Mission to ... Utah?
 Martianauts
leave the habitat.(DAVID REAL / Special to DMN) |
MARS DESERT RESEARCH STATION, Utah -- At first, my friends looked at me funny when I told them that I was spending my two-week vacation in a tin can in the Utah desert.
Then they learned that I would be living with five scientists wearing spacesuits made out of trash-can parts and pretending to be on Mars.
That's when they turned fake-solemn.
"Will there be gravity?" they wanted to know.
"If your spacesuit runs out of oxygen, you can take off your helmet," they said sternly. "You're not really on Mars."
Very funny, guys.
Well, I have news for you.
I really was on Mars -- or as close as you can get on Earth.
The Mars Society, a private organization that wants to go to the fourth planet as soon as possible, has built a replica of a space habitat in the middle of nowhere to simulate a Mars mission. The million-dollar effort includes similar facilities in the Canadian Arctic and Iceland.
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"We're trying out all kinds of things-- different crew mixes, different skill mixes, nationality mixes, character-type mixes, you name it," said Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of a 1996 book called The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. "You might say people are volunteering to be experimental subjects."
Great. I'm a lab rat. And a lucky lab rat, at that, selected from a pool of 400 applicants who volunteered to serve without pay this spring.
Not only is the pay low, the conditions are rough. The space habitat-- we call it the "Hab"-- has no telephones or televisions. There is no cellphone service. The only contact with the outside world is by computer e-mail using a satellite dish.
Everyone aboard must wear a spacesuit outside the Hab, except for emergencies and maintenance of the electric generator and water pump. A dorm-size refrigerator holds only a limited supply of fresh vegetables (although we were able to hijack a biological-specimen fridge to store meat and a 12-pack of beer.)
Despite the expected hardships, my fellow Martianauts and I were excited as we blasted off in April from the Salt Lake City airport in two minivans and drove six hours south to Hanksville, Utah, a town so small it was missed by the 2000 Census.
After stopping at 2 a.m. for four hours of sleep, we hit our retro brakes and landed at the Hab, an odd, white structure that looks like a cross between a stubby corn silo and an Apollo space capsule. Sitting amid some blood-colored dust and boulders, it had this unearthly look, as if we really were on the angry Red Planet.
Since most of us had never met, I figured we'd be ripping out each other's throats in a few days. Just as in the Survivor TV show, a previous crew had voted someone off their space island after a personality conflict developed.
But our tribe soon spoke-- we had a chow-down party crew!
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Martian munchies
If an army travels on its stomach, then food for a mock Mars crew is none other than the prime directive.
We immediately organized a lengthy lunch and agreed to rotate cooking chores equally--a daily dictatorship we dubbed the Director of Galley Operations. It quickly suffered the fate of all science and became an acronym--DGO, for short--which made it seem official and also cemented our sense of team identity.
We had passed our first test.
"DGO--we just made it up for fun, to ridicule the acronym-itis," says German scientist Jan Osburg, 30. "But it stuck, and it's cool."
Are we galaxy-class geeks or what?
Our next space crisis made us feel right at home--our computers wouldn't work. The main computer was fine, but our laptops wouldn't let us connect.
"Just call us and we'll walk you through it," said the e-mail from our tech experts, completely forgetting what we told them before our trip: There are no phones on Mars.
Fortunately, you can't hear computers scream in space, either.
The next day, we stepped into our homemade spacesuits for the first time, clipped on our trash-can-lid helmets, turned on our cooling fans, and climbed aboard our rovers--actually, four-wheel all-terrain vehicles--to destinations unknown.
The curved lens of the helmet and the restricting fit of the spacesuit acted just like a transporter beaming us down to the Martian surface. At times, it was hard to believe that we were not on Mars.
Like the time one of us had an accident. Andrea Fori, 32, a planetary geologist and systems engineer, who helped choose a Mars landing site for an unmanned NASA mission, fell over and couldn't get up--just like that awful TV commercial. She was as helpless as a turtle because her spacesuit backpack pinned her sideways against a Marslike rock.
"When you put on a 30-pound spacesuit and you bend over and try to pick up a rock, it's difficult," she said. "Without going through the motions of doing it, you wouldn't necessarily know that."
