Oh man, look at those cavemen go.
It’s the freakiest show.
—David Bowie, “Life on Mars”
Since the founding convention in Boulder in 1998, the Mars Society has been busy. Its chapters have lobbied for the funding of robotic Mars missions; there have been annual conventions, spirited arguments over the right way to proceed and some serious fund-raising. There has been work on the development of spacesuits and rovers; the Australian chapter has secured space for a dedicated radio pay-load on a small experimental satellite. Zubrin’s company, Pioneer Astronautics, has worked with NASA on the design of Mars balloons—aerospace as agitprop, since Zubrin believes, as do many others, that pictures of Mars from the air will make the planet more interesting to earthlings and stoke up the fires of exploration. There have been fallings-out and resignations from the board. Most strikingly, there has been the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, a dummy version of one of the Mars Direct habs. It sits on a lifeless-looking ridge on Devon Island, high above the Arctic Circle in the semiautonomous Canadian territory of Nunavut. As I write, it has survived its first winter and its first fully crewed summer.
Devon Island is a partially glaciated wilderness with no permanent settlements on it, not as profoundly arid as the dry valleys of Antarctica but still dry enough to be classed as a desert. Near its northern shore sits Haughton crater, about twelve miles across and twenty-three million years old. When it was first spotted during aerial surveys in the 1950s it was assumed to be a salt dome; in the 1970s Canadian geologists realized it was actually an impact crater. If such an impact were to occur today it would be a global catastrophe: The dust and debris thrown into the stratosphere might chill the climate enough to ruin crops for years and precipitate global starvation.
Low precipitation and scarce vegetation mean that Haughton is in some ways quite fresh: Although there has obviously been a lot of erosion over twenty million years, many of the rocks that remain are much as the impact left them. There is no other crater of its size remotely as well preserved. In the 1980s it was studied quite intensively by a joint German-Canadian-American project. Then, in the 1990s, a young researcher named Pascal Lee realized that, as a large, well-preserved impact crater in a cold desert, Haughton represented one of the most Martian locations on the Earth. With impressive determination, Lee turned this insight into the NASA-funded Haughton-Mars Project (HMP), which is run out of the Ames Research Center. The Mars Society’s activities in Haughton now run in parallel with the HMP’s main scientific program.
Part of that program is studying Haughton. The other part is studying how you go about studying somewhere like Haughton, and looking at how such fieldwork might be carried out on Mars. There are geologists and biologists there, but there are also technologists working on robotics and new computer interfaces, and technology development shades into anthropology as the computer people document the culture in which the research gets done. Bill Clancey, an expert in “human-centered computing” at Ames who has been studying the people studying Haughton since 1998, puts it like this, “You describe and think about the particulars that most people take for granted—how the camp is laid out, how the space is used, how the daily routine is planned, how people are showing each other and talking about rock and geological formations, how results are shared over dinner conversation and so on.” In other words, you try to capture the researchers’ world in all its complexity—because it is a world like this, not just a bunch of people and supplies, that a Mars mission must try to transplant to another planet.
Over the years, Clancey has taken on the role of an anthropologist watching the development of Haughton’s rituals and routines. He’s recorded the way that different tents get used and the role that e-mail plays in how people organize their lives. He’s noted the way that the garaging area for the little All Terrain Vehicles (ATV) that are used to get around the crater has become the camp’s main meeting place. (Part of the appeal lies in the ATVs’ seats, which are the most comfortable lounging sites around when stationary—when moving over the broken ground at speed they are as uncomfortable as you would expect.) He’s learned that most people don’t know who does the washing up in the morning. He’s learned the extent to which scientists in the field plan their work around the paper they are already drafting in their heads, and the degree to which everything they do is a response to the tools that they start with and the ways those tools can be adapted.
