by Kate Greene
VI
ON VESSELS
We could begin with the brain encased in the skull, but I prefer the chambers of the heart, and moving out, the veins and arteries, rib cage, muscle, and fat and then the skin that hugs it all into the shape of my body. A possible container for a possible soul. I’m lying on the narrow foam mattress, under a comforter on top of a sheet. Beyond this bed is my room, the medium-size walk-in closet. The door is shut. Beyond the door, the second-floor mezzanine and more doors, behind which some of my crewmates are sleeping. Below us, is the expanse of our habitat—laboratory, work spaces, kitchen, dining area—our home on some kind of Mars. Because it’s morning, I hear Oleg and Yajaira, the early exercisers, laughing as they contort to the demands of a workout video.
The thing about exercise is that it increases respiration and therefore carbon dioxide in the vicinity of the exercising body. Our habitat is outfitted with sensors, and within the first few weeks, we noticed spikes in CO2 levels after workouts. High CO2 affects different people differently. I evidently get light-headed, sleepy, and find it difficult to concentrate. Scott Kelly, during his year on the ISS, felt congested and had burning eyes and mild headaches. In the American section of the space station, high carbon-dioxide levels were a frequent problem, he writes in his book, especially when there was a larger crew and especially when the carbon-dioxide scrubber was malfunctioning or broken, which was unfortunately often. Of all the technical details in Kelly’s book, the carbon dioxide issues on the space station surprised me most for the frequency with which they’re mentioned, and the seeming lack of urgency afforded them by mission control.
Similarly, our mission support also wasn’t much concerned with CO2. The problem was especially pronounced when more than two people were exercising, but since space was limited, we staggered our workouts so no more than two people would be breathing heavily at the same time. Also, because the habitat was essentially a tent with little to no insulation—not a closed, pressurized system like you’d actually have on Mars—we could count on its draftiness for relief.
* * *
Our dome wasn’t the only scientific study on the volcano. Just a short walk across crunchy basalt sat a little gadget that monitored seismic activity, and farther up the slope was the Mauna Loa Observatory, a facility that has measured levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958. During our mission, the observatory made international headlines. On May 9, 2013, readings indicated, for the first time, that daily average levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tipped past 400 parts per million. You can probably imagine what’s happened since. By September 2016, the monthly average never dipped below it.
The 400 ppm marker is mostly symbolic—nothing drastic happens when instruments tick off this reading. But put in a context of ever-increasing CO2 levels, the 400 ppm marker now feels, more or less, like a point of no return.
Still, the even more disturbing number to consider is the rate of change of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and how it relates to the now very rapid rise in average global temperature—a heat that is becoming destructive to humans and other living things.
We’re on pace right now, thanks to an upwardly mobile rate of change, to see CO2 concentrations exceed 500 ppm within fifty years. It’s a big deal because at this rate, global temperatures will increase by 3 degrees Celsius. And 3 degrees Celsius is a very big deal because of the subsequent devastation that accompanies this kind of hotness: sea level rise, more and more-deadly forest fires, liquified glaciers and ice caps, more and more powerful storms, mass migrations of humans, ocean die-offs, jellyfish rise-ups, threats to global food supplies, that kind of thing. Though not a closed system, the Earth is not exactly a leaky tent. Within our or our children’s lifetimes, we will know, viscerally, tragically, how very high levels of CO2 affect us all.
There are some people, often extremely wealthy people, who tend to see Mars as a plan-B planet, to save us from the ravages of a hotter Earth. It’s a proposal that carries a whiff of urgency, but it also flaunts an elitism that already plays out at home. In November 2018, as deadly fires ravaged California, wealthier citizens, for instance, Kim Kardashian, hired private firefighters to protect their homes. Say, for instance, that there were some way to transport hundreds to thousands of people to Mars, and then to house them there. Who would these hypothetical migrants, fleeing a chaotic Earth, be? With hypothetical tickets costing, according to Elon Musk’s most recent estimates, $200,000, certainly not people who make their living as librarians, electricians, sanitation workers, nurse practitioners, or line cooks, though you might imagine those are precisely the people you’d want to have as members of your community. But also, what would their ships look like? What about their Martian habitats? What does it mean to make a home, to call a place home? And how would they take care of their new home once they got there?
