Commander Describes Life in a Mars Simulation Project

Mar. 27, 2002 -- 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.

Psychology and Digital Landscapes

This isn't Lapierre's first sojourn into space simulation. A scientist at the University of Quebec in Hull, she spent 110 days in Moscow in 2000 as the only woman on a crew of eight, an experience she says taught her that astronauts will need personalized, one-on-one support to stay healthy during such long-distance trips.

"In Russia, all the crew members have a family videoconference talk once a week, all crew members can exercise, all crew members can speak with a psychologist," she says. And while that seems to have worked well enough over the years of cosmonaut travel, Lapierre thinks a more individualized approach could be better.

That means giving astronauts what they need, in cultural terms they understand. "It's the same issue we meet in public health around the world," she says. "You cannot go into a country, a city, a village, and expect to have an effective health promotion program if the program is not based on and developed with those in need."

Meeting those needs will require a careful combination of personal interaction and high-tech solutions, she says. On the human level, she's interested in how a group of strangers becomes a cohesive, collaborative team. But she and her team at the University of Quebec are also looking at technologies like immersive natural environments — digital simulations of earthly landscapes that astronauts could enter when they needed a quick hit of all-things-terrestrial. They're also exploring telemedicine and telehealth, prevention and treatment that would be delivered across the solar system.

Mars, Here We Come

Tuesday was a long first day for Lapierre's crew as they addressed basic issues from power maintenance to water storage to operating toilets — nuisances on Earth that could be crises in space. But Lapierre has had a few quiet moments already to think about why she's sitting in a cramped metal silo in the middle of a barren desert, playing an extreme game of let's pretend.

Midday Tuesday, she and her crew got a real-life reminder. The U.S. Department of State, NASA, a group of American aerospace companies, and European and Russian space officials announced a joint effort to study human planetary missions, with the intention of sending an international expedition to Mars later this century.

Lapierre and her crew heard the news sometime in-between their first spacesuited stroll outside the pod and their first crew-cooked dinner together.

"That news … really did increase our pride in our 14-day preparation mission," Lapierre reports in her online log.

It was validation of their efforts and a clear public recognition that playing space camp was serious business after all. Not that Lapierre ever doubted it.

"Going to Mars is our next frontier," she says. " While waiting for our crew, I looked through our window and saw Mars as it must look … ."

Talk about a room with a view.

A teacher and a journalist, Dianne Lynch is the author of Virtual Ethics.