Walden5

The MDRS Hab has 6 rooms. Each room has its idiosyncrasies and no room can really claim to be the best. Some rooms are too cold, some too hot, some are smelly, some are visited by mice, some have tall bunks, some are noisy, etc. etc.

The door to each room is “tagged” by its past inhabitants. Each crew member leaves behind a patch or badge of sorts which is taped to the door containing their name, crew number and perhaps a graphic or picture or quote etc.

I stayed in room 5.

I thought that I might initiate a new ritual and in this spirit left a binder behind. I hope that it might act as an archive or capsule for thoughts born in this room. In thinking about the future of space travel and possible (inevitable ?) settlement of other planets and moons, I hope that we as individuals and we as a civilized people will look backwards to history as we look forwards to the future. In addition to designing new habitats and new EVA suits, we will also have the opportunity to rethink and design new laws, advance human rights and implement better ways of governing.

What do you think Martian society should look like? What can we learn from history?

To kick things off I included in the binder the story of Biosphere 2 (a cautionary tale - watch those CO2 levels), the UN Declaration of Human Rights, some NY Times crossword puzzles and bar of chocolate.

I hope that you will continue to add to this binder (and comment on this website) in any way that you like: jokes, thoughts, stories, data, pictures, artifacts, recipes, etc. are all welcome.

On to Mars!!!

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Well, yesterday was our last day alone at the MDRS Hab. We broke Sim last night and are expecting Crew 66 to arrive sometime this evening. The time has really flown by - definitely a result of being very busy and around interesting people.

After a few heavenly days of consistent electrical power and running water, we’ve hit another power glitch. “Wendy”, our primary diesel generator, won’t start again and so we’ve been on a severe power and internet ration. I’ve got quite a backlog of images and thoughts to post once I get back to earth and have a reliable internet connection.

In the meantime, here are a couple of responses I’ve been waiting to make to things folks have written in:

Jordy writes:
“if you could just stop at a Walmart on your way to space…I’d love a shot of you on Mars with a VHS copy of Total Recall…”

Total Recall DVD

RDS writes:
up in AK. we used to use a simple light bulb covered with a cardboard box which then covered the frozen valve, connection,pipe, etc. to help keep things thawed and moving. The slight heat given off by the bulb generally did the trick! Good luck with the mission!!!!!!!!!!!

Water pipe housing

Lamp heating water pipe

Well, we tried this and initially the little lamp we put inside the housing just didn’t have enough oomph to warm the water pipe. But we replaced it the next day with a small space heater and voilá - running water!!! Thanks!

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Martian soup

Martian water

Martian chair

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“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory …”
- Jean Baudrillard from “Simulacra and Simulations”

It goes without saying that the idea of simulation occupies a fair amount of our attention and conversation here on analog Mars. Every day you can hear snippets of conversation like, “Well that would break Sim” or jokes about pressure breaches and enactments of faked asphyxiation (as visualized in the movie Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger). The Mars Desert Research Station is in fact designed to simulate or model the conditions a human crew would have to contend with during an extended stay on Mars.

Total Recall asphyxiation

A number of elements contribute to making this analog experience quite convincing. The remoteness of the location (a few hours drive into the desert south of Salt Lake City) and the geology of the landscape are perhaps the most compelling features of the simulation. The surrounding soil is quite red and strewn with odd rocks and land formations. The area is also extremely dry and dusty. The Hab is our primary structure and houses our living quarters, bathroom, kitchen and lab facilities. It is cylindrical in shape which reflects the form factor of the rocket that would in theory transport us to Mars. While cleverly designed, space and privacy are limited in the Hab as is water and electricity. I think the bathroom is the only place other than our personal rooms that one can go to be alone - and that is not a place you would like to be in for very long. Our “state rooms” are narrow and cramped (11x4 feet). We have no cellphone or telephone service. Our internet access is via satellite and is frequently down or irritatingly slow. Leaving the Hab requires a space suit simulator. This contraption is sufficiently heavy and unwieldy to make even the most basic tasks time consuming and challenging. All of these factors contribute to the realness of the simulated experience.

Analog Mars landscape

However, the simulation cracks in many locations. Though rare, from time to time we see/hear aircraft overhead. We have an engineering area, observatory and GreenHab (greenhouse and waster water system) all external to the Hab that we can walk to without space suit simulators. How can this be? We access these facilities via imaginary pressurized tunnels - many of which are demarcated by two parallel line of stones. The Hab itself is not even remotely sealed tight - there are cracks everywhere that in an actual Martian environment would lead to the immediate and fatal de-pressurization of our living environment. Many of the materials in the Hab (drywall, plywood, etc) are blatantly unrealistic, heavy and impractical given the expense of lifting objects in to space. We’ve also had repeated mouse sightings.

Fake pressurized tunnel: note the parallel lines of stones

And yet despite these cracks in the surface, the simulated experience is, for me at least, increasingly irresistible. Suspension of disbelief is one of the magic ingredients in this enterprise. Its the glue that holds the adventure together. At night, when its dark and all you can see are stars in every direction and the 6 of us are sitting around the dinner table chatting, its easy to imagine that we are hurtling around the Sun on a distant planet far away from our homes. I’ve realized lately how much this transportation involves reacquainting myself with notions of play.

My friend Larry writes, “I took a quick look at your mission. Fun! I never graduated past the couch cushions and laundry basket setup, so kudos to you!!”

For many of us I imagine, living on an analog Mars as a child didn’t require flying across the country to a well-funded simulated space habitat. Couch cushions and sheets and a heavy dose of imagination were all that was necessary.

Pillow fort

The makeup of the crew and each individual’s disposition towards suspension of disbelief are also important factors. Today the entire crew went outside on an EVA to help Chris with his Slope Estimation research project. For a variety of reasons, some crew members opted to break Sim and leave the Hab without their space suit helmets intact. I found myself irritated by this. It was 8 am (early for me) and snowing. I was cold, hungry and my faceplate was fogged over. What in previous days had felt like an interesting challenge quickly degraded into impatience and aggravation. The line between a meaningful simulated experience and 6 goof balls walking around the middle of nowhere with fake spacesuits on is THIN. What makes this project challenging at times is that MDRS is a consensual hallucination, as coined by William Gibson - group dynamics come into play.

In earlier times representation followed reality. Images were clearly counterfeits of the real. Maps were drawn after exploring a region. Baudrillard has pointed out to us that the real world no longer precedes or engenders maps and models. Rather representation precedes and determines the real. We build models and develop simulations before fabricating actual products. We have detailed maps of places before we arrive there. Reality imitates the model. For Baudriallard, the point is not that culture is artificial or life is fake. Instead, he argues that we can no longer detect a distinction between nature (the real) and artifice. This is our new reality.

At MDRS this desensitization feels ironically heightened.

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Slope estimation research

A recent message from my dear friend Thom:

… … … .

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…

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Sorry for the lack of posting - we had a serious network slowdown recently. We connect to the internet via satellite and it seems that we exceeded our allotted bandwidth (AKA Fair Access Policy Threshold, gotta love HughesNet for convoluted terminology). Anyway, after a couple of days of curtailed internet usage we seem to be back online. Most of us here are internet junkies and while the recent outage was exasperating, to a certain degree it did enhance our simulation. Actual communication between Mars and Earth would take up to 40 minutes to transmit a message and reply. Our internet outage along with the rationing of water and the several power outages we experience each day have definitely heightened our awareness and appreciation of the basic utilities humans require to function.

Snow on Mars: photo by Debi-Lee Wilkinson

The other big news is that it snows on Mars! Well at least it snows on analog Mars. Our landscape has taken on a distinctly lunar appearance. There has been some debate amongst the crew, but given the white and rocky terrain, consensus is that that we’ve been beamed from Mars to Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter). It’s quite beautiful outside.

Suiting up for EVA: photo by Mike Smithwick

Backing up a couple of days, Graham and I enjoyed our crew’s first simulated EVA (or extra-vehicular activity). In addition to familiarizing ourselves with the spacesuit simulators, we had a small ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization) mission to collect, as our commander Deb-Lee described it, “local material to enhance activity in our compost bin”. This was a enigmatic way of describing cow dung! We had a fun 2 hour ride on the ATVs and collected a whole trash bag full of “local material”.

