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Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Come Back to Earth
Hello world! It’s been a while. My previous post was signed, sealed, and delivered shortly before the flap on our dome’s backdoor opened and the HI-SEAS IV crew returned to …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …