Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  This apartment is my first space, singularly mine, since I was in my early twenties. It’s a luxury that many people don’t have, I know. And to “have” apartments in two of the most expensive cities in this country, frankly, is mind-boggling and somewhat embarrassing to me. In 2006, Jill and I lucked into a cheap one-bedroom in San Francisco’s Mission District and have clung to it ever since. We sublet it to a friend for two years while we lived in Nashville. That time was life-expanding in many ways—the writing community was so welcoming. We both learned so much. But the city of Nashville at large was a difficult place for me, in particular, to be. For my perceivable queerness, I experienced everything from stares and sneers to outright confrontation. I wouldn’t have wanted to stay there. While we were gone, San Francisco rents soared, but because of our apartment, we could land there again.

  The low rent, I believe, is one of the main reasons Jill and I became the writers we are and are continually trying to become. It’s allowed us to make job decisions that gave us time over money. These include my four months on Mars, which did pay, but only an after-the-fact $5,500. It allowed her to be an adjunct professor, to do some editing on the side, and to play tennis at the nearby public courts within a strange and beautiful community of tennis players that has inspired much of her current work. And it allowed me to move to New York, to find a place of my own, to work on these essays, and to become again another kind of writer.

  In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard quotes the French historian Jules Michelet on nests, as in the kind made by birds: “Michelet suggests a house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside, like a shell, in an intimacy that works physically. ‘On the inside,’ he says, ‘the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls on every side, that it succeeds in forming this circle.’”

  I think not just of a bird body pressing against a space, but of how psyches and behaviors imprint onto the places where we live as well. In this studio, I prudently, frugally chose all of the objects that surround me, as if they are myself by extension. The place has a certain “Kateness” to it, a friend once said: considerations that are evidently and obviously mine when observed by others. A sensibility manifests in space, my behavior molds a dwelling as I sink my body into this bed, that couch, the chair at the desk upon which I rest my elbows and forearms. Inside this limited square footage, I walk the same limited paths over and over. Here I’ve painted pictures, collected postcards, broadsides, and calendars, taken Polaroids, and hung them all on my wall. Books surround me, there are books on every surface. I press myself into the materiality of the apartment in a way that is wholly, exclusively myself.

  Bachelard continues, “Michelet goes on: ‘The house is the bird’s very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort, I shall even say, its suffering. The result is only obtained by constantly repeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird’s breast, its heart, surely with difficulty in breathing, perhaps even, with palpitations.’”

  I contrast my New York apartment, which is fairly uncluttered, with my aging parents’ house in Kansas, a nest of a different sort. They’ve lived in it for decades. The walls are closing in, made of objects typical of any cluttered home: stacks of mail, magazines, excessive kitchen appliances, items to be returned to stores, items to sell on eBay, containers within containers for everything and nothing. And when I asked why there were so many wicker duck baskets, my mother responded proudly that three or more of anything makes a collection.

  I go back and forth on this. Their house is not easy to navigate. A guest might need to move a box of quilting supplies, for instance, to find a soft place to sit. Might there be some benefit to this? The architecture of the avant-garde artist couple Madeline Gins and Arakawa, specifically the Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) completed in 2008 in East Hampton, New York, is related to the idea that discomfort in this world staves off death—that the chaos of a bumpy, slanted floor or the “poorly” placed light switch will make you more aware of your surroundings and therefore more alive. It’s true that environments that are too predictable feel sterile and can lead to boredom and lethargy. And an easy way to feel young is to experience something new, to travel, to see a thing with fresh eyes. But I wonder. Isn’t it true that most of us can habituate to anything? Isn’t it our nature to minimize effort and discomfort?

  My parents’ movements have constricted as they’ve gotten older, for health reasons, but also perhaps because of their environment. There can be no doubt that their nest restricts them. But again, here I’m conflicted. Personally, I really do appreciate small spaces. I might even get a little nervous in too-large rooms. I think about how shrinking a space makes it feel safer. When you, the bird, need only spin in place to press your breast into your own clutter, to smooth the walls with your own self, you can believe nothing will sneak up on you. Large spaces become vast, become infinite until we find ourselves edging toward an abyss and with it, the accompanying terror. Anne Carson speaks of a domesticated abyss, which is, in effect, an abyss recognized and then restricted in some way so as not to let it get the better of us. What do we need from our nests to feel safe? To forget the abyss and how dangerous all this is, how dangerous and precarious it is to have a body and to move through space, how unlikely and fleeting it actually is to be alive at all.

  * * *

  There’s a very special room in the space station called the cupola, a room full of windows. It’s where astronauts pose for photo ops, wax philosophic, soak up terrestrial sights, and bask in Earth-reflected sunlight. It’s a spacious respite from the rest of the station, which can be, and if you’ve seen the pictures you know, quite cluttered with equipment, supplies, and bags of refuse.

  In the cupola, you can float above it all, literally, above the planet where the entirety of human history has played out, where, Carl Sagan wrote, “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” Sagan was speaking of the “Pale Blue Dot” as photographed from the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990 at a vantage of 4 billion miles, an on-its-way-out-of-the-solar-system point of view. No real need to compare and contrast, though, any extraterrestrial look, even two hundred miles up, can be a perspective shifter.

  In one of the cupola’s windows, there’s a divot. Created by a spec of space matter, either a micrometeorite or a particle of space junk made from colliding satellites, this divot is a reminder that low-earth orbit harbors danger. There are more than a hundred million tiny pieces of space junk zipping around the planet, sometimes crossing paths with the space station. To protect against it, the station employs a patchwork of shields made of Kevlar and placed at a distance beyond the exterior walls because, if large enough, one of these space bullets could rip a hole inside the space station, which, depending on where and what size, would be bad to catastrophic.

  Ground control monitors the bigger stuff, junk that’s larger than 1.5 centimeters in diameter. With enough warning, say six hours, astronauts can engage the station’s thrusters and slip out of a charging satellite’s path. But sometimes there isn’t enough warning.

  During Kelly’s yearlong stay, a defunct satellite on a path to fly within a mile of the station was detected too late. The discovery of this imminent object triggered a set of procedures. Among them, Kelly had to close all eighteen hatches on the U.S. side of the space station, which takes about two hours. The thinking is that if the satellite hits one module, the impact would only decompress the damaged module and the rest of the station could be saved. In the middle of this battening, mission control phoned up to remind Kelly and the cosmonaut Gennady Padalka that they had a previously scheduled public relations event—to talk to a Louisville, Kentucky, television station about what it’s like to float i
n low gravity and the Kentucky Derby.

  Kelly, who reads to me as the quintessential grumpy space robot, complied, but didn’t seem happy about it. Understandably. He was being asked to close hatches, a chore that, probabilistically, was a waste of time. The two most likely scenarios were that the junk would miss the station entirely or that it would hit the station and completely obliterate it. This particular satellite was clocked at 17,500 miles per hour, coming in at the opposite direction of the station, which is also traveling at 17,500 miles per hour—a collision that would release the same energy as a nuclear bomb. And then, in the middle of this most likely pointless task, Kelly had to spin somersaults and answer questions about horse racing, all the while, there was a non-zero chance that his annihilation was less than an hour away. This section of Kelly’s book contains more instances of the word “fuck” than any other.

  Interview complete, hatches finally secured, Kelly, Padalka, and Mikhail Kornienko loaded themselves into the Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station—a kind of emergency life raft. As Kelly tells it, the three of them looked out the windows, waiting and watching even though there was no light, no earthshine. They sat in darkness and waited. They waited for the speeding satellite, which wouldn’t be visible even if there were light because it would be moving so fast.

  Of course, the satellite missed. “Moscow, are we still waiting?” Padalka asked after a while. “Gennady Ivanovich, that’s it,” Moscow mission control responded. “The moment has passed. It is safe; you can go back to work now.”

  Kelly, spending the next two hours reopening the hatches, reflects on the near miss. “Had it in fact hit us, we probably wouldn’t even have known it,” he writes. “Misha, Gennady, and I would have gone from grumbling to one another in our cold Soyuz to being blasted in a million directions as diffused atoms, all in the space of a millisecond. Our neurological systems would not even have had time to process the incoming data into conscious thought … I don’t know whether this comforts me or disturbs me.”

  Space-junk collisions are mostly a problem in low-earth orbit. Once a craft is on its way to the moon or Mars, both of which NASA considers “deep space,” the real threat comes from radiation, either cosmic rays from deep space or solar flare-ups. A blast from a solar event could result in short-term radiation sickness or long-term increased risk of cancer.

  NASA’s new spacecraft designed for jaunts to the moon and Mars is called Orion, and it has a compartment, like a storm shelter, where astronauts can huddle during such events, surrounding themselves with bags of supplies like food and water that can impede the flow of charged particles.

  Once on Mars, astronauts are still vulnerable to radiation. Where Earth has a robust magnetic field that surrounds it, produced by its molten metal core and useful for deflecting the majority of dangerous incoming charged particles, Mars does not. An astronaut on Mars is almost as exposed to radiation as they would be in their spaceship. Any kind of Martian habitat would need to incorporate radiation shielding, but the reality is this shielding can be extremely heavy and might not be worth transporting. Rather, it could make more sense to 3-D print a habitat out of liquified regolith or set one up in a Martian cave—and there are many of them to choose from. Once upon a time, Mars was a living, breathing planet with active and massive volcanoes. Just like on Earth, these Mars volcanoes would erupt, lava would flow, and the top of the lava would cool and harden into a crust as the lava below would course out into another region, leaving behind a so-called lava tube. As on Earth, the top crust would crumble, providing an entrance to the lava tube, a cave into which a habitat, perhaps inflatable, might be nestled, where Martian rock is the radiation shield.

  As a person who lives in both San Francisco and New York, I think of the views. There would, unfortunately, be none from inside this cave-based habitat, no direct windows to the outside. “The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace,” writes Bachelard. I wonder how often those on Mars will dream of Mars and how often they will dream of Earth.

