Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  It makes me think about the veterans who have lost limbs, the kinds of guys my brother played basketball with growing up, the kinds of people who are still coming home from any number of current wars. What would a Mars mission look like with at least a couple of astronauts who could swap out prosthetics depending on need? What about wheels instead of legs? Put the legs back on, maybe with special attachments, and the astronaut could rappel into a Martian cave or climb a steep cliff. This kind of modularity is an approach many engineers take to designing mechanical systems, why not augmenting the human body? What kinds of innovations could be discovered if engineers were encouraged to design space systems for differently bodied people?

  Robonaut 2 did eventually get legs in 2014, used mainly for mobility and stability on the space station. But engineers didn’t use the standard human leg as their model. They look more like bendy tubes thanks to numerous multidirectional joints. “The legs are very flexible,” said Ron Diftler, Robonaut Project leader at the NASA Johnson Space Center in an agency press release. “They can orient themselves in non-humanoid ways … it’s not the kind of symmetry that you have in a human,” he said, “but we were not trying to run a beauty contest.”

  Historically, NASA has selected traditionally normative bodies for space adventures. But in truth, there is nothing normative about a human body in space. It is, in some ways, deviant to put such a delicate construction into such an extreme environment where a body doesn’t normally occur and can’t function without great help. In the future, though, it’s possible that human bodies in space could be a more common occurrence, but only with the aid of a great many carefully considered technologies—technologies that augment, amplify, and assist the human form for the space environment. In this way, human spaceflight highlights how context-dependent even the most well-vetted healthy or normal body is.

  * * *

  It’s easy to forget that just the fact of having a non-male body disqualified a person as an astronaut until 1983. When cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, she bolstered the appearance of communist egalitarianism during the Cold War. But some considered her flight, which was riddled with technical difficulties, more a political stunt than a concerted effort for gender parity, something Russia, judging by the numbers, has never committed to. The next woman on a rocket was Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Sally Ride was the third woman in space. And until Guion Bluford flew in 1983, the same year as Ride, no black American had ever been beyond the stratosphere. The Soviet Union also beat the U.S. in this regard. In 1980, it launched Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, a Cuban cosmonaut of African descent.

  Sian told me that during her astronaut selection process, she could sense that others noticed her difference in the mostly white, predominantly male group, especially when she attended a meet-the-astronauts gathering. “I had my hair Afro’d out, and as I walked in, I definitely felt like I didn’t belong,” she said. “I clearly remembered I felt like I wasn’t the standard polished astronaut or what they might be looking for. It could have been more that people were like, ‘Wow, she’s got great hair,’ but it didn’t feel that way. It felt more like, ‘she’s different.’ And different didn’t feel accepted.”

  Sian, who follows NASA astronaut news like some people play fantasy football, mentioned, too, that the most recent group of astronaut selectees, for young people, have remarkably small digital footprints. No social media. Only one of them had a personal website, as far as she could tell. She says, it’s almost like NASA decided, your identity hasn’t been revealed yet, and we’re going to shape it.

  When I was in my early twenties in graduate school for physics, I was keen on making myself as attractive as possible to NASA, but I worried about the gay thing. This was 2001 and I was keenly aware of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. I knew that NASA and the military weren’t so different, at least culture-wise, but I didn’t know the agency’s official stance. So I made a burner Hotmail account and emailed the question anonymously. The reply was short and to the point. NASA did not have a policy prohibiting gay astronauts.

  It’s possible that America’s first woman in space was also the first lesbian in space, though at the time Sally Ride was married to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley. In Ride’s 2012 New York Times obituary, the paper named a woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy, as her surviving partner of twenty-seven years. It was the first the American public learned of Ride’s sexual orientation. O’Shaughnessy said in interviews that Ride had left it up to her to decide whether or not to say anything about it. The decision was difficult, but doing so, O’Shaughnessy said, “was amazing … it was just so freeing.”

  * * *

  After the Skype interviews, the HI-SEAS selection process continued at Cornell University. In Ithaca, nine of us participated in a kind of cooking class to familiarize us with the ingredients we’d be using but also, I suspect, to see who played well together. I felt out of my depth for many reasons, not least of which was my lack of facility in the kitchen. I was also standing amidst true, in my mind, astronaut-like people, near or actual heroes, every one of them.

  In many ways, I was the odd person out. Good at answering interview questions over Skype maybe, but I had no real impressive, useful skills. At one point I found myself in a conversation with Oleg (pilot, first responder, skydiver), Sian (pilot, scuba diver, and, of course, astronaut finalist), Crystal Haney (helicopter pilot, graduate of the Citadel in the second class that included women), Yvonne Cagle (actual NASA astronaut and doctor), and Chris Lowe (aerospace engineer, avid outdoorsperson). They were talking about their most recent adventures in skydiving or scuba diving or as entrepreneurs in new medical technologies. I felt so ordinary and of Earth. And I remember now, cringingly, how I joked about having recently taken a very exciting walk on a paved path by my house. It was a conversational move that confused all of us. I felt like my chances of being selected were shrinking the longer I hung around these impressive people.

