Andrzej Stewart was a fascinating speaker for our Rotary program last week via ZOOM.  He led us through his experiences training for space missions in which he first spent two weeks in isolation with a crew of specialists on an asteroid mission simulation.  He then spent 366 days in isolation in a “space dome” on the side of a volcano in Hawaii with another group of specialists on a Mars simulation.

 

While we have sent men to the moon, we have never sent any humans to Mars, only a rover known by the name of Curiosity.  Pictures taken from the rover showed the Earth as a tiny spec about the size of a pinhead that had to be pointed out to us in the picture.  Andrzej hopes to go there one day as an astronaut, which is why he went through this rigorous training.  He ate with, slept with and saw just the members of his crew for an entire year.  His only contact with the outside world was with Mission Control, with a delay of three minutes to twenty minutes for a response to simulate actual conditions for contact with Mission Control from Mars, depending on the distance from Mars to Earth at any given time.

 

Everything they needed to exist had to be taken with them.  Water weighs eight pounds per gallon and the crew had to exist on four gallons per day because of that.  We typically use twenty four gallons of water per day on average, so astronauts have to conserve and recycle water as much as possible. While they did grow some cherry tomatoes, all of their food was taken with them in packages so that it would last a long time.  They would add some water to it, heat it up, and according to Andrzej, it tasted pretty good compared to what the astronauts had to eat in the early days of the space program.  The cherry tomatoes were quite a treat though, and enjoyed around a table with all the crew dressed up in their best attire.

 

One of the key studies conducted during a training mission such as this is how the crew members get along with each other for this length of time.  The trip to Mars will take about eight months, they will have to stay on Mars for another eighteen months until the planets are appropriately positioned to make the return flight, and then another eight months for the return.  NASA wants the crew members to have different personalities so that they will always be questioning each other in order to arrive at the best decision for any difficulty that may come up.  What Andrzej discovered was their arguments seemed to be mostly about the small stuff, and he said it taught him to be bolder about whatever position he took in an argument.  The crew members all had different specialties as well to conduct experiments and tests needed by the mission.  If anything breaks, they have to fix it themselves.

 

Thanks to Andrzej for a fascinating presentation, and I’m sure we all hope he sees his dream come true to one day participate in a real mission into space, perhaps even to Mars.