He’s watched as more and more of the crater’s features have been named. Some naming is serious: The ridge that the Mars Society’s Flashline hab stands on is called Haynes Ridge in memory of Robert Haynes, a Canadian biologist with a strong interest in Mars who died in 1998. The plain beyond the landing strip is called Von Braun Planitia in honor of the author of the Marsprojekt. Some naming is commercial—the Flashline hab is so called because Flashline.com sponsored it—and some is dutiful: The lakes are named after universities and colleges—Lake Stanford, Lake Cornell—though there is also a Lake Astrobiology Funding, so called because it dries up halfway through the year. Water for the base camp comes from Lowell Canal, and the dried lake bed near the center of the crater that offers richer soils and thus more vegetation is Lowell Oasis. As things get smaller, their names get sillier: Pathfinder’s cartoon-based naming tradition starts to appear through the cracks in the IAU’s more formal protocol. There’s Devo Rock, named for the early 1980s band of the same name (their guitarist, Frank Schubert, built the Flashline hab); there’s Dr. Evil’s Lair. Indeed, Austin Powers is a pervasive presence. The little rubber dinghy used for sampling the lakes is the Research Vessel Mini-Me.
In the summer of 2000 the addition of the Mars Society’s Flashline Station, a two-story cylinder that can house six people, raised the Mars simulations at Haughton to a new level; but it started off with near disaster. The hab’s parts were dropped in installments by a Marine Corps transport plane. Installments one to four came down fine; installment five’s parachute failed to open. The hab’s floors and a crane and trailer needed for construction were ruined, and most of the construction crew quit. As soon as he heard about the disaster, Zubrin flew from Denver to Resolute, the nearest town to Haughton. He and Schubert put together a jury-rigging package of wood and tools, commandeered an airport luggage cart, and flew out to the crater. With determination, imagination, ideal weather conditions, and help from local Inuits they assembled the hab’s cylindrical walls, cinching them together with a makeshift belt when there turned out to be gaps between them; put on a roof; and set about making plywood floors. Triumph was snatched from adversity with a resourcefulness that left Zubrin aglow. This was the true spirit of the frontier—what robots could have done such a thing?
For a few brief days, Mars Society members occupied their outpost under the command of Carol Stoker and imagined themselves on Mars, to the extent that such a feat was possible given the noise of the continuing carpentry. They discussed their plans with “mission control.” They treated their trips outside the hab as Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVAs—a crucial bit of NASA speak) with associated radio protocols and safety rules. They filed reports on the Internet; they gazed out of the window. This last was oddly moving; from the window, no sign of humanity was visible in the ruined landscape. “I think the Devon Island location looks the most ‘off world’ of any place I have been,” says Stoker, “and I have seen more sights than most people. Looking out the porthole frames the view in a unique way. The scene is very beautiful, but is strange enough to make it easy to believe that one is not on Earth any more.”
If it sounds like a game of make-believe, well, in a sense so it was. So is the Mars Society’s competition to design a rover simulator that could also be used for such studies, and so are its plans for a communications relay on an Australian satellite that will be used, if all goes well, by Flashline’s future inhabitants. They are make-believe and they are fun (Clancey has noted that a commitment to having fun is one of the things that Haughton’s culture prizes most highly). But, at the same time, they are serious. They are serious for the Mars Society because they are one of its main conduits to the media. Haughton in general and the Flashline hab in particular were covered quite extensively in the summer of 2000. There may also, in time, be a revenue stream—Zubrin has plans for hab franchises in all sorts of deserts, starting in the American Southwest, that people might pay to visit. The games are also serious for the participants. Seeing the desolation of Haughton through a spacecraft window was a powerful experience. And they are serious for people like Lee and Clancey. If Haughton is to teach people about how to explore Mars, then ways have to be found of exploring it within Martian constraints. The Flashline hab is one of those ways. In time such buildings will be to would-be Martian explorers what the vast swimming pools at Johnson Space Center are to would-be astronauts: the best available Earth-based simulators for unearthly experiences.