Or the time a sandstorm slammed into our Hab at 56 mph. The station began swaying and groaning, like an old wooden ship at sea. Suddenly, electrical sparks started shooting out like the Fourth of July from our ceiling, which was sizzling and popping. We all ran to get our cameras, just like true explorers.
Then we realized that this was probably not a good situation. That's when the feelings of isolation and peril--as remote as they were--hit home.
Routine adventure
Of course, our voyage was not all danger and excitement and space-alien monsters waiting to rip out our kidneys.
Mostly, it was boring science stuff.
Our commander, Dr. William J. Clancey, who was my roommate at Rice University 30 years ago, was videotaping our every move on the main floor during waking hours.
He was conducting a behavioral analysis of life inside the habitat: what do people do, when do they do it and where. There are still many basic space lessons to be learned.
"I'm claiming that the very nature of human exploration has not even been studied by psychologists or sociologists," says Bill, 49, who works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "You're looking to be surprised, to get a new idea, to find a connection."
I, however, was looking for some relief from the brutal work schedule of 16-hour days and no weekends. I was also tired of finding scorpions in our bedrooms and watching out for mountain lions in the desert.
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Not to mention being unimpressed with our accommodations. My private stateroom had a coffin-sized plywood bunk atop a 5-foot-tall pedestal, plus a living area 23 inches wide ---and no windows.
Every week or so, you could grab an ice-cold shower, if you helped the "bucket brigade" tote water from an outside holding tank.
The foul-smelling biological toilet required us to dump compost into the waterless bowl after every use. One day I saw a white slithery thing crawling through the toilet, but mercifully decided to tell no one.
Power outages occurred every eight hours so we could refuel the electric generator--unless someone plugged in a third appliance, such as a toaster, and immediately blew the circuit breaker.
After a while, I learned, the thrill was gone from scooping up soil for scientific experiments from alien-looking landscapes. How interesting can it be to write yet another report about geologic formations and things growing on microscope slides?
After a few days, we decided to have a party to break the tension. It was a global space party, of course, to celebrate Yuri's Night, in memory of Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut who became the first human in space on April 12, 1961.
I was the only one in the crew who had never heard of this virtual party, but I am a lightweight as far as planetary parties go. After a few beers and Internet chitchat, however, I realized that we were all just strangers in a strange land--some stranger than others. For fun, we once told Mission Control that half the crew was lost in a sandstorm and the others were going space-happy after being trapped in the greenhouse. Or did that actually happen?
The humor of American biologist Dr. Nancy B. Wood, who spent most of her time in the biology lab, also helped.
"I'm making mutant, wacko, genetically engineered bio-monsters," she said one day, when I asked her what she was doing. I'm reasonably sure she was kidding.
Spacing out
To calm down, the crew decided to gather each night before bedtime to watch a film about space. Starship Troopers and Red Planet could convince anyone that there were no intelligent movie producers on Earth, but Frank Herbert's Dune, a six-hour television miniseries, was a crew fave.
Our last night together occurred too soon.
To celebrate, we decided to eat some of our lab experiments.
We savored a delicate, toothpick-sized shoot of arugula from our greenhouse, and then rinsed with some wine that had actually flown in a zero-G training mission (unlike most of us). Then we tried some experimental tatsoi cabbage from our Hab garden and sipped some more space wine. This went on for hours, punctuated with many misty-eyed toasts, done Russian-style.
"Yummy, yummy, yummy, I have radishes in my tummy," Andrea said at one point.
Life is tough in outer space for veggies.
Before we left for our earthly home, a questionnaire asked if we would consider coming back again--maybe for three months or so?
For my fellow space mates, they would probably answer the same as if asked to go to Mars.
"I'll be signing immediately, signing with both hands, both feet," says Dr. Vladimir Pletser, 46, who works for the European Space Agency and is an astronaut candidate for Belgium.
I, however, have seen enough of the wild, wild quest.
Beam me up, Scotty.
David Real is an editor for Belo Interactive.
For information about the Mars Society, visit www.marssociety.org.
