Landing: After a Year and a Day Away
A year and a day ago, I came here with a stack of books, a small pile of clothes, and a leather medical bag. The stack of books got larger. Don’t Continue Reading →
The Write Stuff: A Plea from the Wrong Side of the Lens
I am unashamed to admit it: I am terribly proud of my people. To what “people” am I referring here? Doctors? Scientists? Astronauts and aspiring astronaut-types? That’s surely true in Continue Reading →
Last Sunday on sMars
Looking back over a year’s worth of posts, I find that many of them can be a bit – if not somber – at least serious in tone. So for Continue Reading →
The Weirdest Thing: Two Weeks From Landing
Fourteen days from today, the hatch will open and the six of us will rejoin the world. In some (obvious) ways, we never left. In many ways, we’ll be aliens Continue Reading →
Beautiful Dreams: My Brain Prepares to Resume Its Life on Earth
An egg. An orange. Avocados. These objects exist now only in two dimensions – images, references, distant memories. Like a movie of a picnic running in reverse, in dreams I Continue Reading →
The Freedom to Fail: Space Simulations and the Future of Our Species
“Plans are useless. Planning is everything.” – Dwight David Eisenhower If all goes as planned, in 42 days the hatch will open and our one-year mission to simulated space will Continue Reading →
Moments of Silence, Broken
Last night over dinner we argued about soil. Not argued so much as batted ideas around the way that scientists do. “That’s not soil – that’s bedrock.” One of us Continue Reading →
Day 300: Virtually There
Until we get really good at transgressing the laws of physics, we live under the thumb of certain hard facts. One of the hardest is this: we can’t be in two places Continue Reading →
Ask Martians Anything: Send a Message to “Space”
When you boldly go where no one has gone before, there are a few things you can count on. Number one: you forgot something. Perhaps it was your toothbrush, your Continue Reading →
100 EVAs, 100 Days to Earth
It’s one hundred and seven days to mission’s end. Sometimes, it seems like we’re a few days from home instead of 15 weeks. Most days, it feels like we just marked Continue Reading →