I drop my trusty bag upon the arid red crust of the Martian desert and flip my collar against the mineral wind. Far away, on the horizon, a small, cold sun dips lower behind a dune the color of paprika. It is getting chilly, though I am well protected, being clad on this day in a two-piece sage-green velvet suit with 30-inch bell-bottoms. It’s just as well. I hear that temperatures on Mars can fall as low as –190 degrees Fahrenheit.
Not that I’m actually on Mars. Rather I am standing alone upon the insane red Martian deserts (Martian in the utterly legitimate sense of Mars-like; you can look it up) of southern Utah, thumping periodically and in vain upon the Perspex porthole set into the outdoor air-lock door of a grubby white structure known as the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS). The station resembles a giant propane canister, except with portholes and antennas, and I had been led to believe I would find it occupied by a crew of aspiring astronauts training to go to Mars. Yet no one is answering my thumps. The air-lock door, like so many air-lock doors, has one of those round handles like a steering wheel. Yet it does not turn.
What’s that you say? Training to go to Mars? Why is anyone training to go to Mars?
I don’t know, is the answer. A manned trip to the Red Planet may theoretically now be on NASA’s agenda, but not until we’ve returned to the moon, finished the space station, and polished off a few other minor chores of similar magnitude. For anyone to be already preparing for Mars does seem a little premature. If I could find the crew, I could ask them about this. I could ask them who they are, what they think they’re playing at, why mankind should even be bothering with Mars, what sort of person should we choose for the mission, whether the MDRS has a functioning restroom, and if so, where?
Mars mission simulation in the Utah Desert.
Image courtesy of NASA
The time has come, I decide, for action. If someday there’s a Code of Conduct written for interplanetary explorers, my guess is that fairly high up will be something about not using brute force to yank open other people’s air-lock doors without permission. But you know what? Until that day comes, I answer only to the Code of the Journalist, most applicably in this instance Rule 1: Thou shalt get the story by any means necessary, and Rule 165: No public urination.
Velvet flowing smoothly over my thickly packed muscles, I seize the air-lock handle and yank.
Half a century has passed since humanity first ventured into space, but this Homo sapiens sapiens, for one, is still palpably atingle with pride. The engineering of the feat, which seemed not far short of a miracle back in the late 1950s, seems not far short of a miracle today, quite frankly, especially when you consider that our closest rivals in the animal kingdom are still dining out on being able to open a coconut by hurling it at a rock. And come to think of it, I’m not even sure they manage that with any degree of reliability.
But there is more than just the rocket science to be proud of. Yes, the Conquest of Space once and for all silenced any muttering that the opposable thumb and the giant brain weren’t all they were cracked up to be, but it also showcased human nature at its selfless, rational, rarely seen best. Prior to the space age, human progress had been a haphazard affair. A few centuries of geniuses would typically waste their lives locked in their basements, ignoring their wives while trying to turn lead into gold. Then one of them would forget to wash out a petri dish and voilà: penicillin.
The way we conquered space was the ennobling precise opposite. It required a level of teamwork and self-sacrifice usually achieved only by ants carrying leaves and/or ruining picnics, and best of all, it was deliberate. Getting into space was one of but a handful of instances in which we identified a milestone in our progress not in the rearview mirror but before we’d reached it. We set ourselves a concrete if wildly ambitious goal, methodically broke it down into more achievable substages, then divvied up the labor and worked through the steps in order, testing and endlessly retesting every assumption and innovation to squeeze as much chaos out of the system as possible. Certainly there were mistakes, fiery and spectacular ones, but we handled them maturely, calmly figuring out what caused them and fixing the problem. It could be argued, I suppose, that our ascent to these unseen heights of focus and dedication was fueled by the very worst aspects of our nature, namely tribal fear and hatred of the cold war, but not, I would submit, by anyone who isn’t a paid lobbyist for another, lesser species. Fear and hatred are ubiquitous conditions in the animal kingdom; figuring out how to fly through space and come home again, to put it mildly, is not.
All of which is to say that the simplest and perhaps only necessary answer to why some of us are already in training to go to Mars, decades before any conceivable scheduled mission to the Red Planet, is that Mars is in space, and when it comes to space, human beings are well-versed in the importance of long-term thinking, focus, and commitment.
Like every decent spacegoing body, the Mars Society hews tightly to the principles of a rousing Founding Declaration. “The time has come for humanity to journey to Mars” is how the Declaration begins, and it ends with the words, “No nobler cause has ever been. We shall not rest until it succeeds.”
What that not-resting has largely consisted of, for the previous, first decade of the society’s existence, is sending crews of volunteers to some of the least hospitable environments on Earth, where they pretend that they’re actually on Mars. The crews live in structures known as Mars Analog Research Stations—a term that acronymizes rather nicely, as you may have spotted—and if the crew is observing full simulation protocol—being fully “in sim,” as they term it—they will leave the faux-pressurized habitat only in a space suit.
This all has to do with, among other things, the development and testing of “crew selection protocols.” For those perhaps not familiar with the jargon of the Martian astronaut community, crew selection protocols are what you use before a trip to Mars to determine what kind of person is going to make a staunch and reliable crew member, as opposed to the kind liable to—as we say in astropsychology—fall victim to Space Madness, sell his soul to the onboard master computer, disembowel his crewmates somewhere deep in the black, unaccountable void, eventually landing on Mars only to scamper briefly across its surface, forgetting his helmet in a self-made diaper of hydraulic cabling, and finally collapsing with a mouthful of red dirt, advancing human understanding of the Red Planet millimetrically, if at all.
