Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  Of course, we all found ways to distract and entertain ourselves. I, for instance, tried without success to teach myself the ukulele, self-conscious that my beginner mistakes in learning “Back to Black” were easily overheard and annoying. I also read a good number of books and articles, and spent time writing and listening to podcasts and music playlists made by friends. Sian took up night photography, a satisfying and ever-evolving challenge. Yajaira staggered her research projects throughout the mission so she would have a new one to look forward to every couple of weeks. Simon and Angelo played video games and listened to music.

  It’s easy to see how we believed we weren’t bored at the time, especially since we all knew the negative association boredom has for astronauts and explorers. Though we did begin to feel restless at the end. At one point Angelo even joked, with a wild look in his eye, that he imagined ripping through the habitat cover and finally going for a walk without a space suit. It was very funny at the time.

  Before Mars, I had always assumed I wasn’t the type to get bored. I was never compelled to call anything boring, no matter how monotonous; it seemed like a simplistic dismissal. After all, life was far too interesting for that. But after the shock I felt that fateful day when Simon masqueraded as a beardless stranger outside my room, I started to take boredom more seriously. The extreme contrast between that emotional height and my previously muted state let me see my own version of boredom for what it was.

  And indeed, I had experienced it before. After doing some reading around on the topic, I discovered that certain behaviors—imagining oneself in the future, making new plans, learning new skills, setting goals, trying to refresh and start anew—are typical of someone who feels bored. I could check off all of these. For as long as I can remember, I’ve responded to an ill-defined itch inside that propels me to constantly dream of other ways of being.

  I was often inspired to try new things on Mars, like writing projects, drawing, or finally learning the ukulele. And there was absolutely a point in the mission when all I could do was think about future plans: signing up for a time-share yurt with friends, for instance, or traveling to Puerto Rico or Japan, or writing a book. Some of these imaginings certainly bordered on bliss. All this felt familiar, somehow. Might I actually suffer from chronic boredom and not even know it?

  If only boredom could be compartmentalized. I do wonder how much of this has to do with the interest in sending people to Mars, as if astronauts and explorers might act as bearers of a culture’s collective boredom. In their exploration of new worlds, might they also carry with them a larger, shared yearning for the possible?

  IV

  THE STANDARD ASTRONAUT

  It’s 2012, and Jill and I are living in Nashville. She’s finishing her second year in Vanderbilt’s MFA program for fiction, and I’m writing stories for magazines as a freelancer. Our basement apartment is spacious—two bedrooms, a dining room, ceramic tile floors, brown wood paneling—and furnished with mismatched thrift-store finds, like a wicker love seat, a square, squat, wooden coffee table, and accented with stacks upon stacks of books. I sit at my desk in our shared office as I await the HI-SEAS video interview, positioned at an odd angle so the surface behind me looks, rather than cluttered, interesting and eclectic, maybe even purposefully arranged.

  Sleeping in adjacent rooms are 1) Tungsten, the talkative orange tabby I adore and 2) our sensitive yet endearing dachshund, Grace, who tends to bark at minor provocations. And for the past few days a robin has been cracking its beak into the glass of our back door. I hope none of them will be joining me on the call.

  The Skype app chimes and I tap the keyboard. Accompanying Kim Binsted are a couple other people involved with HI-SEAS, and, I find out later, a NASA employee whose actual job was to help select actual NASA astronauts. There are bandwidth issues, Binsted says, so they can see me, but I can’t see them. Just relax, I tell myself. Just be yourself.

  Questions they ask include: Why do you want to do this? What do your friends and family think of you wanting to do this? Tell us which foods you’ll miss. Tell us about a time you were in a harrowing situation or in physical danger and how you dealt with it.

  I tell them I want to do this because I presume NASA wouldn’t choose me as an actual astronaut at this point since I might be too old or too long out of science, but I’d like to help the cause anyway, to donate my data.

  I say my friends and family, including Jill, think pretending to be an astronaut for four months is strange, but no one’s surprised I want to do it. And as for the food I’d miss? I’d anticipated this question and decided to answer in a way that I hoped would make me seem fun. But it also could be a little risky. I say, “I’d miss beer.”

  And then like a nerd I add: “I learned in my research on Mars analogs that during Kim Binsted’s own simulated mission in the Arctic, her crew brewed beer, and I’m interested in giving that a try, so if things go well I might not actually miss beer.”

  Silence.

  Then Binsted responds: “Unfortunately, alcohol won’t be allowed as part of the food study and besides, we’ll have CO2 sensors installed so we’ll know about your home brew.”

  More silence.

  “Well okay,” I say, “then I guess I’ll miss beer.”

  They laugh and I laugh and I feel like I just won the lottery.

  The question about a harrowing situation is difficult because I had none. Never even broken a bone. Later I learn of Oleg’s rafting near-disaster in the Alaskan outback. And about Crystal Haney, another finalist and later part of the backup crew, who lived with her family on a sailboat, weathering storms in seas of towering waves.

