Commander Describes Life in a Mars Simulation Project

Mar. 27 -- There's one heck of a space camp going on out in the red desert hills of southern Utah, and for the next two weeks, Dr. Judith Lapierre is the woman in charge.

It's as close as she and her five-person crew may ever make it to the red planet, but for now, it's close enough. Their Mars Society Desert Research Station, a squat two-story pod about 25 feet in diameter, is plunked down in the red craggy terrain of the Utah badlands; they're trekking around in awkward, bulky spacesuits; and they're pretending — seriously pretending — to be living 35 million miles from Planet Earth.

It's all part of a privately funded project, part science, part fantasy camp, part public relations campaign, sponsored by the Mars Society, a group of about 5,000 Mars aficionados determined to light a fire under the federal government's space exploration initiatives. The society is convinced that we could send a human team to Mars for about half of the $20 billion to $22 billion currently estimated — and it's trying to prove it.

In Utah.

Mission: Getting Along

LaPierre and her crew arrived at the station late Monday night to begin their two-week rotation, one of four crews so far to spend 14 days in the pseudo-space of the Southwest. The simulations, which eventually will occur at stations in Iceland, the Australian outback, and the Arctic as well as Utah, involve a complex enactment of life on Mars that includes close living, complex research, treks out into the craggy terrain, and a slate of activities limited to what would be possible on the red planet.

"We each have specific goals for our research, mainly geology, biology, human factors," Lapierre says by e-mail. The team is also trying to get a handle on some of the basic operational issues related to life in a small, isolated space station.

That's LaPierre's bailiwick: the human element. She has a doctorate in health sciences but her research is in space psychosociology: the stuff that goes on between people when they're crammed into a very small space completely removed from their usual personal support systems under intense physical and intellectual pressure for months at a time — or how a crew of scientists is going to make the months-long trip to far-off planets without killing each other along the way.