years of reports into a document that would be on the NASA record. It probably is not just a good idea but might be, as NASA would say, mandatory if I want to have an influence on the future. 

NM: That's a surprise to me in that I would think there would be no question about preserving this knowledge for the future.

BC: It happens in all research areas. I see people doing research in artificial intelligence that I was involved in twenty years ago and they've lost track of who I am and what I did, even though I was publishing everywhere and a member of the council. People don't read enough, they don't have proper search tools, and their education doesn't cover all of the areas that are researched. In general, my experience as a researcher is that scholarship is a function that needs to be improved in every field that I've looked into. Most people are happy enough reinventing the wheel. They don't read. They don't seem to enjoy studying. 

I think it's just the way that we teach. We teach with textbooks - and the textbooks are not primary sources and they don't even necessarily quote from sources successfully. So students don't learn how to work. You don't learn from textbooks, you learn by researching. The web of course offers a new way to do that so it offers some hope. But the idea is that we learn so much that's been packaged for us - that's useful but it should only be an introduction of a table of contents to literature. I think I learned that from philosophy - when you learn philosophy you read the primary sources. There's not that much. There are lots of textbooks, but that's not what philosophy is. What I came to discover in psychology is that you have to go back to primary sources - what people actually said.

NM: What advice would you give to a young person today to increase their chances of having an impact on getting humans into space and hopefully on the way to Mars?

BC: My advice is more for the parents, for the media, and for the government about what's necessary to get the kids excited about space. 

Just yesterday I got a copy of a planetarium program by the company that made Starry Night. Their latest thing is called Deep Space Explorer and it's a virtual world that you can enter of the 28,000 catalogued catalogs. You can fly out to seventy million light years from Earth. I learned more in two hours - I learned why we never had this before - I didn't know how little we really know. One way to put this - if you were in a room that was say 14 feet across and you were inside an amount of space about the size of a volleyball- that the amount of space that we have mapped out in our universe. I talk to parents and I say- buy this for your kids. Tell them about it and show it to them and get them interested. I'd like to see if kids could get into this - if they can see what it is that interests me. 

Sometimes when I give these lectures for kids I have to stop and say- maybe I'm just not at all a typical person and I shouldn't expect them to be interested and their minds are somewhere else. Then it becomes an issue for the Mars Society. We can say the public should care - but will they? You can tell your stories about the new worlds and so forth, but remember that most of the Europeans stayed home. I don't know that they cared enough. It was the pioneers that did it. Maybe our focus should be on leading the pioneers and trying to get their support so maybe we could leverage their support so that it pays for itself.

NM: Do you think there is any hope for a privately funded mission to Mars?
BC: Yes, I think there is. Look at the numbers that Zubrin throws around and NASA mentions. Gordon Moore of Intel just donated several billion to a foundation dedicated to space exploration. Do the math - you only need a few people like that to make it happen. I think there's real hope there- that private citizens can do things that governments cannot. This is part of what the terrorist attacks should tell us - but you can do it for good on the other end. The thing that most encourages me about the Mars Society is the diversity and the number of people that are getting involved with the desert research station. There are a lot of people out there every day doing real work- they're building stuff. It's not just talk, it's not just this discussion- and you have a lot of skills being brought to bear. So that's the one thing I'm now very convinced of - that we can build enough of a movement to get to Mars. One thing that I think people don't realize as much as I've seen being inside NASA is how serious ordinary NASA researchers are and I see a lot of negative things about NASA and when you're part of it, it feels pretty silly. I've been at NASA for four years and these are just gross generalizations. It might be true about some people at headquarters - but some of the statements I read I can't even relate to. It seems like it's just politically correct to be negative and to blame.

NM: How do you feel about the ISS - I've noticed that Zubrin has been pretty negative about it in print?

BC: Well it's there- and we're building it. I think the right thing is to think about the right way to use it. He's promoting the TransLife thing- why not use the ISS? It's easy to say the ISS is a waste and NASA is no good. If you did TransLife at the ISS you'd be able to do it much more cheaply and do something useful with the ISS by relating it in some way. Of course it has to spin and all that so maybe it can't be connected- but you could have it nearby and maybe tended. In general I think any negative vibes and biases are working against us.

NM: What I found interesting is that Zubrin was able to say such terrible things about NASA in The Case for Mars but NASA eventually adopted many of his ideas.

BC: That sort of makes part of my point in that the right thing is to be eclectic and get ideas wherever you can. There are also a lot of good people inside NASA who read those things and put them to use.

Additional information regarding Bill Clancey's research and the Haughton Mars Project can be found at http://billclancey.name. This interview was conducted by Joel McKinnon. All photos are copyright William J. Clancey, all rights reserved.

Joel McKinnon currently works as a User Interface Engineer for an e-learning company in San Francisco. Joel's proudest accomplishment thus far has been to organize a fundraiser for the Mars Society which attracted filmmaker James Cameron, Robert Zubrin, Pascal Lee, and Chris McKay and raised well over $100,000. Joel has had a deep fascination with the planet Mars since childhood.

Posted in New Mars Interviews at 06:00 PM on 1/02/02