Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Walkback constraints were a source of worry for Apollo mission planners and frustration for astronauts. Without trees or buildings to give a sense of scale, it was difficult to accurately estimate distances. For safety’s sake, estimates were conservative, sometimes maddeningly so. On the way back from an Apollo 15 EVA, astronaut Dave Scott spied an unusual black rock sitting out on its own. He knew that if he asked Mission Control for permission to go get it, they’d tell him to keep driving, as the EVA was already behind schedule. Since Mission Control could hear their conversations, Scott fabricated a seatbelt malfunction. The rock would become known as “the seatbelt basalt.”

SCOTT: Oh, there’s some vesicular basalt right there, boy. Oh, Man! Hey, how about…Let’s just hold on one second, we’ve got to have…

IRWIN: Okay, we’re stopping.

SCOTT: Let me get my seatbelt…. It keeps coming off.

IRWIN [picking up on the ruse right away]: Why don’t you hand me your seatbelt?

SCOTT: Just a minute…If I can find it. [pause] There it is. [pause] If you’ll hang on to it here for a second.

IRWIN: Okay, I’ve got it. [long pause]

It’s late afternoon now. We’ve reached the end-of-the-day rendezvous point. Lee and Abercromby will overnight here, on primitive bunks in the back of the Humvee, while the rest of the team drives back to camp and then rejoins them in the morning. Bravo Party is nowhere in sight, so we wander over and take pictures of each other standing on the lip of a ravine. Later, I’ll look at these photographs and it will appear that I was visiting a strip mine. It’s hard to say why I find Devon Island beautiful. But there are these moments when you’re tromping along, head lowered against the wind, and your eye lands on a hump of moss with tiny red flowers like cupcake sprinkles, and you’re just walloped by the sight. Maybe it’s the unlikely heroics of something so delicate surviving in a place so stingy and hard. Maybe it’s just the surprise of color. At one point yesterday, on a hike through yet another grey and beige canyon, a bumblebee flew past. The yellow seemed like a hallucination, something colorized in a black and white photograph. “Whoa, buddy,” someone said. “Where’d you take a wrong turn?”

It’s starting to rain, so we head back to the Humvee. Lee and Abercromby are in high spirits, having completed day one of NASA’s very first pressurized roverlike traverse. “Just terrific,” Abercromby is saying. “There can’t be many places in the world where the terrain and the scale so closely approximate lunar—”

“Ground, this is Bravo Party.” It’s the radio. NASA geophysicist Brian Glass, the SPR-Bravo traverse leader, reads out his GPS coordinates and a weather update. Read is the wrong verb. It’s something between shout and spit . It’s raining hard where they are. Their visibility is down to 300 feet. Bravo Party isn’t in a Humvee. Their rover simulator is a Kawasaki Mule, a larger ATV with a short pickup bed. Their spark plugs got wet crossing streams that had appeared shallower in satellite photographs. One of the spare plugs was the wrong size. At one point, they were almost two hours behind.

Weaver flips his hood over his head. “Sounds like the other guys aren’t havin’ as much joy.”

MORNING AT HMP begins with the sound of tent zippers. The sleeping accommodations are thirty nylon tents, hunkered on a hill, breaking rank with the island’s color scheme. Everyone gets up around the same time, because every morning begins with a meeting. This morning’s is being held in the main office tent. Along with the NASA meeting mentality, an actual NASA phone system has been set up on Devon Island. Staff at NASA Ames, in California, can dial a four-digit extension and reach Lee, a couple hundred miles from the magnetic North Pole, on an in-house call. (HMP is one of those odd but surprisingly common Internet-age locales with VoIP coverage but no flush toilets.) [59] In this case, to keep the island more Mars/moon–like. (Biowaste encourages plant growth.) Fourteen 50-gallon drums of urine are flown off the island each season. Men go directly into the drum via a funnel. Women squat over a pitcher first. It’s one of those clear plastic pitchers they use for beer at campus pubs. Pouring it out was like an entire Saturday night of drinking condensed in a single gesture. Solid waste happens on a toilet seat mounted over a plastic bag that you then take away and drop in the trash. You are your own dog.

An HMP webcam is set up on a tripod in one corner, enabling people all over the world to look on as Andrew Abercromby attempts to maintain order and civility at the posttraverse Lessons Learned Review. One of HMP’s ancillary research goals is the study of “human dynamics which result from extended contact in close quarters.” Hopefully someone other than myself is taking notes this morning.

“No one told us we were behind after the first EVA,” Glass is complaining. “According to the paper time line we were ten minutes early.” Something about Glass’s receding red hair and the cut of his mustache and beard make me think of Sir Walter Raleigh. It’s easy to picture him with an Elizabethan collar atop the polar fleece. Glass says ground control made them wait nearly two hours while they mapped a quicker route. “I…” He exhales. “I had the impression we were being jerked around just so Alpha Party could get back in time for dinner.”

Lee insists that Alpha Party had had no idea any of this was happening.

“Well, yes,” Glass says, “because…” He turns to Abercromby. “Pascal had his iridium phone set to Ignore.”

“It was on Vibrate!”

“Can we,” says Abercromby, “try to drive toward lessons learned?”

Glass has moved on to “the seemingly incessant” calls from ground control to check in on what they were doing. “Every time, I had to stop, get to a place with no wind noise and no motor noise, take off the helmet…”

Lesson learned: Explorers appreciate a little autonomy. The rigidly scheduled time lines that typify shorter planetary surface EVAs will have to loosen if NASA pushes ahead to two-week EVAs and trips to Mars. Autonomy is the topic of the moment among space psychologists. Astronauts often complain to flight surgeons about not being allowed to make their own schedules and decisions about their work. Like Glass, some find Mission Control’s micro-management frustrating and demoralizing. Space psychiatrist Nick Kanas, of the University of California, San Francisco, has studied the psychological effects of high and low autonomy on personnel in three different space simulations. The men and women Kanas studied were generally happier and more creative in the high-autonomy scenario. The exception was the guys in Mission Control, who “reported some confusion about their work role.”

The meeting shows no sign of abating. Weaver is in presleep mode. The HMP field guide, known for his laissez-faire shower regimen, is scratching his back on the doorframe like a molting grizzly. Glass isn’t quite done. “…We had no lunch other than candy bars. Alpha Party had taken multiple items that—”

“No way,” says Lee. “We had a total of two sandwiches.”

“Lessons learned,” Abercromby says flatly. “Order more bread.”

Mike the cook speaks up. “Some bread got stolen in Resolute.” (Flights to Devon Island leave from the Inuit hamlet of Resolute.) Mike had three days to singlehandedly plan meals and buy supplies for thirty-some people over a six-week field season. The NASA traverse planning office should probably hire Mike the cook. One of the problems with expedition planning today, versus forty years ago, is that NASA is so much larger. Too many cooks take forever to agree on how to make the broth. Or as Apollo mastermind Wernher von Braun is said to have commented on the moon landing, “If we’d been more people, we’d have failed.”