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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
'Filled with wonderment and awe ... Greene's eloquent memoir is equal parts escape and comfort.' Publishers Weekly A powerful reflection on life in isolation, in pursuit of the dream of Mars. In 2013 Kate Greene moved to Mars. On NASA's first HI-SEAS simulated Mars mission in Hawaii, she lived for four months in an isolated geodesic dome with her crewmates, gaining incredible insight into human behaviour in tight quarters, as well as the nature of boredom, dreams and isolation that arise amidst the promise of scientific progress and glory. Greene draws on her experience to contemplate what makes an astronaut, the challenges of freeze-dried eggs and time-lagged correspondence, the cost of shooting for a Planet B. The result is a story of space and life, of the slippage between dreams and reality, of bodies in space, and of humanity's incredible impulse to explore. From trying out life on Mars, Greene examines what it is to live on Earth. 'In her thoughtful, well-written account of the mission, Greene reflects on what this and other space missions can teach us about ourselves and life on Earth.' Physics Today
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iii
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FOR MARK
AND FOR JOAN AND BOBvi
CONTENTS
ix
W. H. Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings).
—Lorine Niedecker
x
xi
1
I
INTRODUCTION
There were clouds in the Hawaiian sky on the morning of June 3, 1965, and beyond them, two hundred miles up, astronaut Ed White floated through the hatch of his Gemini IV capsule and became the first American space walker.
His main task was to test a handheld propulsion gun, which would blast him to the end of his tether and back three times before it would run out of fuel. Twenty-three minutes later, over the Gulf of Mexico, White tugged on his umbilical and floated back inside the craft. Space walk as cakewalk, mission accomplished.
A year later, the second American space walk nearly ended in disaster. NASA wanted Gene Cernan to try out a full-fledged jetpack, built by the air force and stowed outside and at the back of his Gemini IX spacecraft. Cernan, unlike White, had no propulsion gun. To reach the pack, he needed to use the hand- and footholds bolted to the exterior. Bad news was that these holds were too few. Worse news was that Cernan’s suit was unexpectedly stiff once pressurized due to extra fabric to protect him from the heat of the jetpack’s thrusters.
And so Cernan clumsily pawed at the exterior of the capsule, spun himself around, and tried to grab at anything while barely able to move his arms and legs. It might 4have been funny if not for the mortal danger. Cernan’s exertions—a heart rate maxing out at 195 beats per minute and heavy breathing—overwhelmed his suit’s cooling system. Sweat stung his eyes, and his visor fogged. NASA eventually canceled the walk. Still, he wasn’t yet out of danger. Both he and crewmate Tom Stafford knew Cernan would have to make his way back inside on his own since Stafford couldn’t leave his post. If Cernan couldn’t manage it, protocol required that Stafford “throw him overboard,” effectively cutting the tether to close the hatch to return to Earth.
A highly motivated but utterly exhausted Cernan eventually did make it back—using his nose to rub a small window through the mist on his visor—two hours and eight minutes after the space walk began. Cernan lost nearly fourteen pounds.
Ten days after that troubled space walk, NASA reps attended a prescheduled demonstration of underwater astronaut training—a new kind of zero-g simulation—put on by a small NASA contractor. The founders of the company had been trying for years to get someone at the agency to seriously consider using scuba for mission training, but hadn’t gotten much traction. Now, however, NASA officials were ready to listen. And Cernan—who many suspected had his own panic to blame for the botched space walk—was first to sign up.
At a prep-school pool in Baltimore where the company had developed their training setup, Cernan, in a pressure suit, slipped into the pool and practiced moving around, turning knobs, and tightening screws outside a mock-up Gemini capsule. Impressed by the exercise, Cernan announced that compared to zero g, it was “at least 75 percent accurate”—certainly good enough to develop best practices and improve safety on future flights. Soon, other astronauts 5followed, and by the end of 1966, neutral-buoyancy training had become a critical part of pre-mission operations.
NASA still uses this kind of underwater training today, but recently the agency has also embraced an enhanced kind of simulation that goes far beyond practice in a pool. These simulations are called analog missions, and they are how the details of future human exploration to asteroids, the moon, and Mars come into focus. Analogs, which are managed by space agencies and independent organizations around the world in places like Antarctica, Morocco, Moscow, and an underwater facility off Key Largo, let engineers test equipment and play out scenarios that might arise on expeditions in deep space. But increasingly, these faux space missions are also used to probe astronaut psychology and sociology—the most unpredictable element in any human expedition—to study coping strategies potentially useful on a long journey far away from Earth.
In 2013, NASA launched its newest Mars analog mission, called Hawai‘i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS. The project emerged from the interests of Kim Binsted, professor of information and computer sciences at the University of Hawai‘i and Jean Hunter, professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell. Both were curious about space-food systems for Mars and about the food’s impact on crew psychology.
In 2012, they put out a call for “almost” astronauts to participate in a four-month “Mars” mission. Binsted and Hunter wanted a crew who could technically qualify for spaceflight, according to NASA, in terms of education and experience. They were also looking for astronaut-like personalities which, according to Binsted, feature “thick skin, a long fuse, and an optimistic outlook.” Nearly seven hundred people applied worldwide.6
At the time I was a science journalist and not necessarily an obvious choice for the mission. And yet I found myself on it. Between April and August 2013, I lived with five other not-really astronauts in isolation, all of us making various Martian concessions like mostly bathing with wet wipes, forgoing real-time social media, and zero access to fresh fruits or vegetables.
We lived inside a large, white geodesic dome off an access road at 8,000 feet on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa. The scene was very red, very rocky. Very Mars. There was limited electricity and water. We could only leave the dome wearing bulky, cumbersome, space suit–like outerwear. While we had an emergency cell phone, our sole regular contact with Earth was through email. And since Mars is extremely far away and photons can fly only so fast, our email transmissions were delayed by twenty minutes each way to mimic the actual communication lag to be experienced by Martian explorers. It wasn’t your typical Hawaiian vacation.
All for science, though. Binsted and Hunter’s main research question regarding food was this: Might it make sense to allow astronauts to cook their own meals once they’ve landed on Mars? Data has shown that astronauts on six-month missions on the International Space Station eat less over time and lose weight, making them more prone to illness and injury. One reason for this could be that they grow bored with their limited selection of just-add-water-and-heat entrées. The consequences could be dire on a two-and-a-half-year mission to Mars.
But what if, once on Mars, back in touch with gravity, astronauts could cook their own meals? They’d have to use shelf-stable ingredients, of course, but given enough ingredients like freeze-dried beef, dehydrated onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, flour, rice, freeze-dried cheese, cashews, 7oils, spices, there could be thousands of recipes. Might these novel dishes help astronauts regain their appetites?
In effect, Binsted and Hunter wanted to measure the importance of cooking, and meals in isolation more generally—how food affects a crew’s physical, mental, and social health. Imagine a homemade cake to commemorate a milestone—the successful landing, say, or a birthday, or a halfway point in the mission. Celebratory tacos, a vegetable stir-fry, fresh-baked bread with butter and jam.
On Earth it might be obvious that food is more than just sustenance for a body, that it plays a psychological, social, and cultural role, and that it nourishes the spirit and our relationships with others. But to ask complex questions about the role of food on a Mars mission and base a brand-new Mars analog around these questions? It’s pretty radical, actually.
And so, for this food study, which was just one of many HI-SEAS experiments, we ate a combination of preprepared meals, similar to those currently available on the ISS, as well as meals we cooked in our small yet well-equipped Martian kitchen. We logged the changes in our appetites and weights and took tests to measure our ability to breathe through our noses and to identify odors, all of which relate to hunger and food satisfaction. There were nearly a dozen other experiments too—trying out antimicrobial socks, tests of mental acuity, behavioral surveys, the list goes on.
We lived and breathed survey questions for four months. Four months of isolation. Four months of the same people, same seats at the table, same clothes, same smells, same routines, same view outside the one-and-only window looking out onto the same rocks. No sunshine on our skin, no fresh air in our lungs.
I truly don’t want to overstate the difficulty—we were never in any mortal danger. But there were some aspects of 8the experience that I did find trying. I missed face-to-face conversations with my wife. I longed for a change of scene and better indoor lighting. A swim in the ocean or a pool. A walk in the woods. A bike ride. And our crew did have a handful of emotional trials and interpersonal dustups. There were frustrated and confusing communications between mission support and some crewmembers, especially in the beginning. And then at one point, there was a real hurricane bearing down on us, though it juked north just before landfall.
Also: brief power outages, annoyance over chores, those multitudes of daily research questions, personal insecurities, relationship issues back home, high-altitude living, only eight minutes of shower time each week, sleep deprivation, a strained plumbing system that put the toilets out of commission and required us to shit in trash bag–lined buckets, frustrations with our simulated space suits, awkward social interactions, and a creeping sense of torpor as the mission wore on.
But in the grand scheme of things, no, it was not in fact hard to pretend to be an astronaut on Mars. There were no life-or-death decisions, not even close. And, besides, I had signed up for it, we all had. It’s kind of amazing what, given the right context cues, can feel normal pretty fast. Though of course there’s really nothing normal about six adults making believe they live on another planet.
I didn’t know it at the time, but over the years, I have come to realize this: Mars changed me. The science of that mission spilled over and mixed with the personal experience of the project. The survey questions of the quotidian like, how hungry are you? How full? Who did you interact with the most today? The least? What was the best thing about 9your day? What was the worst? somehow began to feel like larger inquiries relevant not just to an astronaut on a space mission, but to me, personally, or to anyone.
Issues like communal versus individual food stores, how to divvy up chores, whom you trust and how much, how to behave when privacy is at a premium, when resources are scarce, and what kind of problem-solving approaches to take seemed, in the context of a small space with a fixed group of people, mostly domestic. But then you think about it. These are exactly the issues that are relevant to larger communities, to nations, and the entire world. Somehow the research questions on an imagined Mars mission began to sprawl beyond their intended bounds. I could see how they were about everything and all of us.
And, as expected, while I was away on Mars my home changed as well. When an astronaut comes back, Earth isn’t where it was. The whole system has shifted from underneath and all around, which is of course just the imperceptible hurtling of our local galactic arm. “There is no there there,” as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, which as an adult she found unrecognizable from the city of her childhood. It’s like anything, though. You leave and come back, and home isn’t what it was. But sometimes leaving is the only way to know it was ever home in the first place.
In the days and weeks after returning to Earth, my crew and I ate fresh fruits and vegetables that crunched in our mouths, we swam in the ocean, and we debriefed with Binsted, sharing some of our more personal and poignant observations during the mission, all in service, we believed, of a better imagined future trip to Mars. Those early days back home are something of a blur, though I do recall the intensity of certain sensations. Loud noises easily startled me. 10It took days for me to not actively notice even the slightest breeze on my skin.
For a long time too, I struggled to find the best way to convey my HI-SEAS experience. I avoided the immediate media flurry, the phone and television interviews. I simply couldn’t find the sound bites. I had come into the experiment as a journalist and as a kind of citizen-scientist. But the data was far from analyzed and requests for more formal, journalistic accounts of the experience didn’t sit well with me. Most news reporting aims for a kind of objectivity and to tell a story with singular authority. But to me, the story of my Mars felt shifty, my telling of it variable. I could answer some of the questions, sometimes, and often awkwardly, but I didn’t feel comfortable saying I knew what any of it really meant. And it wasn’t just about what happened on the mission or inside the dome. It’s reverberated out, touching everything in my life. HI-SEAS did indeed change what I think about space exploration. But it also helped me to pay more attention, generally. I’m talking about my relationships here, to people and to my home planet that, I must admit, I never saw with as much clarity as I did in those first few weeks immediately after the mission ended.
In the years since, I’ve become a stranger in many ways to the person who first entered that Mars dome on Mauna Loa. I write less journalism, more essays and poetry—more interested, I suppose, in the subjective and associative, in mystery and in looking at a thing from the side rather than straight on. I’ve changed jobs, gone back to school, and moved across the country. I’ve made and lost friends. My oldest brother has died. My long relationship with my wife has ended, and I am, for the first time in fourteen years, living on my own, thinking a lot about the meaning of home, the meaning of exploration and isolation, of collaboration 11and partnership, of the various ways stories are told, and of beginnings and ends.
Meanwhile, the world now is very different from the one of my Mars 2013 mission, politically, socially, environmentally. People have access to ever more information, an immense flow. It’s an important time to be paying attention. But it’s perhaps even more important to think about how we pay attention and to what, exactly. The essayist John D’Agata has said, about information and its ready availability: “We can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.”
Because of analogs like HI-SEAS, scientists and engineers are amassing plenty of data to design a safer, better mission beyond low-earth orbit. But the push to go farther into space has left me wondering what assumptions get built into space systems and mission designs. I’m also wondering more about the assumptions that drive us to want to go in the first place.
What is it exactly, that propels us up and out? Is it competition? With whom? Species propagation? Is it commerce? Curiosity? Boredom? Fear of death? Love of life? Loneliness? Ambition? Ego?
Historically, much of Earth exploration has been rooted in colonialism and subjugation. What kind of remnant legacies and unexamined assumptions thread through today’s discussions to colonize Mars? And if there is ever a human mission to Mars, who gets to go? Who decides?
I wonder too, hopefully not too naïvely, if there might be ways that traveling to another planet could help shape our perspectives here for the better. What if human explorers on Mars could inspire new ways to sustain our lives and ecosystems back on Earth? What kind of wisdom might 12launch inside those spaceships? What kind of wisdom might we grow here at home?
Maybe it’s not surprising that over the past few years, I’ve come up with more questions than answers. And I’ve seen that it matters a great deal how those questions are framed. How long is the tether? Where are the foot-and handholds? It takes practice, various approaches, thoughtfulness. Now, perhaps more than ever, conversations about space exploration are opening up to new ideas and complexities. The Earth is heating and crowding, resources are increasingly unevenly distributed, and there’s a sense that, at least among some people, there should be a plan-B planet. At the same time, NASA’s announced a roadmap back to the moon as a stepping-stone to Mars. And though behind schedule, there’s a spacecraft and a heavy-launch rocket system gearing up for both journeys, to span the gap, and then some, created in 2011 when the space shuttle was retired.
Meanwhile, companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are making steady progress on relatively cheap, reusable rockets as well as offering tantalizing concepts and economics for transport systems to the moon and Mars. Major space agencies from all over the world have either sent or will be sending robotic missions to the Red Planet soon. The summer of 2020 is a big one: NASA, China, and the European Space Agency, in partnership with the Russian program Roscosmos, and the United Arab Emirates all plan to send rovers, orbiters, or static landers.
What does this emerging competition and collaboration—commercial and international—mean for space exploration in general? For Mars expeditions, specifically? What does it mean for those of us watching from Earth?
A journey of hundreds of millions of miles begins with tests, attempts, and approximations. It’s built on data and 13observation, 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.14
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.16
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 17get 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 18bone 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 19her 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.
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, 20which 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 21the 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 22food 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 23volcano 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 ground-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. 24Next 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 25or 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.
And now, here I was, dropped inside a project that married my interest and quite possibly genetically bestowed talent for space exploration with my historic ambivalence to food. The six of us wandered around the habitat not knowing what exactly to do because there was so much to do—food inventory, setting up a lab and computers and all other equipment for experiments, figuring out our schedule for meals, chores, exercise, work, free time, correspondences, filling out surveys. The actual science. Eventually, we made our beds, said our good nights, and tried to sleep.
Food is never just food. Consider the Ironman triathlete. She’s done the calculations and knows she’ll burn 10,000 calories traversing the 140.6 miles over some twelve to fourteen hours, and she needs to eat on schedule so that her body can continue the course she set for it at the beginning of the race or, more accurately, the year before when she signed up for the race, paid the fee, and started in earnest to train. She calls her food “fuel,” and it’s made of calories and molecules that look like rings and sticks that rearrange themselves in the gut and the bloodstream to spell performance and success.
When I was in my early twenties, I visited a friend who’d moved to Brooklyn right after college. For breakfast one morning, my friend and her roommate, a young woman who worked in the fashion industry, decided we should go to a diner, an authentic, adorable diner nearby that had been around forever. As we looked over our menus, the roommate 26asked what kind of cheese we had eaten on our grilled cheese sandwiches as kids. Without hesitation or shame, I said Velveeta processed cheese. It was perhaps one of the most wrong things I could have said in front of my friend who, little did I know, was working to shed indicators that she might have grown up anything less than middle class. My friend instantly covered her mouth in horror and half laughed in disbelief. There was no coming back from my admission. The conversation was over within seconds, yet I’m still struck by how oblivious I was to the true meaning of Velveeta, how quickly I learned my place, and how often I retrieve this memory.
After months ensnared in ice, it finally became clear to Ernest Shackleton, British polar explorer, that his Endurance
