Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

Greene, Kate. Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth. New York: St. Martin's 2020. Print.

First Sentences:

There were clouds in the Hawaiian sky on the morning of June 3, 1965, and beyond them, two hundred miles up, astronaut Ed White floated through the hatch of his Gemini IV capsule and became the first American space walker.


Description:

If you did not make it past the first fitness screening for potential astronauts, the next best opportunity is to be chosen as a guinea pig in a four-month Mars simulation experience. This would involve you living with six other people in a closed geodesic dome to record and analyze what challenges future people might face and how they might address them when humans venture to settle on Mars.  

...[T]hese faux space missions are also used to probe astronaut psychology and sociology--the most unpredictable element in any human expedition--to study coping strategies potentially useful on a long journey far away from Earth.

In 2012, science writer Kate Greene was part of the first group of six "almost astronauts" selected by NASA from over 700 applicants to participate in its HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) project. She and the five other men and women lived for four months in an isolated dome 8,000 feet up the slope of the volcano Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. 

During this time, she recorded her thoughts on the project, fellow participants, and reflections on herself and the world. She then compiled them all into her fascinating book, Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, 

 

You might be worried that this could be a dry, technical, day-by-day detailing of life in the HI-SEAS dome. That would be a misjudgment. Greene is much too interesting a writer/thinker to settle for such a mundane account. Sure, there are descriptions of the dome, equipment, scientific experiments, food, and general inconveniences. But it is the interpersonal relationships and her own thoughts about the program and people that provide the backbone of this book.

 

Woven in among her routine experiences are thoughtful reflections about her life, decisions, and dreams, and how they became intertwined to place her eventually in this destination. She is open about how her personal life has succeeded (and failed) due to this mission, how she interacts with fellow inhabitants, and even her feelings of isolation, loneliness, and boredom.

Along the way, we learn about:

• The chosen team members "could technically qualify for spaceflight...in terms of education and experience, [but also had] astronaut-like personalities...a thick skin, a long fuse, and an optimistic outlook."

•  Participants "could only leave the dome wearing bulky, cumbersome, space suit-like outerwear,...had an emergency cell phone,...and email transmissions delayed by twenty minutes each way to mimic the actual communication lag to be experienced by Martian explorers." In Greene's mind, this 40-minute lag was "just inside two episodes of Who's The Boss" TV show.
  

• Surveys and questionnaires were constantly taken throughout the day, after every meal, task, experiment, and at the end of each day to gauge the individual's feelings about the specific experience, other people, and their own successes/failures that day;

• On the Mir space station, "you lose the calluses on the bottoms of your feet and gain calluses on the tops of your toes where the footholds rub";
  

• "When in low gravity, the shape of the eyeball changes for reasons unknown....[but] only male astronauts have suffered the effects of altered eyeballs in space;"

• Neil Armstrong's space suit "was designed and produced by Playtex, the women's bra manufacturer;"

• Team member Sian brought 120 individual packages with her into the dome, one to be opened each day of the experience. These were prepared by her best friend, and consisted of "photographs, handwritten notes, painted pictures, [and] little trinkets";
  

• During her interview for the position, Greene told interviewers that in the proposed enclosed environment she would most miss beer;
  

• Greene calculated that because of the lighter weight and food requirements of women, "A mission to Mars crewed only with women would, on average, require less than half the food mass of a mission crewed only with men. But in any scenario, the more women you fly, the less food you need. You save mass, fuel, and money."
  

One of the most important HI-SEAS' studies involved the food they ate. ISS long term resident astronauts historically lost weight on their missions due to eating less and less, possibly due to "food boredom." Weight loss meant fatigue and the inability to perform tasks, think clearly, or respond to challenges. The HI-SEAS team first and foremost had to find methods and ingredients that would keep food interesting and reliably edible.

 

The team found that shared mealtimes were vital to morale, as were fun meals celebrating real and made-up events (birthdays, half- and quarter-birthdays, anniversaries, completion of a difficult task, etc.). These special meals allowed the team to veer off from the prescribed meals and experiment with available ingredients, encouraging creativity that promised unusual meals, some even quite tasty. The crew's morale rose as they looked forward to these meals which gave them something to look forward to out of the ordinary, and also helped to mark the passing of time, often a difficult concept in their routine which was repeated day after day.

It's fascinating, informative, imaginative, reflective, and even scientific from start to finish. It is written in clear prose, often humorous, but always honest and thoughtful. Overall, Greene understood that this experience was only make-believe, an environment that was simply as close as NASA can get to simulating potential close-quarters life on Mars. But the conditions, restrictions, demands, interactions, isolation, and even boredom, are very real to her.

Issues like communal versus individual food stores, how to divvy up chores, whom you trust and how much, how to behave when privacy is at a premium, when resources are scarce, and what kind of problem-solving approaches to take seemed, in the context of a small space with a fixed group of people, mostly domestic....[But] These are exactly the issues that are relevant to larger communities, to nations, and the entire world. Somehow the research questions on an imagined Mars mission began to sprawl beyond their intended bounds. I could see how they were about everything and all of us.

  ***P.S. For information about the real 2024 one-year NASA Mars simulation program in Houston, check out these sites:

Information about the project (which concluded July 6, 2024) 

    https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/volunteer-crew-to-exit-nasa's-simulated-mars-habitat-after-378-days/

Video of the simulation environment 

     https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkNI7evLRM

 

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

     See More Recommendations 

          (and an Intro to The First Sentence Reader) 

________________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars.   

A fascinating, often humorous and jaw-dropping, look at the challenges faced by NASA which one curious author found while researching and even participating in issues and solutions regarding travel to Mars. Highly recommended. (previously reviewed here)