‘Martians’ walk the Utah desert, paving way for life on red planet

The morning calm broke as an urgent cry for help rang from Clément Plagne’s space-suited crewmates. It was Day 3 on this simulated excursion to the red planet, and things were getting dicey.

“I’m getting no air from the suit,” one crewmate radioed. “If this weren’t Earth I’d be dead right now.”

“We need to head back to the Hab immediately,” another instructed.

Inside the “Hab,” a hermetically sealed habitat, Mr. Plagne and two other crew members anxiously waited for the rest of the crew to return from walking on the “Martian” surface. The situation was solved eventually, but they lost time exploring the surrounding terrain.

As an appointed journalist for Crew 223, part of Mr. Plagne’s job during this two-week simulation was to document these roller coaster interludes. The problems encountered at The Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station (MRDS) in the southern Utah desert are valuable data points for disaster prevention and response plans for real-life astronauts.

“If you’re putting yourself in a situation that was supposed to be on Mars and your ventilation breaks in four, five seconds, that’s an emergency,” he recalls of that day in 2020. 

Mr. Plagne, an aerospace engineering student at the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space in Toulouse, France, says his astronaut dream dates back to his childhood, inspired by the 1995 film “Apollo 13.”

He is among more than 1,000 space-passionate volunteers who have been selected, trained, and sent to the MDRS analog sites over the past two decades. They are part of larger worldwide efforts in which “astronauts” isolate themselves in a Mars-like environment for weeks in order to study the technological, operational, and behavioral requirements for a human mission to Mars. 

The aim is at once simple and grand: to forward human understanding, which could ultimately help us reach other planets – and perhaps have spinoff benefits for solving problems like climate change here on Earth.

“We aren’t leaving Earth to leave Earth problems behind,” says MDRS director Shannon Rupert. “Going to Mars enables us to fix Earth’s problems and makes us look toward the future, not only on Mars, but here – what do we want Earth to look like when we’re on Mars?”

Around the world, 22 analog bases run by science organizations simulate operations on future Mars and lunar missions. Participants study the habitats’ safety and ability to sustain life, as well as crew psychology – for anywhere from a few weeks to up to a year.

In Utah, for example, teams of six to seven crew members share the group-living habitats, rely on solar-powered energy, eat prepackaged frozen food, grow crops and vegetables, run extravehicular activity missions to study rocks and collect data, and track water usage. 

The tests of a Martian lifestyle 

Dr. Rupert, who first joined the MDRS analog program in the early 2000s and became its program director in 2009, pinpoints the shift in public interest on the mission to Mars to the 2015 film “The Martian” starring Matt Damon. “All of a sudden space became exciting ... where before you had to really earn the respect of a smaller community,” she says. 

For Israeli data scientist Alon Tenzer, a passion for space drove him to join the AMADEE-20, Austrian Space Forum’s four-week analog mission in partnership with the Israel Space Agency at the test site in the Negev desert in October 2021. First selected as an analog astronaut in 2019, he traveled from Singapore to Europe on five separate occasions that required time away from his family and work to participate in monthslong intensive physical training, self-directed learning, and dress rehearsals before heading to the Mars-like mission.

“Putting on a suit is an activity in itself,” Mr. Tenzer recalls of the four hours it took to learn how to get dressed in their protective gear.

While living in the Mars-like environment, he found the simulated communication delays between Earth and “Mars” challenging, where “there’s no live calls or video chat [with family members],” says Mr. Tenzer. “At that time, my twins were 6 months old. I wasn’t able to see them and the changes that happened to them or just talk to them, and it’s hard,” he says. 

Long-duration missions can set further challenges, says Christiane Heinicke, a physicist and engineer who leads the Moon and Mars Base Analog project at University of Bremen in Germany. Her 12-month isolation experience about six years ago as part of a crew at the Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) informs her work on the analog base.

While finding “sweet spots” living in a group setting during the first two quarters of the NASA-sponsored experiment, she ​​observed signs of a “third-quarter syndrome” in her group during the final months of their mission as living in an isolated environment took its toll. 

“There’s this classic example of someone making chewing noises when they’re eating food. If you hear it once, you’re like, ‘It’s annoying, but I don’t care,’” says Dr. Heinicke. “But if you’re on a long-duration mission and you hear this every mealtime every single day for weeks or months, at some point, it just drives you nuts.” 

But those kinds of stressors can also be the catalyst to find solutions. 

“In our case, at an event, we had communication issues and we said, ‘OK we need to sort this out. We need to find a solution.’ And that was what helped us carry on to the third quarter,” she adds.

Tackling environmental challenges

With limited water and energy supply, Dr. Heinicke says her crew created a competition to see who could take the shortest showers. One crew member got it down to 23 seconds. 

“One of the takeaways [of these missions] is that while you’re simulating life on Mars, you’re also realizing how much comfort ... we have in daily life on Earth and how lucky we have to have all the resources,” says Mr. Plagne, who notices himself being “more mindful” about saving water and conserving energy after his missions. 

Annie Meier, chemical engineer and principal investigator at NASA Kennedy Space Center who studies waste conversion and resource utilization, thinks analog mission experiments in trash management and food packaging can inform the logistics of future space missions. 

During her four-month analog mission at HI-SEAS, Dr. Meier and her crew had tried to separate their trash out for recycling, something the International Space Station currently does not do. They also analyzed what kind of packaging is really necessary to preserve food.

“For long-duration missions, you can have bulk packaging and don’t need all this individually wrapped to keep it shelf stable. That can significantly reduce the amount of plastic and radiation shielding that you have on this food,” she adds. 

“Every person is a dreamer”

Coming back from the Mars analog mission, Dr. Heinicke ​​has been working on sustainable habitat technologies that won’t interfere with the Martian ecosystem, such as airlocks, one of the main sources of potential contamination. “We have to make sure that the airlock is not this wide-open gate where microbes can lead into the Martian environment,” she says. 

This past January, Mr. Plagne returned to the Utah site for a three-week simulation, this time as a commander. Crew 240 included five other participants with backgrounds in engineering, food safety, biology, and botany – all dedicated to the idea of helping future astronauts safely reach Mars and achieve self-reliance. He’s also scheduled for an internship at the European Space Agency. He says he still keeps in touch with his Crew 223 team two years after the mission. 

“I like to think every person is a dreamer. Our dream is to work so that, someday, humanity will flourish somewhere else, away from its cradle,” Mr. Plagne wrote in Crew 223 mission’s journal on March 10, 2020. 

No one anticipated the day after Mr. Plagne wrote those words that the World Health Organization would declare a global pandemic, ushering in unprecedented uncertainty and changes. But if there is anything these “Martians” learned living in isolation on Earth, it was the power of dreams, hope, collaboration, and persistence to carry them through the unknown.

Editor's note: Since participants at the Mars analog sites are often scientists with advanced degrees and training, this article has been updated to remove references to the phrase citizen science.