Such simulations are intended to teach people what working on Mars will be like. Already, one answer is clear: Given current technologies, it will be frustrating. One of the key arguments for sending people to Mars in the first place is that human fieldworkers will be far more capable than robots ever can be. It was a point made very neatly in field trials that took place in February 1999, during which a team at NASA Ames tele-operated a rover carrying various instruments slated for Mars Surveyor missions. The rover was placed in the Mojave Desert, but treated as though it were on Mars. The rover team was reasonably accurate in many of its assessments, but not nearly as good as geologists able to survey the area on foot. If the geologists had been in spacesuits they would still have outper-formed the rovers—but it would have taken a lot more time and effort. Spacesuits are heavy and cumbersome; they take time to get in and out of, and they limit the time you can spend on a given task. They cut down your peripheral vision; their faceplates may well get covered by Martian dust. They remove your sense of touch almost completely; they make working in tight corners or on steep slopes difficult if not impossible. They add to your weight and they malfunction. They cut you off from the world in which, as a receptive scientist, you are meant to be immersed.
Part of the point of simulating Mars on Earth is to understand these limitations. Another part is to work out ways around them. One idea is to minimize the amount of work that needs to be done in spacesuits in the first place. At the second Mars Society convention in 1999, the film director James Cameron held a capacity audience enthralled with production designs for his forthcoming Mars production (still forthcoming as of this writing). Cameron is, as his films suggest, a world-class gadget freak, endowed with a fertile engineering imagination and a prodigious capacity for absorbing and caring about technical details. If he was going to design a Mars mission, he was going to do it right. One of his more striking insights was that the traditional portrayal of Mars rovers as vacuum-proof Winnebagoes designed to move people around might be misleading. Given the problems and risks of spacesuit work and the time taken up by preparing for even a simple EVA, a lot of field-work might actually be done from within the rovers by means of remote manipulator arms. The rovers would be like wheeled versions of the deep-sea submersibles he had used to film Titanic, mobile bases for the control of remotely piloted vehicles, with samples passed in to the researchers through small airlocks.
Another way around the problems of Martian fieldwork is the design of better tools. If a geologist cannot use a hand lens in a spacesuit, then the suit’s visor will have to magnify things. If she cannot wear a knapsack and a spacesuit, maybe some sort of robot carrying cart will have to follow her around. If she cannot scribble notes or tap on a keyboard handily (protecting a keyboard from corrosive Martian dust will be quite a task), various forms of voice recognition software will be necessary. If she cannot sketch a map with her hands in gauntlets, she will need a digital camera that somehow lets her annotate its images.
None of these tools, though, will be freestanding. Haughton crater is already the site of a number of computer networks, and each season adds new connectivity. The Internet is not an alternative to scientific exploration; it is a new facilitator. Wireless systems keep the Haughtonites in touch with each other and with various roving and flying robots. Samples are logged, pictured, and discussed with colleagues continents away over the Web; personal e-mail provides insulation against the loneliness. The networks are not only a way out; they’re also a way in. The HMP Web site offers beautiful virtual reality panoramas for Internet visitors. The Flash-line hab may not have had a proper floor in its first summer, but it had three cameras trained on its occupants—one for the Discovery channel, which had a sponsorship deal, one for the Mars Society Web site, and one for Clancey’s anthropological studies*—not to mention a number of modems all of its own.
And this is nothing to what things will be like on Mars. Explorers on Mars will have high-capacity local-area networks linking their habitats, rovers, individual spacesuits, and even some of their tools. Spacesuits will ceaselessly update the network on their position and on what their occupants can see; remote cameras—perhaps on tethered balloons—will keep an eye on all movement. Data-mining programs will work on reconciling human observations and annotations with remote-sensing data from other sources to suggest fruitful targets for future excursions. To maximize the efficiency of the human explorers—who, on early missions at least, will always be too few and too pressed—everything that can be recorded will be recorded and everything that can be automated will be automated. Data will constantly be shared over the Web with mission control and earth-bound scientists. If something terrible happens, constantly backed-up earthly databases will act as a virtual black box.
No hill or ridge or crater rim will ever be crested without foreknowledge of what lies beyond. The explorers standing on the desolate surface of Mars, as physically isolated as any human has ever been, will at the same time be immersed in a world of human data. They will know where they are and where their companions are. A word whispered into a microphone will bring them images of where they have been, or of where they are going. If one of them so much as looks at an intriguing outcrop the discrete heads-up display projected onto her suit’s visor will tell her if it has already been studied and, if so, what was found. They will be cocooned in data as snugly as they are wrapped in their suits. Their planet may be alien, but their world will be connected.
Imagine the first landing.* Zubrin’s approach is now mainstream enough for us to be sure that, wherever the site may be, it will already have been prepared in some way. There will be physical infrastructure—a fueled-up rocket ship, in all likelihood, along with a fuel factory and a power supply, perhaps a rover and a green-house. Radiolocation beacons will be ready to guide the ship to within inches as it sets itself down. If cameras on tethered balloons have not already produced images of the surface’s every pebble, cameras in orbit will have done nearly as well. Our high-resolution models will tell us the thermal properties of the soil and the mineralogical composition of the rocks.
Up in orbit they will check their real-time data on the upper atmosphere, make any last tiny corrections to the flight plan, and fire the engines. The cameras within the landing craft will go off-line; the crew will have negotiated its allocations of privacy carefully and this will be a time it will not want to be watched. The cameras on the landing craft’s exterior will see the surface grow close and closer. Then the fires of atmospheric entry will blind them. High data-rate communications with the spacecraft—a constant part of our mediated earthly lives since its launch seven months ago—will be briefly severed.
Cut off from our explorers, as a world we will gaze up through cameras on the surface, straining to see the first signs of a parachute. Just when we think we never will, it will appear. Descent cameras on the landing craft’s legs will show us the already familiar ground rushing closer; cameras on the surface will show us the spacecraft falling through the washed-out sky until it is lost in the dust kicked up by its engines. And then they will be there. We will hear a voice from Mars, and it will self-consciously echo the voice we once heard from the moon. It will tell us that what was once an uninhabited site is now a base and that a spacecraft whose name will long have been a household word has landed. The local network and the satellites overhead will determine the explorers’ position precisely. When we refresh our screens, their landing craft will have been incorporated into the terrain models.
Television anchors—if there are still anchors—will strive for something significant to say. Stan Robinson, Bob Zubrin, Matt Golombek, Chris McKay, and all the other specialists brought in to add to the commentary will be looked to for response; some will be lost for words. (How old will they be? I don’t know.) Some of them may cry. Some of us watching will certainly cry. But it’s only fair to say that the majority will be less strongly affected. To most it will be an entertainment.
There will be a pause—a pause long planned and scheduled. (On Apollo 11, the crew was ordered to take a nap after landing, though they didn’t.) Then the first EVA will be prepared. We’ll probably be able to watch some of the suiting-up; we’ll see a face with which we have become familiar vanish under a helmet, its visor strongly tinted against the hard ultraviolet rays outside. We’ll change our point of view and see through her helmet’s camera.
The ship-side door of the airlock will close and she and her companion (EVAs will be in pairs; everything will be by the book) will be alone with the world. The air will be pumped out and the microphones on the suits will hear nothing as the pressure falls to a near vacuum. Then the outer door will open. There will be a noise of some sort as pressure equalizes; a little oxygen will escape out into the Martian air. She will walk forward, turn around, and start to climb down the cold rungs of the ladder. Her helmet camera will show us the side of the landing craft, already dirty with the dust kicked up on landing. Perhaps the microphone will pick up some faint noise as her feet hit the rungs; perhaps the thin wind will sing as it whips through the spacecraft’s legs.
From the cameras outside we will watch her lower herself down, slowly, in the unfamiliar gravity. She will seem to be drawing the process out. Impatiently, we, or the networks, will flick between the two cameras with the best points of view, triangulating our impatience.
At last, one boot will touch the surface, its precise location immediately registered in the models. The fact that we will all know that this actually happened fifteen minutes ago will not matter at all. “When” may shift, today it is “where” that matters. Never has a location mattered to us more.
Her lessened weight—it’s a small planet, after all—will shift from the foot on the earthly ladder to the foot in unearthly soil. Surrounded by absent observers she will step onto Mars.
And into our maps.
*Clancey himself was inside the hab.
*And, if you don’t mind, imagine it on a Tuesday. In Sanskrit Mars is Mangala, and the second day of the week is Mangalavar. The convention has carried through to Latin languages—Mardi—and to English—Tiu is another war god. If it’s Mars, it must be Tuesday.