  My despair mounted when we gathered at a counter in the test kitchen. Many of the ingredients we’d have on Mars were presented to us by our chef/instructor, Rupert Spies, who was excited to show us the possibilities. Spaetzle from scratch! Pizza from scratch! Sushi rolls with canned tuna, spam, or rehydrated carrots and cucumber! All from scratch!

  At one point Spies, who wanted to sauté vegetables, tasked me with looking up, in an immense cookbook that seemed to contain all culinary knowledge, the smoke point of olive oil. Why were my research skills failing me, I wondered, as I checked the index and table of contents, flipped through hundreds of pages and, secretly panicking, tried to phone-google my way into being a useful member of the team. But there was no cell service in the kitchen.

  A little while later, Spies asked me to scoop forty-eight scoops of egg powder into a bowl. This fake-astronaut candidate’s blood pressure rose as she lost count at around twenty-five and began to officially scoop-count/estimate what looked to be quite a lot of egg powder (or was it too little?), so unfamiliar was she with eyeballing the volume of dehydrated egg for a spaetzle recipe.

  Every interaction was being watched or not, panopticon style, and I was certain that my blunders, which were growing larger in my mind, would keep me from making the final cut.

  To my relief, both the smoke point and egg situations resolved themselves without, I believe, anyone noticing or needing much help from me. The hot pan with canola oil was ready to go before I could come back with the olive oil answer (374 degrees Fahrenheit, boldly discovered in the writing of this essay), and the egg powder proved itself to be gloriously forgiving, I suspect, because it was mixed with other powders, like dehydrated milk and flour, and because our chef, a German baker by training, was good at his job.

  Within a couple weeks of this kitchen tryout I got a call, somewhat ambiguous in its news: no decisions had been made, but Binsted and Hunter wanted to know if I were selected for the mission, would I want to be commander? Preposterous, I thought. Though what I said was
: I’m comfortable in leadership roles, generally, and though I don’t have a particularly strong desire to be the commander, if called upon, I would do it.

  I hope you’re rolling your eyes, because I am rolling my eyes as I type this. In any case, I desperately did not want to be the commander, but I suspected it wouldn’t be wise to say that. There would likely be some big personalities on the crew who I sensed had the potential to be adversarial—I wasn’t wrong—and I simply didn’t want that challenge or responsibility. But I also suspected I wouldn’t be commander, anyway. I don’t really have a commanding presence. I tend to hang back and observe. Ultimately, I was told I would be second-in-command under Angelo. I didn’t ask the reasons for this decision and I still don’t know. I also learned that Crystal, Yvonne, and Chris would not be joining the mission as part of the main crew, they would be backups, though any of them would have been great. Chris, in particular, seemed like a wonderful person to be around—easygoing, good at telling stories, and he played the guitar. Someone who played guitar would have been nice.

  Later, toward the end of our four months inside the dome, we talked as a crew about that fateful phone call. Turns out Binsted and Hunter had asked everyone if they wanted to be in charge. Only one of us, Angelo, had said yes. We had gotten to know each other pretty well at this point and this news surprised no one—we even laughed about it. As a working artist, Angelo’s professional life entailed leading community art projects around the world, so it made sense. I also recall him saying that when Binsted and Hunter told him that I was to be second-in-command, he said he’d rather have had his own pick. But they held firm. By the time I learned this background, Angelo and I had been working together well for months and were friends. We trusted each other and were comfortable in our respective roles. He was often the voice and the face of the mission to the outside world, whereas I had become something of an unofficial crew counselor, a go-between when frustrations rose. Angelo said he was glad I was his number two. And I was very happy to not be the commander.

  * * *

  As of July 2019, the number of people who have been to space is 563. Of those, only sixty-four have been women. In an alternate universe, a different timeline plays out for female astronauts, one that answers Look’s question about “girls” in space with a resounding yes, and sees men and women together prominently contributing to the U.S. space program. It really could have happened.

  Here’s how close we were. In the early 1960s a physician named William Randolph Lovelace II and a pilot named Jacqueline Cochran developed and ran a research program in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to test women’s physiological and psychological suitability for spaceflight. Lovelace, who had designed the tests for the Mercury Seven, the first test pilots NASA sent into orbit, had a grand vision for the future of space. According to Margaret Weitekamp, author of Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program, Lovelace anticipated giant floating space stations for scientific research, run like military battleships or outposts, which would hold positions for women as well as men. In his vision, which seems to have been heavily influenced by gender norms at the time, at least some astronauts would need to be women, if for no other reason than to be space-station secretaries or space-station nurses.

  This Women in Space program drew from a group of trained pilots who’d served as Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), a World War II program, headed by Cochran but disbanded in 1944, that trained women to fly planes domestically as male pilots were sent to combat. Though the medical results were encouraging, the female pilots Lovelace worked with never even got near NASA.

