Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  Example: John Franklin “was chosen for his initial Arctic leadership position in 1819 in part ‘because he came from a well-placed family … He had no canoeing experience, no hunting experience, no back-packing experience,’ all qualities that would have proved useful for his land-based journey, on which 11 of 25 crew members died.” What’s more, the organizers of public expeditions generally did not actually go on the journeys they planned, which insulated them from negative consequences of poor planning or erroneous theories.

  The section in the paper about the use of various expedition technologies was, in particular, extremely illuminating. Private expeditions, it seemed, were more willing to learn from the Inuit people they encountered. Private explorers, for instance, used Inuit parkas consisting of loose-fitting doubled layers of sealskin with one fur side facing out and one facing in, and in between an insulating layer of air that prevented sweat from condensing against the skin. They also constructed snow houses, finding that “when you use snow as shelter your breath instead of condensing on your bedding gets condensed on the walls of the snow house, and therefore your bedding is relieved from nearly the whole of this.”

  Meanwhile, in public expeditions, the men wore tight woolen garments that absorbed sweat during the day, and then became cold and stiff at night. They also used heavy canvas tents and cloth sleeping bags, which would freeze with condensed water vapor, a miserable way to sleep.

  Transportation too, was drastically different. Private explorers were quick to use dog sleds, skis, and snowshoes, while hauling less gear (building snow houses instead of lugging tents, for instance). In contrast, public explorers used large and cumbersome sledges, requiring ten to twelve men to pull them, and they scoffed at the idea of snowshoes. From an account of a public expedition in 1875: “When the snowshoes were brought on board there ‘was a shout of laughter and derision from the gallant but very inexperienced officers.’”

  There were other innovations ignored by publicly funded explorers as well, including not relying enough on fresh meat, not bringing enough lemon juice to stave off scurvy, and ignoring evidence that the size of an expedition party matters. Smaller parties allowed for fast, more efficient travel.

  But it turns out the full story isn’t simply private good, public bad. It’s more complicated than that. Karpoff concludes: “Men died and ships were lost not because of the public nature of the funding per se, but rather because of the perverse incentives, slow adaptation, and ineffective organizational structures that frequently accompanied public funding.”

  Success depended heavily on incentives and organizational structures in either case. And, when it comes to spaceflight especially, the picture isn’t even as straightforward as these polar examples. In fact, the goals and rewards for NASA and SpaceX are actually quite different. NASA is developing technologies to get astronauts to the moon and to Mars, but for what? Presumably for scientific purposes, to inspire young people to go into science and engineering careers, and for some kind of nationalistic pride. SpaceX wants to build technologies to eventually colonize Mars, for profit, for a stated goal of distributing humans beyond Earth in case of a devastating asteroid strike. There’s also a billionaire’s legacy on the line.

  It’s an evolving arrangement, the NASA SpaceX entanglement. According to the investment firm Space Angels, about half of the company’s money for its first ten years in operation came from U.S. government contracts. And to this day, NASA and the U.S. Air Force remain two of its most important customers. This means that SpaceX, in a nontrivial way, receives a good amount of its funding from taxpayers, with the government acting as the distributor. This public funding also means that SpaceX is subject to certain oversights that accompany any government contractor, especially one working with as popular an agency as NASA. Hence the complicated relationship on drugs and risky fueling procedures. These public-private space endeavors aren’t nearly as easy to disambiguate as the historic polar expeditions, and need to be seen for what they are: a constant push-and-pull between cultures, motivations, goals, money, and various kinds of power. In order to make it work, the people designing these missions need to know what incentives are at play, and to understand how and where their effects might arise.

  All of it makes me wonder what would happen if the voices of those who traditionally haven’t had the money or the power were louder in this conversation about getting to Mars. If Mae Jemison’s voice were louder. If Jill Tarter’s. If Kimo Pihana’s. If Koa Rice’s. If Kim Binsted and Jean Hunter were given more than a couple million for their HI-SEAS experiment. If they had the funding and the cultural clout of Elon Musk. And if they held that megaphone, what would they say? If more ears were tuned to listen, what could be heard? A story of human space exploration that transcends nationalist pride, capitalist power, and ordinary ego? Where might that take us?

  XII

  EXITS AND AIR LOCKS

  The first practical U.S. patent describing a space station was filed by a NASA engineer in 1961. This was three years before the first American space walk and seven years before anyone bunny hopped on the moon. Already, NASA was thinking seriously about living in space.

  It wasn’t until 1966, though, that an engineer proposed a specialized air lock for a space station—a kind of hinged tube jutting from a craft that could depressurize and re-pressurize.

  None of the early spacecraft, the Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo capsules, had dedicated air locks. On these missions, during space walks and moon jaunts, the open hatch exposed all parts of the inside of the craft as well as any astronauts, suited-up of course, to the vacuum of space.

  “Depressurizing the entire vehicle, which would require the use of individual space-pressure suits for all occupants” was “substantially impractical,” wrote J. H. Judd, the owner of the space-station air lock patent. There is a desire, he wrote, that astronauts on a long-duration mission “be able to work in a shirtsleeve environment.” An air lock, then, was critical to creature comfort and the freedom to come and go.

  The air lock, in concept, was not a new idea. There were already chambers, used underwater or in poison-gas environments, in which changes in air pressure could be manually controlled. But NASA’s new design would be simpler, lighter, and easily replaced if damaged.

  Today, the air lock on the International Space Station still resembles the pressure tube described in patent number 3386685. The entire structure consists of two chambers, one for equipment and suits, and another, a cylindrical chamber with a hatch, for crew who plan to go outside. Astronauts spend hours in this chamber in their suits breathing pure oxygen to rid their bodies of nitrogen, necessary to protect against the bends. There is a lot of waiting; much checking of equipment, seals, valves, switches, and attachments. There’s some conversation between astronauts inside the air lock and with people in mission control. There are sometimes jokes. Usually a lot of important information is conveyed. It’s not very much like what you see in the movies.

  * * *

  The ISS is in low-earth orbit. The moon resides in “deep space.” If you consider Earth to be the original spaceship and the moon or Mars to be a destination beyond, to be the actual place of exploration, then humanity’s time in low-earth orbit since the Apollo program ended in 1972 is something of an air lock. It’s a middle space, after one stage has been completed, a place to wait for the pressure change so the next stage is possible.

  This stillness, a kind of waiting for what’s to come, is reminiscent of the phrase “to hang fire,” which appears numerous times in the works of Henry James—often referring to characters who have something to say but hesitate. Appropriately for space travel, the term has a ballistic origin. It describes the momentary pause between the act of igniting gunpowder in a musket, just before the round ball is fired—a thing has been triggered but not yet blasted into motion.

  James creates tension in his works with this hang-fire effect, setting up scenarios steeped in anticipation, where characters hesitate when speaking, w
aiting, unsettled, for events to manifest. In a way, the Cold War ignited something in human space exploration. A trigger was pulled, thereby creating a situation in which all the rockets and space capsules, moon buggies and life-support systems, worldwide mission-control centers and communication protocols, foods in tubes and suits for floating out hatches with rubber seals and orbital mechanics and middle managers and underwater training practice and maintenance personnel and blueprints and hopes and dreams were quickly cobbled together, in less than a decade’s time. There was an expectation that space travel would soon be a regular event, still exciting, of course, but also ordinary, maybe even democratic, not just for highly trained astronauts or wealthy tourists.

  To this day it smolders. The actual bullet, air locked, still hasn’t left the chamber. Will we become a species that moves beyond? That explodes into action, opens the hatch, and transitions out of stillness?

  In many ways on Earth, as I write this, people are waiting. Politically, internationally, small actions are accruing like patchy dark storm clouds. There’s a sense that world events are adding up to a larger shift, a move away from the order that was. But how and what will it be? We wait. This book is being written a decade after the last great recession in the United States. Economic dips are cyclical and we are due. But when and how hard? We wait. Weather patterns are changing, the planet isn’t what it once was. But how bad might it get? We wait. People everywhere are experiencing personal transitions. Becoming new parents, starting new schools, jobs lost, jobs gained, illnesses revealed, wounds healed, people are falling in and out of love. My brother has died and my parents are aging. I am separated from my partner of fourteen years, divorced soon, and finishing up school in New York while she and the apartment we shared for a decade are in San Francisco. I don’t really know where I live. I haven’t really known who I am as a person not coupled. I’m in an air lock fiddling with these gauges, flipping these switches, suspecting that I’ll need to go out the hatch soon into some new way of being, trusting that I’m wearing a suit that will provide some kind of life support for the next thing I need to do. I tend toward a futuristic mind-set, not the nostalgic, but now in this air lock, I’m willing myself to be an extreme opener of the radical present, and this is what it feels like to wait.

  Astronauts on space walks are always and never alone. They go out in pairs, but they are still singularly responsible for maintaining their tether to the station. They have their radios to communicate with mission control, but that’s just voice exchange. And back on Earth, two hundred miles down, those people don’t really know what’s going on inside the suit, inside the body, inside the mind. It takes guts to float out that hatch. But you just do it because that’s what happens next. You can’t go back. Open the door, there we are.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A compendium of gratitudes is necessary, though it will no doubt be incomplete even as it is sprawling due to the first-book nature of this first book. And so, thanks to Tisse Takagi for initially reaching out, for patient guidance, conviction, smarts, and calm. Thanks to Karen Wolny, for your bid and Laura Apperson and Daniela Rapp, for shepherding it through. Thanks to Kim Binsted and Jean Hunter, for your ambitions to create a Mars on Earth, and for the other members of the project, including Bryan Caldwell, Mongoose D’angelo, Brian Shrio, James Harris, Jamie Guined, Henk Rogers, Vincent Paul Ponthieux, and many others, too many to name, on mission support, who gave of their time and expertise. Thank you, Robin Black; thank you, Jessica Cruzan. Thank you, crew—Sian, Simon, Oleg, Yajaira, Angelo, and Crystal, Chris, and Yvonne. You changed me.

  To teachers, mentors, and friends Maggie Bayne-Sneed, Stephanie Shelley, Jane Raplinger, Jade Durkee, Janice Ninemire-Van Gorp, Megan Boyer, Marian Van Vleet, Jean Emerson, Kyle Beran, Sister Susan Rieke, Sister Susan Chase, Sister Diane Steele, Leslie Anderson, Tina Warinner, Anne Gibson, thank you. Also: Linda Olafsen, Delora Tanner, Todd McAlpine, and Mike Santilli for showing me how to be a scientist. And Tom Standage, Tim Cross, Alex Fak, Kate Galbraith, and Patricia Marvin for showing me how a scientist could become a writer. Continuing that, my sincere appreciation to Wade Roush, Katie Bourzac, Rachel Kremen, Ross Andersen, Jennifer Kahn, John Gravois, Siri Carpenter, Lisa Raffensperger, Laura Helmuth, Michelle Nijhaus. And to Inga Lintvedt, Susanna Kwan, Kendra DeColo, Steve Ornes, David Winetraub, Kate Daniels, Rick Hilles, Mark Jarman, Nancy Reisman, my gratitude. Thank you very much Paige Bierma, Joel Murach, Ray Halliday, Chun Yu, Rosemary Gong, Dan Krotz, Julie Chao, Kelly Owen, Jim Wilson, Valerie Maulbeck, Joanna Sickler, Beanie Allen, Shay O’Brien, and Jess Anthony, damn, those drawings. And gratitude to inspirations, friends, and guides Dorothea Lasky, Timothy Donnelly, Mark Bibbins, Shane McCrae, Susan Bernofsky, Alan Felsenthal, Leanne Shapton, BK Fischer, Hilton Als, CA Conrad, Donika Kelly, Sarah Jane Stoner, Rachel Khong and the Rubies, Aku Ammah-Tagoe, Rebeca Felix, Brandan Griffin, Hannah Risinger, Lauren Green, Coco Wilder, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Sahar Kubba, Anastasios Karnazes, and Dia Felix. To early readers of the manuscript, Stephen Cass, Ada Brunstein, Jacquelyn Marie Gallo, Christopher J. Adamson, and my first reader, truly, Jill Schepmann, thank you completely. To my family of origin, Albo and Stu, Steve, Evann, Mark, Joan and Bob, thank you for the beginnings, the middles, and to the ends of all of it, I am grateful.

  NOTES

  The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your ebook. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  “W. H. Hudson says”: “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960–1970, Lisa Pater Faranda, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 149.

  INTRODUCTION

  “Ed White floated”: “Gemini IV: Learning to Walk in Space,”: www.nasa.gov/feature/gemini-iv-learning-to-walk-in-space

  “first American space walker,”: www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1098.html

  “NASA wanted Gene Cernan”: www.americaspace.com/2014/06/08/date-with-an-alligator-the-trials-of-gemini-ix-a-part-2; “Astronaut and Cosmonaut Medical Histories,” http://www.doctorzebra.com/drz/s_medhx.html

  “Ten days after”: Michael J. Neufeld and John B. Charles, “Practicing for Space Underwater: Inventing Neutral Buoyancy Training, 1963–1968,” Endeavor, vol. 39, 3–4.

  “There is no there there”: Stein’s longer quote is “What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.” Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 289.

  “The essayist John D’Agata”: John D’Agata, “Yucca Mountain as Metaphor in About a Mountain,” interview by Ira Flatow, Science Friday, NPR, March 5, 2010, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124361803

  “to contend with complicated questions of who we, in our complexity”: A note on the narrative We: Throughout this text, I use the first person plural we (and related pronouns us and our) to mean a few different groups. We is certainly shifty, even more so than the narrative I, and it’s certainly more politically fraught. I’d like to try to clarify a few types of we I used in this text that explain my relationship to the use of the we in these cases. In the above case, I’m interested in the complexity of the most general human-we there is, the we as a species. It’s a grand gesture, and one I don’t take lightly. I hope that it can be read in a spirit of generosity and solidarity and not as an act of claiming or omniscience. No one can speak for each human on the planet. Of course not. But I hope a number of the questions asked in this book have the potential to be relevant to a great many humans alive today. That’s what I aim to get at with this we. Occasionally, I use we to refer, colloquially, to people who may be similar to me in terms of interests or perspectives or experiences. This is the loosest kind of we there is and the trickiest to deploy. It assumes a kinship with the reader that may or may not be there. I�
��m aware that it doesn’t always work for all readers, and I’ve tried to use it sparingly. In other cases, I use we to refer to my crewmates and me. I can’t speak for them at all times either, but there were enough shared experiences, goals, schedules, observations, etc., that in certain cases, I feel confident, though not perfectly, in speaking for the collective. And finally, there are times when I use we to refer to Earthlings in the most general sense. That is, all creatures of this planet. We really are all in it together.

  ASTRO-GASTRONOMY

  “poutine”: OED Online. September 2019. Oxford University Press. www-oed-com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/view/Entry/263616?redirectedFrom=poutine

  “In 2001, chef Martin”: Crystal Luxmore, “Martin Picard,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, March 10, 2014. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/martin-picard

  “The psycho-social preparation”: Kim Binsted et al., “Human Factors Research as Part of a Mars Exploration Analogue Mission on Devon Island,” Planetary and Space Science 58, no. 7–8 (2010): 994–1006.

  “An NPR headline”: Joe Palca. “Why Astronauts Crave Tabasco Sauce,” All Things Considered, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/02/23/147294191/why-astronauts-crave-tabasco-sauce

  “space camp as a kid”: My space camp hopes and dreams were localized to Hutchinson, Kansas, home to the Cosmosphere, an excellent space museum, and space camp. https://cosmo.org/

  “Fantasy is hardly”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GilIovrb4uE&feature=youtu.be&t=5m43s

  “The first food”: https://aas.org/posts/news/2016/11/month-astronomical-history-launch-sputnik-2

  “The second food”: https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/apollo-to-the-moon/online/astronaut-life/food-in-space.cfm and www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12460720