Can people endure the psychological torment of Mars?
What about the psychological aspect of the mission? The monotony? The loneliness?
“I’m a hardware person first and foremost,” McCauley said. To be precise, she is a solid propulsion systems engineer. She has the distinction of being the member of our species most responsible for determining the best method to catapult humanity to Mars. To do this, she needed to know how much weight a spaceship can carry. McCauley was able to estimate to the milligram the mass of every nut and bolt, every anti-vortex bulkhead and every cargo bay door. But how many corn tortillas and yogurt cartons will four astronauts, under psychological duress, consume in 378 days? That question, or some version of it, was what McCauley wanted answered. She also needed to know how many clothes they need. Clothes are heavy.
Mathias, the isolation historian, was not surprised to learn that the psychological questions were a secondary consideration for NASA. But his skepticism about CHAPEA went further. Mathias wondered whether an experimental reason could justify another isolation study. “I wonder if the scientific value of these simulation experiments doesn’t matter,” he said. Instead, the experiments seemed to him “a way to accomplish the colonization of Mars. A form of wish fulfillment – or cosplaying, to put it less poetically. This is about satisfying an urge. There seems to be a compulsion to keep repeating these fake Mars missions until we actually do it. There is something very beautiful about this idea, but also very macabre at the same time.”
The analog experiments reflect the utopian promise of our future on Mars. Because a human mission to Mars is not the highest ambition of the space program. It’s just the beginning, one small step for humanity before the giant leap of planetary colonization.
Five months before CHAPEA’s call for applications, Dennis Bushnell, then chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center and a nearly 60-year NASA veteran, published “Futures of Deep Space Exploration, Commercialization and Colonization: The Frontiers of the Responsibly Imaginable.’ Colonization of Mars has always been conceivable, especially for this settler nation. But in his article, Bushnell noted that in recent years this prospect has “gone from extremely difficult to increasingly feasible.” Colonization has also become increasingly desirable, due to “potentially existential social problems including climate change, the crashing ecosystem, machines taking jobs, etc.” – and so on perhaps reflects the naturalness of planetary decay.
A more surprising aspect of the article is Bushnell’s prediction about how Mars’ physical hostility will be overcome: colonists will “turn into a changed species.” He cites projections that suggest that “over time, due to reduced exposure to g and radiation, travelers who colonize Mars will evolve into Martians.” The ultimate promise of NASA’s Mars mission is the chance to start over – if not, then as human beings, then as Martians.