  Weitekamp suspects that President Kennedy’s push to go to the moon, along with the space agency’s initial decision to choose astronauts from a preexisting pool of military test pilots, a group made exclusively of men, precluded NASA from even considering women for the role.

  “They had one goal and that didn’t include the social experimentation of flying a woman,” Weitekamp said in an interview. “And they were then legitimately concerned about the political ramifications of having any flights that seemed off the lunar focus. Certainly they worried a lot about if anything happened to a woman on a flight, whether that would end all human spaceflight programs.”

  The reasoning to exclude women actually went counter to scientific evidence that they would be just as good if not better than men psychologically and physically in space and that they would be more economical with their small size and low calorie requirements. There is no natural law that says that men are better astronauts. The reason half the American population was kept from opportunities in spaceflight was the same reason Valentina Tereshkova flew in 1963. The people in charge determined what, politically speaking, would be the best look.

  * * *

  Within the first few days of the mission, I’d never felt my bodily obligations so acutely. The fact of eating, and all that it required, hit me hard during our food inventory. Four months’ worth for six people—it nearly completely covered the floor of the habitat’s common area. The fact of pissing and shitting and making sure the plumbing was running was another reminder multiple times a day and was compounded when the waste tank backed up and we as a crew had to use so-called field toilets made of trash bag–lined buckets.

  Breathing, needing warmth, needing light with which to see, needing water to drink and bathe and launder clothes and wash dishes, electricity with which to communicate beyond the dome. All of it! It’s easy to forget about these things when you’re just living your life on Earth, the everyday, but when your living is engineered, when all your inputs, outputs, and behaviors are considered and an environment is created to cater to those requirements, it can feel almost repulsive to have a body, the truth of it, so greedy. And there are nearly eight billion of us.

  There’s a picture that’s floated around NASA since the mid-’90s—Jean Hunter sent it to me—a line drawing of an astronaut’s body and its estimated “needs” and “effluents.” The astronaut appears to be female, zombie-armed as if she’d just fallen asleep in zero g. Her hair isn’t long, but it isn’t short—similar in style to that of a young Sally Ride. Her collared shirt has short sleeves; it’s tucked into above-the-knee cargo shorts. Her socks are pulled up mid-shin and her shoes are drawn as if an afterthought: no laces, so perhaps they are slippers. On one side of this woman is the list of inputs (“needs” like oxygen, food solids, hand/face wash water, urine flush) and on the other side, the outputs (“effluents” like carbon dioxide, sweat solids, feces solids, hygiene water) and their corresponding weights in pounds. This image, perhaps more than any other I’ve seen, captures the idea of the astronaut’s body as a system that must be accounted for when plugged into a spacecraft sent off into the solar system.

  When I researched the article I wrote for Slate in 2014 about the astronaut body and the female economic advantage in spaceflight, I learned I wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea. In the early 2000s, Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA, had also been thinking about the problem of astronaut bodies. He consulted the NASA document on physiological metrics called STD-3000, Man-Systems Integration Standards, now revised to STD-3001, that detail the needs and effluents for a range of body types. Drysdale compared the numbers for women whose size was in the fifth percentile to men whose size was in the ninety-fifth percentile, a range from about 4 foot 11 and 90 pounds to 6 foot 3 and 215 pounds. He found that a fifth-percentile woman would use less than half the resources of a 95th-percentile man. While we didn’t have a woman on the HI-SEAS crew who was in the fifth percentile, our stats were similar to the predictions.

  I spoke with Drysdale, who no longer works with NASA. He said his calculations suggest all things being equal, a crew of smaller astronauts would launch for half the payload cost. “Small women haven’t been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there’s no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it’s brain power you wan
t,” said Drysdale. “The logical thing to do is to fly small women.”

  Harry Jones, of NASA Ames Research Center, told me that he too, noticed the average female and male calorie requirement differed significantly and published on the topic in the early 2000s. “For a Mars mission, life support will be a major cost,” he said. “It is expected that oxygen and water can be recycled, but not food. Reducing the crew’s calorie requirement would cut costs.”

  Indeed, a number of people I talked to for the article acknowledged the benefits of an all-female crew, or even just a crew made of smaller people in general. One proponent is Andrew Rader, a mission manager at SpaceX. “Anything to reduce weight and even in terms of making the spacecraft seem bigger, having smaller astronauts would be great,” he said, noting that he isn’t speaking on behalf of his company. “I think it’s a reasonable proposal.”

  As reasonable as an all-female Mars mission is from an economic perspective, some might find the idea offensive. After all, it’d be an expedition that fails to represent half the world’s population; an all-female Mars crew would strike many as biased.

  Crew cohesion was an important subject of study during HI-SEAS. Our crew members were a relatively diverse bunch: a white Belgian man, a white Canadian man, a white Russian-American man, a Puerto Rican Latina woman, a black woman who grew up in the Northeastern U.S., and me, a white, queer kid from Kansas. We had a range of engineering, science, and creative backgrounds. For half of us, English wasn’t our first language.