In-Situ Resource Utilization: Morgan collects cow dung.

ISRU is actually a very compelling and elegant idea. Basically it describes the approach of using indigenous resources found and/or fabricated on the Moon, Mars, etc. to reduce the amount of material that must be brought from earth. ISRU has been popularized by space visionaries like Robert Zubrin as economical ways of buiding human colonies on Mars. But the terms “indigenous” and “colonize” are definitely trigger terms for me and suggest a myriad of philosophical and ethical issues to grapple with. I plan on dedicating some future posts to explore controversies and ethical dilemmas that ISRU and terraforming (ISRU’s logical endpoint) suggest. Astrobiology Magazine has a great series on their website that explore the “Great Terraforming Debate”.

Back to life at the Hab - our focus on engineering tasks during the first few days here has paid off and now that we’ve entered Sim, the crew has fallen into a nice rhythm. We still have a number of daily chores that in theory could be automated but, due to cold weather conditions and broken pumps, require our regular attention. These primarily involve moving water into and out of the Hab. Even with a crew of 6, it takes a remarkable amount of time each day just to keep us all fed, clean and the basic systems running. Someone mentioned the other day that during a period when the space shuttle was grounded and there was only a skeleton crew on the International Space Station, it took two astronauts working around the clock just to keep the thing functioning - never mind conducting any scientific research.

We’ve worked up a daily rotating schedule for cooking, cleaning, generator refueling and water pumping. In between these duties, crew members are beginning to squeeze in work on their own research projects. Yesterday we left the Hab on our first all-crew EVA to work on Chris Oravetz’s Slope Estimation research project. The idea behind his research is to develop an understanding of the psychological and physiological factors that influence an astronaut’s ability to accurately estimate the slope of surrounding terrain. He has a series of experiments for which the rest of the crew will act as test subjects. In addition to collecting some initial data, we played in the snow!!

Slope estimation experiment

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As of 7 pm last night we are officially “in Sim”. We can no longer leave the habitat without a spacesuit simulator.

Yesterday morning Graham and I took a great hike up to the ridge west of the Hab to watch the sunrise and the moonset. The landscape here is pretty fantastic.

Sunrise over the Hab

Moonset over Factory Butte

Here’s a link to yesterday’s reports.

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We’ve been focusing on engineering tasks in and around the “Hab” the past two days in preparation for going into “Sim”. A number of systems were down or in need of attention when our crew arrived. In order to have a good simulation we decided to try and fix as many of these before going into Sim in order to have the most convincing experience possible.

The Hab is a 2-story cylindrical structure that houses our living quarters and lab spaces. We access the outside environment via 2 airlocks. One leads directly out into the landscape and is used for EVA [extra vehicular activity] missions. The other is the engineering airlock and connects with simulated pressurized tunnels which lead to the power generator, observatory and GreenHab. EVA missions require a space suit simulator. The GreenHab is a combination of greenhouse and waster water management system. More on this in a future post.

Going into Sim means that we will pretend to be on Mars and that we will explore it geologically, biologically, etc. We will not leave the Hab without a space suit simulator. Everyday we prepare a number of reports and converse with Mission Support over email about the status of our research and various Hab life support systems.

Luis hauling water

We plan to go into Sim at some point tomorrow. Today we continued work on various water related systems. Flow of potable water into the Hab is still frozen. We’re trying to rectify this as the alternative means hauling 45 gallons of water manually. We’re also working to get the GreenHab system back online. The GreenHab processes and recycles our grey water (sink and shower water) through a series of filtration systems, tanks and plant life so that it can be reused in the Hab.

Graham photographing the moon

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It was a full moon tonight and we spent some time after dinner in the observatory. The full moon made the sky very bright and it made for less than ideal conditions for astronomy. However we still got nice views of Mars, Saturn, the Moon and Orion’s Nebula.

Afterwards we celebrated Luis’ b-day with Betty Crocker cupcakes!!

Mike holding the moon

I’ve posted a journal report for our first day on Mars. You can also review our other daily reports at the MDRS logbook.

Crew 65 shopping for supplies

Milky Way over the Hab- photo by Debi-Lee Wilkinson

Crew 65 mission commences

Graham in the GreenHab