The Mars weather is beautiful today, and an astronaut is about to suffocate to death under the cloudless blue sky.
The trouble starts after three crew members leave the safety of the Hab, their pressurized six-person living station, and venture outside to do some routine work. They trudge along in 35lb spacesuits, breathing air pumped by fan and watching the jagged red landscape through their fishbowl-like glass helmets.
As they head back to the station, one astronaut, Aga Pokrywka, begins acting strangely. Her movements are sluggish. She stops walking.
The radio crackles. “Aga, are you all right?” the crew’s commander, Sionade Robinson, asks. The Hab is only a few dozen yards away, but Pokrywka can’t seem to go further. She collapses on to the red clay.
Robert Turner, the crew’s medical officer, radios the Hab: “Astronaut down, astronaut down!”
The three crew members inside begin emergency protocols. Two don spacesuits, grab a stretcher and enter the airlock. They must wait five painstaking minutes for the air pressure to adjust. If they don’t, they may be torn apart when they step into Mars’s thin atmosphere.
After the agonizing wait ends, the rescue party rushes to Pokrywka and rolls her on to the stretcher. They run toward the Hab, maneuver her body into the cramped airlock, and begin the countdown all over again.
A crew member inside, Kay Sandor, holds a timer against the airlock window: “Five … four … three … two …”
They get Pokrywka inside and on to the ground and remove her helmet. After a while, she starts to revive.
“Patient stabilized,” someone says. Everyone relaxes.
After a beat, Pokrywka asks: “Did I win my Oscar?”
•••
It is hard to imagine that anyone would volunteer to live with five semi-strangers in a tin can in the desert. Yet hundreds of people from around the world apply for the chance to come to the remote wilderness of south-east Utah and pretend to colonize Mars.
Crews at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) conduct research to understand what humans may face when visiting or settling the red planet. And, in a sense, the crew members are the research.
For two or three weeks, they live like Martians. They wake each morning in bedrooms slightly larger than coffins. They gather in a small common area to eat breakfast – usually a surprisingly edible meal made with dehydrated food, bacteria cultures and harvested greenhouse plants – and watch the sunrise through portholes. Each crew member is allotted one 90-second shower every three days.
Operated by the non-profit Mars Society, the MDRS is an analog space station. The crews there have no communication with the outside world except for a brief window every 24 hours when off-site personnel simulating ground control make contact. No one is allowed to go outside without donning a spacesuit, or before going through airlock procedures. The station is surrounded by one of the most stunning landscapes on Earth, but crew members are allowed to interact with it only while confined, in effect, in a diving bell.
Knowing all this, I headed to the MDRS expecting my hosts, the members of Crew 238, to resemble the cast of The Thing, the clammy 1982 sci-fi film about an Antarctic research station riven by paranoia, at the phase shortly before the flamethrowers come out.
On the way to Mars, I stopped to gas up in Hanksville, Utah, a tiny roadside hamlet whose main attraction is a convenience store built, missile-silo-style, into the side of a mountain. Due to an epidemic of sign theft, the miles-long dirt road to get to the station, Cow Dung Road, is unmarked. This may be for the best, as the station has an occasional trespassing problem – tourists, sometimes bearing drones, show up uninvited and disrupt the simulation. (The Mars Society asked me to remind readers that the station is a private research facility and closed to the public.)
Arriving at the MDRS is a slightly surreal experience: the small white compound, framed by windswept desert devoid of a single tree or shrub, really does look like a settlement on an alien planet. When I knocked cautiously on the airlock door, I heard a flurry of pleasant, multinational voices – a German accent followed by a British one, and then by an unflappable southern American drawl straight from The Right Stuff or Apollo 13.
My astronaut hosts turned out to be an affable group: earnest, collegial and not visibly suffering from the kind of nervous breakdown that one might expect of a group of six sharing a single, bucket-powered dry toilet. After a week “in sim”, they were eager for a visitor and pressed me for news from outside.
“In my daily life I produce – ironically, perhaps – Big Brother,” PJ Marcellino, the executive officer and crew journalist, said. “So I guess observing people gave me this weird foray into small-team dynamics.”
In addition to working as a protocol producer on the reality TV show, Marcellino is a political scientist by training, a documentarian and an amateur writer of speculative fiction.
Ranging in age from 37 to 74, the other crew members had similarly eclectic career backgrounds – art, nursing, engineering and as a business professor. None have held space-related day jobs, though Turner, a paramedic from Tennessee, has attended Nasa launches as an observer. The Mars Society reviewed their individual research applications and matched them as a crew. Crew 238 started planning their mission more than two years ago, but only met in person when they arrived.
Touring the MDRS doesn’t take long. The Hab is deliberately cramped, to replicate the size of living quarters that could conceivably be delivered to Mars by rocket, and the rest of the facility is similarly utilitarian. Covered walkways connect the Hab to several outbuildings – a greenhouse, a telescope, a lab and a mechanic room fashioned from the belly of a decommissioned Chinook helicopter. The facility has a small fleet of electric dune buggies. An array of solar panels provides much of the MDRS’s energy, which, like water, is strictly rationed. The only neighbors are the program’s on-site director, who lives in a trailer nearby, and a desert rat occasionally seen scavenging.
Over lunch – lentil soup, Verdean chili, homemade bread and an apple crumble made from dried food – the crew members talked about what attracted them to space. One common denominator: science fiction.
Two members of the crew were born behind the iron curtain – Pokrywka in Poland and Simon Werner, the crew engineer, in East Germany – and Marcellino was raised by leftwing parents in Portugal after the fall of the rightwing regime. Where North American sci-fi novels tend to emphasize individuality and the importance of technological innovation, they said, the Soviet sci-fi they grew up reading was more interested in the political and social aspects of future life.
Photograph: Cassandra Klos
Everyone disputed the perception of space travel as an expensive boondoggle. “We spend billions on our militaries – on fighting each other,” Werner said; by comparison, he argued, space exploration was a drop in the bucket and one that could very well be crucial to humanity’s survival.
Marcellino rejected the idea that there is a dichotomy between space travel and solving needs here on Earth. High-efficiency fuel, he said, was an example of a space technology that could be vital to alleviating the Earth’s climate crisis.
Werner and Marcellino also defended private space programs such as SpaceX, arguing that the interest that tech billionaires have taken in space exploration was a mostly positive development. (Elon Musk has contributed money to the Mars Society, which is funded by a mixture of membership dues, individual donations, grants and crowdfunding campaigns. MDRS crews are also charged a fee to help cover the cost of the program.)
Public space programs “have as a rule struggled with financing”, Marcellino said. “It’s hard for politicians to justify the funding.” Only tech billionaires such as Musk and Jeff Bezos can afford to test rockets over and over, he said, and they are willing to do it at their own expense.
The crew members all told me that they did not expect to participate in a staffed mission to Mars and were just trying to lay some groundwork for whoever does.
“I think we need to equip ourselves for the fact that we may not live to see the results of the things we’re working on,” Pokrywka said.
•••
The Mars Society has its origins in frustration. In the early 1990s, an American aeronautics engineer and inventor, Robert Zubrin, became convinced that direct exploration of Mars was not only possible but decades overdue.
“I was 17 when we landed on the moon, and if anyone had told me then that I’d be 61 and we’d have not landed on Mars – or even that people were not going to the moon any more – I would have thought they were nuts,” Zubrin told Business Insider in 2013. “We were on the brink of opening up space, and we just stopped.”
Zubrin has prosecuted his argument in a series of emphatic books – The Case for Space, Entering Space, The Case for Mars, How to Live on Mars – that sketch what a mission to Mars might look like, rebut common political and technological criticisms, and make a philosophical case for space exploration.
In 1998, Zubrin and others founded the Mars Society, which has no affiliation with Nasa. “The Mars Society view has always been that there is nothing preventing a human mission” within a decade, a representative told me. “That was the case 10 years ago and it’s the case today.”
Based on current technological trends, any journey to Mars would probably take six to nine months. Including the roundtrip voyage, even a short stay on Mars would require a group of human beings ready to spend a long time frighteningly far from home.
One dilemma, Robinson told me, is that the kinds of personalities that would be most attracted to a Mars mission – people who are novelty-seeking, thrill-seeking, extremely accepting of risk – are also those who would be most restless during the day-to-day reality.
Marcellino added: “I think there’s been an evolution of personality types from extreme type-A people who like to break records” – think Chuck Yeager – “to people with the social and cooperative skills to endure a nine-month space voyage.”
Hence the importance of analog space stations. The Mars Society also maintains a base in the Canadian Arctic, though the one in Utah sees more use, for practical and cost reasons. Nasa and other groups have tried similar projects on a Hawaiian volcano and in a cave in Spain.
Much of what we know about long-term isolation comes from personnel stationed on submarines or in remote outposts in the Arctic or Antarctic. Space advocates believe that such case studies have limited application. Those sailors “were bored”, Zubrin told Business Insider, regarding US navy personnel stationed in Antarctica. “They didn’t want to be there. They wanted to be in San Diego where they can go out on the pier on Friday night and pick up girls.”
By contrast, he argued, scientists and engineers who volunteered for long-term space missions would be highly motivated. Overwork, not boredom, would be a greater risk. The crew members I met at the MDRS seemed to partly bear out that observation; they worked hours each day and told me they were anxious about not finishing their research before leaving.
Either way, however, there’s a huge difference between a few weeks in small-group isolation and, say, two years. A study completed in 2013 – which confined six men at a facility in Russia, under simulated Mars conditions, for 520 days – found that the men became lethargic and seemed to be tired even as they slept more.
In 1991, members of an experimental theater troupe undertook an audacious project to create a completely self-sustained ecosystem. At the Biosphere 2 facility in Arizona, a mixed-gender group of eight volunteers were enclosed in a giant terrarium, with water, plants and animals, for two years.
Tensions ran high; food, and eventually oxygen, ran low. The mission was only completed with the aid of emergency supplies smuggled in. In 1994 a second group tried, but were forced to end their mission early because of a power struggle in the Biosphere’s ownership.
Astronauts to Mars will live with the danger of fires, meteor impacts, radiation poisoning and solar storms. Air will need to be expertly managed to avoid astronauts choking on the carbon dioxide in their own breath, and months of low gravity will weaken them before they even arrive.
Depending on the relative positions of the two planets, communications between Mars and Earth will take as long as 20 minutes. “Think of how stressful Zoom delays are,” Marcellino said. “Your brain starts to fry. Extrapolate that to four to 20 minutes, perhaps in an emergency situation.”
If an emergency strikes on Mars, help or extra supplies will take months to arrive. Humans there will need to prioritize collective survival above all else, a principle that the MDRS emphasizes in emergency simulations. In a common scenario, some astronauts are contaminated by radiation while outside the station; their comrades inside have to decide whether to let them in.
During one such simulation, a contaminated woman pleaded to be let inside, but another crew member – who was also her actual husband – voted to let her die, arguing that it was necessary to protect the rest of the crew. The simulation supervisor praised the husband’s choice. (No word on whether the marriage survived.)
And even the most rigorous training can’t always prevent human error or mechanical failure. During Crew 238’s simulated emergency, Pokrywka, who was designated to play possum, was “saved”, but afterward Turner admitted that his suit kept malfunctioning during the rescue operation.
“I think I died,” he said, casually. “My airflow collapsed.”