“I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is straightforward. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced,” said the architect, author, and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller. “We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.”
* * *
A vessel is a repository or a transport system. It is a ship that ferries people and cargo over oceans; it is a tube that moves blood, sap, or water; it’s a structure built on solid ground. A vessel is a body that holds an ethereal spirit or, as a womb, another body within it. It is a container, a shelter, a shell, a home or destination, a space that creates a sense of security, insecurity, or, possibly, adventure. It can be emptied and refilled, closed and opened. A vessel is defined by its boundaries, the shape that’s formed when interior and exterior coincide.
Our dome on Mars was geodesic in the sense that it is a hemisphere made up of triangles, a design patented by Buckminster Fuller in 1954, and popularized at the World’s Fair in New York City a decade later. Ours was covered in white vinyl and, on top of that, partially covered by a brown, black, and rust-colored camouflage tarp so that the brightness of its white against the red rocks of Mauna Loa wasn’t so gleaming from the distant road. This was in accordance with land-use permits and to keep a low profile on the mountain, a mountain which is sacred to the native people of Hawai‘i, and so also in accordance with Hawaiian cultural practitioners who had asked that the habitat respectfully be covered.
The dome featured one window, about two feet in diameter, which was installed only at the end of our first month. The window was important to us on Mars because the camo coverage significantly limited the amount of light that got through the shell during the day. On the ISS, researchers have installed LED lights that can be tuned to produce white light that’s slightly more blue in tone, which is thought to wake up the circadian system, and light that’s slightly redder, which is believed to calm it down. We had LED lights, but they weren’t so special. They were mostly track lighting, and never enough, it seemed to me. In addition to missing talking to Jill, being able to go for a bike ride, drinking beer, and eating fresh vegetables, it turned out I also missed sunshine. A lot.
Per protocol, we could go outside, but only in bulky outfits that simulated a kind of space-suit experience. These outfits were monstrosities, XXL neon-green hazmat suits, bought by Kim Binsted on sale from a government-surplus website. We’d set up our radio communication system (walkie-talkies) and our suit’s hydration system (an off-brand CamelBak), climb into the backs of the single-piece, heavy-duty plastic shells, Velcro up, wait in the “air lock” for five minutes (for light verisimilitude), and then venture outside. It was a process that usually required multiple people to get those of us leaving the habitat in and out of the suits, though Sian, who went out more than others for nearby photography projects, got very good at dressing solo.
The first space walk ever was done by Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov in 1965, who opened the hatch to his orbiting capsule, drifted out on an umbilical, declared the Earth “absolutely round,” and then struggled t
o get back inside. The space suit, due to either poor design or a malfunction, had overinflated and Leonov, suddenly too bloated, could not reenter his craft. The fix was to release some air, but the quick drop in air pressure to do so almost made Leonov pass out.
Though no one has died during an extravehicular activity, or EVA as NASA calls them, there have been close calls and dangerous failures, even recently. In 2013 Luca Parmitano’s helmet began filling with water from a leak in the unit within the space suit designed to separate moisture from his exhaled breath, almost drowning him in the vacuum of space. And in 2011, according to Kelly’s account in his book, a cosmonaut named Oleg Skripochka became untethered from the station during a space walk and actually floated away. The only thing that saved Skripochka, Kelly writes, was hitting a space-station antenna that sent him “tumbling back toward the station close enough to grab on to a handrail, saving his life.” And what if it hadn’t been so? Eventually, his life-support unit would’ve reached its useful limits, Kelly writes, and he’d lose consciousness from rising CO2 or oxygen deprivation, but hopefully not until mission control could patch him through to his family back on Earth.
In 1994, Neil Armstrong sent NASA a thank-you letter for his space suit. “It turned out to be the most widely photographed spacecraft in history,” he wrote. “That was no doubt due to the fact that it was so photogenic.” Though its true beauty, