Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  A journey of hundreds of millions of miles begins with tests, attempts, and approximations. It’s built on data and observation, propelled by the grace of exemplary engineering, huge sums of money, and uncommon political and social will. These essays were born of an experience on a project that aims to help NASA get astronauts to Mars. They are an attempt to explore aspirations of becoming an interplanetary species—an examination of science, culture, and self—and to contend with complicated questions of who we, in our complexity, might be right now as creatures on this Earth and in space, poised on the edge, readying for launch.

  II

  ASTRO-GASTRONOMY

  Let it begin with poutine. Salty, squeaky, messy, and delicious, poutine is a French-Canadian delicacy of french fries topped with cheese curds and brown gravy, currently experiencing international acclaim. Likely invented in a restaurant in Québec in the 1950s, poutine’s breakout moment was in 1982 when the Toronto Star introduced it by suggesting two types could be found in the eastern part of the country: “regular” and “Italian style,” a version made with spaghetti sauce. Shortly thereafter, its popularity exploded. Before 1982, the use of the word “poutine,” at least in books digitized by Google, was virtually nonexistent. After 1982, the Google graph of its appearance in text shoots straight into the stratosphere.

  There’s a decidedly of-the-people feel to poutine. Like a sandwich or a casserole, you can make it your own, dress it up or down, add extravagant sauces and toppings such as ground beef, pickles, kimchi, pork, fennel, curried lentils, a fried egg, pepperoni. In 2001, chef Martin Picard “elevated” poutine by making it with foie gras, now a specialty at his Montreal restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon. And in 2007, in a remote outpost on Canada’s Devon Island, 10 degrees north of the Arctic Circle and just west of Greenland across Baffin Bay, poutine went interplanetary.

  Devon Island is home to a facility used to conduct analog Mars missions. Called Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, or FMARS, it mainly consists of a two-story metal can that accommodates crews for long expeditions, allowing them to conduct experiments in a harsh, isolated environment. FMARS comes equipped with ATVs for transportation and shotguns to scare off polar bears, which historically haven’t been necessary, but it’s good to be prepared.

  * * *

  From May to August 2007, FMARS was home to an international crew of seven people conducting a four-month mission to better understand possible astronaut challenges on Mars.

  One of those difficulties turned out to be a homesick Canadian named Simon. To cheer him up, the crew decided to make poutine. While they didn’t have french fries or cheese curds, they did have certain dehydrated, shelf-stable, and therefore space-friendly foods such as packets of brown gravy. A start. The crew improvised the rest. Dehydrated scalloped potatoes stood in for fries, and powdered milk hinted at the possibility of cheese curds.

  The curds took some time, I learned from Kim Binsted, crewmember on this 2007 FMARS expedition. Like Simon, Binsted was Canadian and therefore familiar with the restorative powers of poutine. The fries also took some finagling. First, crewmembers rehydrated the potatoes, then fried them, and finally baked them for good measure. “And because we were feeling exuberant, we made alternative sauces,” Binsted told me. “It took all day, but Simon was extremely happy. We put a Québec flag next to it and took pictures.”

  The Martian poutine launched dozens of culinary celebrations on Binsted’s mission. The crew celebrated birthdays, half birthdays, three-quarter birthdays, any excuse to get creative in the kitchen. All the while, Binsted was reading Ernest Shackleton’s diaries from his harrowing 1914 Antarctic journey aboard the Endurance. “It was clear that food was important and that [Shackleton’s crew] also had special meals, even if it was just seal fat,” she said. “I realized food plays an important role in long-duration expeditions and not just in sustaining yourself, but also helping crews bond and reminding people of home.”

  After the mission, a picture and description of the interplanetary poutine appeared in an academic paper authored by Binsted and others, along with suggestions that meals, in particular celebratory or special meals, might play a crucial role on far-flung space missions:

  The psycho-social preparation and consumption were very clear … meals eaten en famille provided the social glue that held the crew together. Meal times were an opportunity to discuss the challenges of the day, plan next steps, air complaints, share news, and so on … Special meals were used to break up the monotony of the long mission, and to mark the passage of time.