  I think about how I like to swim outdoors. But nothing even close to dangerous or life-threatening had happened unless you count that one time in San Diego when a sea lion revealed itself, prompting me to churn faster back to shore. It all makes me realize how diligently I avoid true danger. After a couple of false starts, I bumble through some thoughts on having played volleyball in high school and college. I was the setter, I say, the position that calls the plays like a quarterback, and when things got tough, I had to decide who to set, who might be able to get us out of our rut. As if a rut-in-the-volleyball-match is in any way a “harrowing situation.” So unexciting, so boring is this answer, I feel like I lose all the lottery money I had just, minutes ago, won over beer.

  I learn from Binsted later that NASA had an unofficial list of astronaut soft skills it looks for, and it’s possible that the volleyball answer and my lack of adventure wasn’t as bad as I thought. While the traditional view of astronauts is that they are thrill seekers, this is mostly a holdover from the days when the only astronauts were test pilots. Those astronauts needed to be good at flying fast and risking death, able to handle the controls of untested craft as well as enduring, or ignoring, the existential threat of being among the first humans to hitch a ride on an explosion and float, tin-canned, through the void.

  As a group, though, test pilots also tend to come with bravado, egotism, and hot tempers—none of which would be advantageous on a long, likely tedious, space trek, especially since personality matters and social and psychological issues compound the longer a journey lasts. A three-year mission to Mars would call for something different, perhaps even some danger aversion. “If you think about a mission to Mars as being a system of systems,” Binsted said in an interview once, “the human part of that system, if that breaks, can be just as disastrous as a rocket blowing up.”

  * * *

  On February 2, 1960, Look magazine ran a cover story that asked “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” It was a sensational headline representing an audacious idea at the time. And, as we all know, the proposal fell short. In 1961, NASA sent Alan Shepard above the stratosphere, followed by dozens of other American spacemen over the next two decades. Only in 1983 did Sally Ride become America’s first woman to launch.

  A certain kind of person might be compelled to ask, why would anyone think a woman s
hould be the first to space, anyway? And to this person I would say, expert medical opinion, for starters.

  Women have fewer heart attacks than men, and in the 1950s and ’60s, scientists speculated that their reproductive systems were more protected from radiation from space than men’s because they are on the inside. What’s more, psychological studies suggested that women cope better than men in isolation and when deprived of sensory inputs. But there was another, possibly more compelling reason that women might outshine men as potential astronauts: basic economics. Thanks to their size, women are, on average, cheaper to launch and fly than men for the simple fact that they need less food.

  I verified this firsthand. During the mission, part of my job was to collect and manage the crew’s sleep data. One device used to track sleep was a sensor armband, which, in addition to sleep data and activity logging, also estimated daily and weekly calorie expenditure.

  Every week, sitting at the table where we ate our meals, I’d dump the sensor data into my computer. While I didn’t know which numbers belonged to which subject, due to anonymity requirements, I could see each subject’s F or M. Over time I noticed a trend. Sian, Yajaira, and I consistently used fewer than half the calories of Angelo, Simon, and Oleg. Fewer than half!

  Consider the numbers. During one week in particular, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day while the least metabolically active female went through 1,475. Overall, it was rare for a woman on the crew to use 2,000 calories and common for male crewmembers to exceed 3,000.

  We were all exercising roughly the same amount—at least forty-five minutes a day for five consecutive days as per our exercise protocol, most of us ardent followers of Tony Horton’s P90X workouts—but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways.

  Another observation: at mealtime, Sian, Yajaira, and I took smaller portions than Angelo, Simon, and Oleg, all three of whom often went back for seconds. I also remember that one of the guys complained how hard it was to maintain his weight, despite the piles of food he was eating. It all got me thinking about economics and gravity.

  Astronauts’ calorie requirements matter when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain their weight on a long space journey, the more food should be launched with them. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. Further, the more fuel required, the heavier the whole rocket becomes which, in turn, requires more fuel to launch.

  This means every pound counts on the way to space. A conundrum, but a predictable one, thanks to math. The “rocket equation” was first derived by a British mathematician in 1813, and later independently discovered again—and applied to hypothetical space travel—by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903. It’s the equation that guides all decisions around how heavy payloads, and even rockets themselves, can be.

  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.

  When I mentioned my proposal at dinner one night, one of my male crewmates grumpily dismissed it. I figured I was onto something.

  * * *

  Our selection for HI-SEAS and the supplies we brought into that dome, including food, had nothing to do with the rocket equation. And of course the question of female astronaut suitability had long been answered. This meant that we were chosen, more or less, in the same way all NASA astronauts are chosen. Fundamentally, they must have the same baseline: be a documented U.S. citizen with at least a bachelor’s degree in science, math, or engineering and have worked at least three years in their field or have flown at least one thousand hours as a jet pilot.

