he human eye works on a logarithmic scale—a 10x reduction in actual illumination results in a perception of "half as bright." For example, the sunlight at Mars is only one-fourth as bright as it is here on Earth, but thanks to this quirk of perception it would look like about 80 percent—not much different at all. Standing on the daylit surface of Mars or looking out through a habitat window, you wouldn't see the dim, cartoony, special-effecty images of TV and movies, but a very real landscape of dirt and rocks, hills and formations, not unlike the barren, rust-colored deserts of southern Utah. It helps to keep this in mind: Mars and the other planets are not Greek myths or science-fictional plot devices, but actual places.
This point has been much on my mind lately, because I actually am in southern Utah, an hour away from the nearest doctor, in a red-painted desert that betrays few signs of life unless you study it very closely. It looks about as much like Mars as anyplace on Earth possibly could. Which is good, because I'm here on behalf of the Mars Society, participating in a two-week simulated Mars mission. This transmission comes to you—no kidding!—via the two-way satellite Internet link I share with my six crewmates. We're living in an enclosed, two-story habitat modeled closely on existing Mars base designs, and we're not allowed outside without a space suit on. As far as we're concerned, there's no air out there, and when we do go outside our time is split between exploring the landscape on foot, tooling around on four-wheeled rovers, and hunkering down with a toolbox to fumble with a maintenance task in our stiff, bulky space-suit gloves.
I didn't mean to end up here, but the invitation was irresistible. Life is full of sudden turns.
Learning the ropes on the Red Planet
This is the Mars Desert Research Station, and we are MDRS Crew 27. We took over a week ago from Crew 26, and one of the most interesting things about the handover was watching the old crew, not only in action but also at leisure. Not that there's too terribly much leisure here, and I don't want to imply that everyone gets along with everyone else 100 percent of the time. We're all human beings. Still, there was a definite rapport there—every person had a task and every task had a person, and it all seemed to flow very easily. After two weeks together they were laid back and very tired, not taking things too seriously, and yet getting an awful lot of work done.
Frustratingly, by Day 3 we in Crew 27 were still doing training and setup. Testing radios in the morning and then, after organizational meetings and lunch, we messed around a bit with the space suits and ATV rovers—not "in sim" (actually pretending to be on Mars) but just to familiarize ourselves. We also had a request from Mission Support to move our main diesel generator 10 feet, so it would sit behind a man-made rock wall instead of in front of it. There it would be quieter, and wouldn't spoil the view. Who could have guessed this would mushroom into a three-and-a-half-hour task for six people? Under the hot Utah sun, in our T-shirts and ball caps, we didn't feel much like astronauts, but we got the job done, and even spared half an hour before sunset to pretty up the platform with a welcome mat and some stapled-on plastic sheeting. So as we high-fived each other and photographed the completed job site, I felt like we were starting to build a bit of that same rapport we'd seen in the previous crew. And with Internet access and a dinner of salmon and rice, we weren't exactly roughing it. So began our adventure on "Mars."
Life is what you make it, and simulated Mars missions are no exception. It's possible on the one hand to treat this whole exercise as a joke—grown men and women dressing up and play-acting. On the other extreme, some participants have been known to get really, really serious about the simulation, making unnecessary problems for themselves and others. But there's a middle road where common sense prevails, where hard work and serious intentions combine with a playful sense of discovery. This is not so much a fake Mars mission as a genuine training exercise. Most of us there at the hab will probably never go to Mars for real, but that doesn't make the training any less valid. If nothing else, it enriches us as people. After just four days in this desert, I'd added dozens of useful skills to my self-reliance tool kit, and we hadn't even started the sim! And of course as a science fiction writer I'll be mining this experience for decades.
Our commander, Alejandro Diaz, is a Boeing engineer who works closely with the astronauts on the space shuttle and space station programs. And following his lead, we're shaping up to be a cautious and methodical crew. On day four, there was still no full-dress "extravehicular activity," or EVA. Instead, we worked our way toward it with a sort of "practice sim" or "simulated sim," where we went out without space suits. There's nothing cheesy about this, either; real astronauts don't go to space until they've rehearsed their mission in water tanks, and they don't enter the tanks until they've walked through the steps in a dry mockup, and they don't even do that until they've been thoroughly trained and briefed on the mission's equipment and objectives.
Step by step, we inched our way toward realism, starting with a test of the base's long-range radio repeaters—which weren't working and would clearly need to be serviced. We also mucked around with battery chargers and microphone headsets, and cleaned things up in the Green Hab, which is connected to the habitat structure and processes our wastewater through sand filters and five different baths of algae and bacteria. Later on in the afternoon, we did several hours of navigation exercises with maps, compasses and GPS. Arguably the compass is not a realistic piece of simulation hardware, since Mars doesn't have a planetary magnetic field like Earth's. However, there are several strong regional fields generated by magnetic materials in the planet's crust, and any future Mars astronauts would be silly not to use them. Believe it or not, the GPS is realistic, since the Mars Global Surveyor and several other satellites in orbit around the planet have been equipped with GPS-like clocks and radio transmitters. Accuracy is not great right now, but as more and more spacecraft arrive at the planet, the system can only improve. By the time we start landing astronauts there, they should have little trouble finding their way.
By day five, we were fully "in sim," and tried on our space suits immediately after breakfast. There were six suits and six of us, so we had to find the best match between garment and wearer. Each suit has a numeral on it, and a Velcro patch where you slap your nametag, and a backpack and helmet with the same numeral. It turned out I was McCARTHY 2, or "EV 2" in the radio jargon of simulated space missions. I was no longer quite the same person I'd been when I woke up; for the convenience of my crewmates I had been renamed. And much to my delight, I was in the first party to go outside. I was helped into my backpack, outfitted with drinking tube, boots and gloves, radio, headset and a sweat-absorbing headband. Finally, my helmet was latched in place like the lid of a pressure cooker.
A space walk through southern Utah
Was it claustrophobic? Not really. The air in the helmet was a bit stuffy at first, but once the air hoses were attached and the backpacks turned on, there was a cool, fresh breeze blowing gently across my face. But the backpack was heavy and the chest and waist straps confining, with the helmet cutting off peripheral vision, and within a few minutes we were closed up in the airlock, with the red DECOMPRESSION light glaring down. Twenty minutes to kill while our (simulated) pressure equalized with the (simulated) near-vacuum outside. That makes it worse.
Twenty minutes (actually less than the official safe decompression time on the space shuttle and space station programs) is a long time to sit around, and until you've had a space helmet on you don't realize just how damned often you touch your face. Imagine reading this entire column without scratching or rubbing or stroking your face even once. Does the very thought make you itchy? Well, let me assure you, in the sensory deprivation of a two-man airlock, with radio chatter discouraged and only our toolboxes to sit on, I felt itchier than I ever have before. Fortunately, once we got outside and started doing stuff the itchiness quickly subsided. We exited the airlock and started climbing up the ridge behind the hab, where our observatory and Martian flag were located. Right away, I figured out that the airflow into my helmet was constant, regardless of how hard I was working, so as the climb got steeper I began to feel short of breath.
Exploring an alien landscape on a fixed oxygen budget, you've got to pace yourself. Anyway, and perhaps more importantly, this was an experience to savor, not to rush through. The views were staggering enough that we had to keep stopping for pictures—a practice that ended only when my camera declared itself full. Too, the experience of being EVA, being Outside, being fully immersed in the environment of the simulation ... well, it was more intense than I was expecting. It felt easier and less dangerous than a deep scuba dive, but there was nothing make-believe about it. We really were on a steep hike in the middle of nowhere with heavy loads to carry, with our bodies locked into potentially suffocating suits that we couldn't hope to escape from without help. It was thrilling, it was fun, it was serious business. The fact that this wasn't Mars seemed beside the point.
No matter where you look around here, it certainly appears to be an alien world of some sort. We've made several weird discoveries already, including wildlife traces, natural caves and odd spiral-shaped imprints in the rock. The hills are covered in rubble on their northern faces, while on the south they're just stripy mounds of bare dirt. We did a lot of speculation about this, and Bill Foltyn—our geologist, among other things—was in hog heaven, dashing from rock to rock in great excitement, or else plopping himself down on the ground to stare at one spot for minutes at a time. In an environment like this, it's hard not to be a scientist.
And a handyman; I've done five full EVAs now, and all of them have been involved one way or another in repairing the MDRS remote radio which sits on a high hilltop half a kilometer away. That damned radio, thrown together from spare parts, was supposed to be temporary. Supposed to. But naturally it became an important fixture of the base, and after three years of weather, slipshod maintenance and ill-considered band-aid fixes, the thing hasn't worked in months. And we need it. And I'm determined to stay in sim and fix it with my space suit on, no matter how absurdly difficult it might be. That's the life of an astronaut, right? The good news is, I brought the radio inside and got it working on a test bench. The bad news is, we're socked in by dust storms and haven't been able to hook it back up on the hilltop yet.
I'm burning to tell you all about my crewmates—a can-do collection of genuinely fun people—and about the Zen of decompression, and the joy of daily reports and psych evaluations and human factors testing that fill up fully half our working hours. These, too, are part of the astronaut life. But I'm out of time, out of space, and I've been hogging the satellite link for long enough. And in the wind and dust, the cold desert nights and the bright noontime sun, lots of things are in need of attention—broken space suit backpacks and radio headsets and one of our four-wheeled rovers. On a real Mars mission we'd have to fix them ourselves, and we're certainly trying, though the sheer complexity of this station, coupled with the small crew and the brevity of our mission, make it an uphill battle at best. Still, with talented people, a determination to explore, and seven days left to go out here, we may just give entropy a run for its money.
Habcom, this is EVA 2, signing off. We are over and out.
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, The Collapsium and most recently The Wellstone and a related nonfiction book, Hacking Matter.