  VII

  ON ISOLATION

  It was the crew’s first night, we had just arrived, we were settling in. Kim Binsted was preparing to leave for four months, nervous, I think, about launching this Mars mission, a project whose actualization was so uncertain throughout the build-up—NASA nearly pulled funding, there were delays in the construction of the habitat—that at times it almost seemed if any of us were to look down, we’d see we’d collectively run ourselves off the edge of a steep cliff. And yet here we were. In the shipping container attached to the dome, she and I stood surrounded by four months of shelf-stable food, hand tools, and mountains of toilet paper and paper towels. In the shipping container, I followed her gaze to an ax leaning against the wall. And then I heard her say, “Maybe I should take this with me.”

  I imagined what she might have imagined or maybe it was just what I imagined, which was the very bloody deaths of our crew at the hands of one of us who might not be as mentally sound under the pressures of isolation, or even at the hands of an intruder because, though our habitat was remote, we were still technically accessible. In any case, the fact of my isolation and vulnerability, the realization of it, and my voluntary removal of myself from life as I had known it, sharpened.

  The ax. All work and no play … does what to astronaut stand-ins? Binsted and I were quiet for a few seconds, and then, for unknown reasons, I insisted she not worry about it. We might need an ax if there were a fire, I said, or some other emergency. Also, if someone wanted to kill us, they could do so in many other ways, like pillow smothering, though I really did hope not to be murdered while pretending to live on Mars. She scowled and hesitated, then finally agreed to leave it. I still don’t know why I was so confident the ax wouldn’t be a problem—it wasn’t—but I do wonder about my instincts in this case.

  * * *

  We were warned about the effects of isolation in small and large ways. The small ways: brief mentions during our pre-mission conference calls about tensions that arise between crewmembers and their friends, family, and mission support back home. Stories about small annoyances on previous analog missions—others’ chewing sounds, hurt feelings when movie night selections weren’t respected or worse, mocked, and the overall lack of privacy—thin walls and the fact that most space is shared space. We heard how these irritants had led to emotional outbursts on other simulated missions or how they’d been stuffed into sacks of silent grudges, to spill out upon return to Earth.

  The large ways in which we were warned: the multiple hours-long discussions to discover what our breaking points would be. Would we abandon the mission if we got a sudden job offer? If someone back home got sick? If someone died? If we got sick? How sick? Mentally? Physically? If we lost faith in our crewmates or the project entirely?

  And how did we plan to manage the well-documented challenges of isolation? These challenges included but were not limited to something scientists have called “third-quarter” syndrome, in which the itch to be anywhere but inside the dome with your five best friends flares hot when the end is in sight but not quite within reach. Diaries from Arctic and Antarctic expeditions suggest that it’s a special time, three-quarters into your mission. You’ve gotten used to your routines and found a rhythm, but the hard reality of being cut off from others, the demands of your duties, and the quirks of your crewmates have started to wear on you and the end to these low- to high-grade tortures is still not yet near.

  Other challenges include an alienation between the crew and those back home wherein intentions and tone are misinterpreted in communications: the “crew-ground disconnect.” People’s feelings get hurt; information isn’t effectively conveyed; everyone gets frustrated. Productivity and mood can plummet.

  Challenges continue and can appear in the form of obsession with micro-stimuli. Small vexations—a crewmate’s favorite catchphrase, another’s tendency to take up too much space, the subtle and not-so-subtle slig
hts—grow macro over time in an environment without much else going on.

  Here, I was guilty, somewhat predictably. As a writer, I tend to notice the little things. Minor, finely detailed irritants snuck up on me and then kept flicking the back of my head. The number of times in a row I replaced toilet paper in the first-floor bathroom. The cadence of a crewmate’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs, remarkably consistent and always so loud. I also wondered why one of my crewmates kept swinging her crossed leg under the table at every meal so as to ever-so-gently tap me in the shin with her fuzzy slipper, seeming to reach across an incredible distance to make such slight contact, even after I’d tucked my legs well under my chair. But what I really wondered was why I couldn’t ask her to stop.

  Does all this make me sound a little unstable myself? Unsuited to live in an isolated environment with other people? Maybe. But I know I wasn’t alone. One crewmember complained of another’s frequent throat clearing. Someone repeatedly expressed exasperation over the length of time it took some crewmembers to suit up for EVAs. And another suspected that his position on the chore chart was unfair because it gave him too many back-to-back heavy tasks. Then, when he traded with one of us and found himself in an even worse chore lineup than before, he became even more frustrated. In No Exit, Sartre wrote that hell is other people. But what about “other people” and you’re hurtling for eight months through the void of space in what amounts to a metal can on your way to a distant planet?

  From 1967 to 1968, Soviet researchers conducted a year-long medical-engineering experiment in which two male subjects lived in a space capsule just large enough for them and the two seats that held them. On a trip to Moscow to visit Kim Binsted in 2017, she and I spent time touring the very large facility that housed this capsule experiment as well as the Mars500 Experiment, the 520-day simulation of an entire Mars mission from “launch” to “surface expedition” to “trip back home.” When the tour guide mentioned the two men in a can, I wanted to know more. He didn’t go into detail, though he said that it was indeed an unpleasant experience for the subjects. After the year was up, both men still worked for the Soviet space program but, according to the guide, they never spoke to each other again.