  These requirements might make sense to you. It’s a technical job. Potential astronauts should have proven their rationality and ability to handle the rigors of a machine-dominated environment. This kind of educational prerequisite is a shorthand that says yes they can. But I’ve often wondered about all the people who might have made very fine astronauts—car mechanics, inventors, oil-rig workers, sculptors, clergy, EMTs, truck drivers, novelists, designers, plumbers, philosophers—who never got a chance. What would the history of spaceflight have looked like if it wasn’t just formally educated scientists, engineers, and pilots invited to the party?

  In any case, I was qualified, but barely. My undergraduate degree is in chemistry, and I have a master’s degree in physics. And though I never worked as a physicist after graduate school—I went straight to science journalism—I did take three years to complete my master’s rather than the usual two because, as a chemistry major, I needed to make up some undergraduate physics courses. I don’t know if the HI-SEAS selection committee considered journalism as relevant experience in addition to my three years in graduate school.

  In 2015, NASA put out a call for astronauts, and I thought I might as well give it one last shot. I didn’t make it past the first round. It made me wonder if the agency or, more specifically, the algorithm programmed by those at the agency to sort through the 18,300 applications, a flood three times the size of the previous hiring round in 2011, operates with a fairly narrow definition of professional astronaut experience so that a journalist—even one with a background in science and time on “Mars”—would always be a no-go.

  The group that came out the other end of NASA’s hiring process two years later was made up of five women and seven men. Most had flight time, many in some branch of the military. Some were scientists, some were doctors, all seemed to be firing on all cylinders and had been for much of their young lives. Reading through their bios, what I read was ambition, and a lot of it. And it wasn’t the usual American kind, either, that ambition for money. After all, the most financially hungry among us rarely go into science. Fewer still join the military. It’s a different kind of ambition that propels people to NASA, something to do with glory, maybe, or perhaps a sense of something to prove, though I’m sure it’s different for everyone. And while NASA pulls from the military, and the military often pulls from particular segments of the country’s population, I couldn’t help but think, looking at those bios, of James Baldwin’s observation that ambition isn’t equally distributed in America. In addressing his nephew in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes, “You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” This was what it was to be black and born in Harlem, Baldwin writes in 1962. This sentiment, and the rightful anger behind it, also may apply to many other nonwhite Americans in other cities and rural towns today, to those born in poverty, to those who lack documentation. There are so many excellent people in this country, living now and throughout history, who have had their ambitions blunted before they could even get started, who have been told that they are not what America is looking for. What of the almost-astronauts or those who never even thought to give it a try? What might they have contributed to humanity’s grand space endeavor? How might they have shaped it differently, for everyone?

  * * *

  It’s not just education and temperament that gets you picked. You also must pass a flight physical, which is like a regular physical, but slightly more involved. This was a HI-SEAS requirement as well. It confirms that you have an untroubled heart and nervous system, no substance dependence, and no diagnosed personality or mental health disorders.

  But at NASA, the flight physical is just the start of the bodily assessments. The vetting, which includes a colonoscopy, bone scans, and an EKG among other scopings and probings, is thorough. Sian, who wasn’t medically disqualified but doesn’t know exactly why she didn’t make the final selection, learned through this process, among other unbeknownst personal details, that she had “freakishly” small ear canals, the smallest NASA doctors had ever seen.

  Again, here, I think of the disqualified, all those whose bodies rendered them ineligible f
or spaceflight, NASA-style. What has been missed by not including them? My oldest brother, Mark, was pretty fit when he was younger, competing in 10Ks and playing basketball. Professionally, he was also a union stagehand. Part of his job was to help load big-name bands like U2, the Rolling Stones, and Metallica in and out of their stadium venues. This union position was a point of pride for him and our family because Mark was born with spina bifida and his main form of mobility was a wheelchair. He had to fight for that union card, as he had to fight for many things in his life—access to driver’s ed in high school, access to front doors and various second floors of buildings, access to health care and doctors who believed his body could continue to function despite its initial conditions. Of course, serious health issues that could lead to illness or death could be a liability on a long mission. My brother, with spina bifida and poorly functioning kidneys, would certainly not have been a good candidate for Mars because his overall health was not stable.

  In 2011, NASA launched a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2 to the ISS, notable because its body came with only a torso, arms, and a head. On its maiden voyage, it was to remain stationary and demonstrate the usefulness of a humanoid robot for flipping switches, cleaning handrails, and removing dustcovers. For these kinds of tasks and more, engineers deemed anything more than a torso superfluous. Legs in microgravity mostly get in the way. They knock into walls and doorways in tight, overcrowded space-station modules. And they demand time and attention to keep in shape. Most exercise—squats, running on treadmills, and riding a stationary bike—and the accompanying equipment, which can be bulky, is geared around them. To legs’ credit, astronauts on the ISS use their feet to steady themselves on toeholds, bars bolted to the walls, floors, and ceilings, though there could be other ways to fix a floating self.