  Back on Earth, Binsted gave talks about her FMARS experience. In attendance was Jean Hunter. For years, Hunter had been asking questions about space food, including how fermentation might expand the diversity of flavors, textures, and uses of a limited range of space crops, and how omnivorous astronauts might feel, over time, about a diet with vegan menu options. Binsted and Hunter decided to partner on a project—a Mars simulation of their own—to test a problem called menu fatigue, which NASA already knew its astronauts encountered on long-duration missions. Simply put, crews on the International Space Station tend to eat less over time. And since a healthy diet is crucial to maintaining bone density and overall health in zero gravity, when calories flag, Houston considers it a problem.

  * * *

  I first encountered the concept of menu fatigue, when I myself was fatigued one late February day in 2012, scrolling through Twitter. An NPR headline flashed past: “Why Astronauts Crave Tabasco Sauce.”

  Why indeed. I clicked. From the article I learned it could be that the lack of gravity shifts fluids in astronauts’ bodies. Their sinuses clog; their sense of smell dulls, possibly making food less palatable. And if so, might it be important to reconsider space menus, to make them more appealing?

  And then, at the end of the article, the writer added a suggestion from one Kim Binsted that duck fat be included on a Mars mission instead of margarine. It doesn’t weigh any more, Binsted noted, it’s just as shelf-stable, and it simply tastes so much better.

  The article also posted a call for volunteer wannabe astronauts. The piece concluded, “If the idea of pretending you’re on Mars for four months is appealing to you, Binsted is still taking applications from people who want to join her simulation.”

  Well, if you’re a certain kind of person, someone who had wanted desperately to go to space camp as a kid but whose parents didn’t have the money for it, someone who had geared her whole educational track toward getting the scientific degrees that could qualify her to become an astronaut but who, along the way, had found herself writing about science rather than doing it, which was fine and even at times quite satisfying, but had no plans to get back into science and no big writing assignments or obligations really on the horizon, who was married but childless so the possibility of removing herself from the day-to-day would likely not too drastically upend the lives of others except maybe her wife, her understanding wife, then, especially since being a pretend astronaut matched so closely with her personal hopes and dreams that she had years prior gently stashed on a shelf, you might have been inclined to apply. And so I applied. “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality,” wrote the children’s book author Lloyd Alexander. “It’s a way of understanding it.”

  APRIL 7, 2012

  Dear HI-SEAS Applicant,

  Thank you for your interest in the Hawai‘i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. As you may know, we received almost 700 applications for this mission, for only six crew positions. Because of the huge response, we have had to add one more stage to the process (as originally described in the call for participation). At this point, you are in the “highly qualified candidate” pool of about 150 applicants. However, we will have to narrow that pool down further before moving on to interviews, references and medicals. We expect to be able to notify the 30 semi-finalists by mid-April.

  …

  Thanks again for your application, and for your commitment to human space exploration.
<
br />   Kim Binsted

  HI-SEAS, University of Hawai‘i

  And so I waited. And as I waited, I dreamt. In one dream, I attended a Mars-simulation tryout where I didn’t care much for the other people, my potential crewmates. The guys were competitive and, I suspected, deeply insecure. The women were knowledgeable about all things science and engineering, but were humorless and dull. In this tryout, which spanned days, our every meal was tuna salad sandwiches with a side of tuna salad, a domed, glistening scoop whose pool of watery mayonnaise sogged the bottom of the sandwich. A nightmare, actually.

  After a few weeks I still hadn’t heard from Binsted. My loud brain told me that it wasn’t meant to be. It suggested I read the internet to distract from my disappointment. But my quiet brain said, what if the silence was a mistake? Why not just send an email to see? My quiet brain is often a better friend.

  It was a mistake! I should have been contacted with next steps, Binsted told me, and she gave me dates for a Skype interview. I interviewed. Then, a few weeks after that, I was invited to the training workshop with eight others in Ithaca, New York, after which Binsted, Hunter, and the rest of the team would select the crew of six that would participate in the first HI-SEAS mission. I hadn’t believed that anything so strange or wonderful, short of actually going to space, could be possible.

  * * *

  The first food in space was dog food. In November of 1957, Laika, the Muscovite street dog, flew on the Soviet satellite Sputnik 2, which had been fitted with a life-support system to prevent carbon-dioxide poisoning, a fan to keep her cool, a bag affixed to her body to collect waste, and powdered meat and bread crumb gelatin to sustain her over the several days she would orbit Earth. She died within hours of launch. Her capsule overheated because part of the rocket failed to separate. This fact wasn’t made public until 2002, and for decades the world believed that she died on day six when her oxygen was scheduled to run out, the publicly reported conclusion of the mission.

  The second food in space was human food, from a tube, a puree that Yuri Gagarin ate on his historic orbit around the Earth in 1961, the first human space flight. Then along came John Glenn of the NASA Astronaut Corps. In 1962, he circled the Earth three times, sucking down applesauce. Tubes and cubes—food blocks made of meat, vegetables, bread, etc., pressed into bite-size morsels so they wouldn’t leave crumbs that could float in an eye or gum up controls or air filters—were standard in the early days of space programs. But engineers were always fiddling with the numbers, trying to find ways to save payload weight and space and compensate for the hassle of eating. In Packing for Mars, Mary Roach writes of an unsuccessful proposal in 1964 by a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, to fly a very large astronaut, one with, say, 20 kilograms of fat. By the numbers, the astronaut’s adipose would carry 184,000 calories, the researcher claimed, which would supply more than 2,900 calories a day for 90 days. No need to send any food at all.

  Today, astronauts who do six-month tours on the International Space Station are not required to subsist off their own bodies and also have more leverage with their meals than astronauts did in the ’60s and ’70s. There are some two hundred ready-to-eat options. Most ISS foods are sealed in pouches. Many, like the Salisbury steak, require the addition of hot water to rehydrate and heat them. Same goes for the shrimp cocktail and its sauce, a favorite, which features a jolt of horseradish to clear the sinuses. Other foods, like peanut butter and jelly tortilla sandwiches, are ready to go as soon as you smear the condiments. And in fact there is something of a “tortilla culture” on the ISS, which Jean Hunter mentioned early in our HI-SEAS indoctrination, that has allowed some sandwich/wrap/burrito creativity to emerge. For example, a steak and bean burrito isn’t technically on the menu, but there’s a YouTube video of an astronaut making one. Astronauts are also allowed to send up a personal food treat for their mission, something that reminds them of home. Marshmallow Fluff if they want it.

  But what about Mars? What about something longer than six months on the space station? It turns out astronaut food for a Mars mission requires a significant reformulation. Few things in NASA’s pantry are designed for the length of such a journey. Nutrients degrade over time, and since the food is prepared well in advance of the mission, it needs to be fortified and palatable for up to seven years.

  Binsted and Hunter weren’t necessarily interested in developing new, long-lasting foods for Mars, though it is true that bulk ingredients like the ones on HI-SEAS are more shelf-stable and offer the additional benefit of less packaging. Rather, they were more keen on combatting menu fatigue by letting crews be more flexible and creative in their meals. Of course, cooking wouldn’t be possible on the actual journey to and from the Red Planet; zero g wouldn’t allow for that. Though once on Mars and held to its surface by a gravitational tug about a third as strong as Earth’s, a crew with the proper ingredients, utensils, and pots and pans could have any number of gustatory adventures. They could bake and sauté, boil water for pasta, and toss a salad. Soups, latkes, pizza, sushi, beef tagines, apple pie, all made from scratch!

  But before project directors, managers, or engineers at NASA would even consider in their mission designs something other than premade pouch food, Binsted and Hunter would need to show the trade-offs between cooking and the resources it eats up, such as water and time, and that less packaging, longer-lasting ingredients, and the creative meals that these ingredients allowed would make a positive difference in a crew’s well-being. They’d need to get the data.

  * * *

  On the evening of April 16, 2013, a Tuesday, after a long and winding drive up to an old quarry site on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa, the six chosen to kick off the HI-SEAS project stepped out of the van. Bags in tow, our boots crunched lava rock like broken plates underfoot to the door of our home for the next four months, a sparsely furnished, newly constructed two-story geodesic dome. The smell of it—off-gassing vinyl from the skin that stretched across the metal frame—was striking and intoxicating, alien and familiar all at once, like driving a new spaceship home, straight off the lot.

  Just inside the door was the foyer, which we would use as an “air lock” once we were settled, waiting five minutes before going outside and after coming back in. Straight ahead was a metal shipping container, which housed a workshop with tools and extra supplies. To our right was an archway with white vinyl curtains. Parting them revealed a large common area covered by a thin, blue-gray carpet. Three white rectangular plastic tables, the kind with folding legs, followed the curve of the dome—these would be our workstations. A fourth table was placed near the kitchen, surrounded by black, high-backed rolling chairs, like you might get at Office Depot. This would be our dining room.

  In the kitchen was a small fridge, some convection burners, a convection oven, a toaster, a bread maker, a dishwasher, a microwave, standard stuff. Off the kitchen was a door that led to a utility space with a washer and dryer, the control panel for the habitat’s electrical system, and another exit. On the other side of the kitchen wall was a small room that acted as a laboratory, and next to it, the first-floor bathroom. Around the corner from the bathroom were stairs leading to a mezzanine where there was another bathroom and six small rooms where we’d go to sleep each night and wake up every morning.

  Our rooms were about the size of small walk-in closets, wedge-shaped like a piece of pie. At crust-edge was a bed. Next to mine was a set of plastic drawers that I used for a nightstand and a small desk and stool. The wall over our sleeping area was curved because of the shape of the structure, making it difficult to sit straight up in bed and adding to a claustrophobic feeling for those prone to it. I’m not. I’ve always enjoyed small spaces. As a kid, I was always making forts or repurposing large cardboard boxes, rooms within rooms. A little like a hug, maybe. Or just an enclosure that held few surprises and felt completely my own.

  When I learned I was selected for the crew, I called my parents. My father, a quiet man, at one point
gently said, “I always thought you’d make a good astronaut.” At which my mother, a former teacher and very much a talker, reminded me that her high school took part in a national study conducted by Stanford in 1957 to measure the aptitude of American teenagers. While one of her lowest scores was domestic engineering, or housekeeping, one of her highest scores was adaptability to spaceflight, so if such a thing might have a genetic component, she suggested, perhaps I inherited it from her. How the Stanford study’s conclusions were drawn, the kind of questions that were asked, what any of it really meant, she didn’t really know. But in thinking about my childhood and my relationship to food, to planning and preparing meals, and to cleaning up after, I can absolutely see how it might have been shaped by a mother who was not particularly well suited to the tasks, nor a person who enjoyed them. At an early age, she sold me on the idea of a “meal pill,” one of her favorite futuristic concepts. No preparation! No cleanup! Saves time so you can do other things! Our family—my parents, two older brothers, me, and my little sister—ate dinner together most nights without television or other distractions because eating as a family was important, our mother would remind us, though the food that we ate, the meals themselves, were not particularly inspired or inspiring. The canned corn or green beans or salad of iceberg lettuce with ranch alongside spaghetti dressed in RAGÚ, assembled by my mother moving from stovetop to beeping microwave to table, had the mouthfeel of fatigue, of the fact of the need for a dinner for four then five then six people as the family grew. Year after year, every night for decades. Please pass the meal pill.