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Dreaming of Blue: Water and Mars
You live on a world of dry red rock. Something’s missing. Air? Check. Gravity? Check.294 days worth of Tang? Check, check, check. So, what could it be? A visual sweep of …
Movember is here – and the Martians have landed!
Hello World! While we’re on sMars, the crew is doing our best to support continued operations back home. This means lots of research about how to live in space, now …
2 Months Down, 10 to Go
At around 4 pm local time about two months ago, six acquaintances entered a dome-on-a-volcano and NASA’s longest Mars simulation began. For our 1st-month-i-versary in the dome, we all wrote …
Back to the (Near) Future
Oct 21st, 2015 – 30 years to the day after Doc Brown took Marty McFly to the future – I’m in a dome practicing for a trip to Mars. Sadly, we …
The Answer, Naturally, is 42
Welcome to the 42nd day of NASA’s longest simulated Mars mission! The day started with a bang. Or rather, a whimper. The whimper was the sound of our power systems …
This Alien Shore: 1 Month on sMars
There are a number of oddities inherent to space missions. Some are obvious and predictable: communication delays and dependence upon spacesuits, for example. Others are a little more…unexpected. One of …
A Window Into Mars
When we finally get to Mars, where will we live? That seems like a pretty obvious question. We’ve all seen the movies, read the books. In the future, we live …
Mission Day 14: Mad Respect, aka Don’t Kill Bob
This post should really be titled, “MAD MAD MAD” respect. Respect for what, you may ask? For life-long astronauts? For scientists and support-staff who over-winter in Antarctica? For servicepeople aboard submarines …
A Long Last Look … At Lettuce
This is it: the last of the lettuce. If I’m lucky, I’ll see a fresh vegetable of some kind again in 4 weeks. As I look at it there in …
Hot and Heavy: Spacesuits
You know those moments where you can almost hear god laughing? This is one of them. As a child in sunny Los Angeles, I snickered at my cousins’ back-east tales of …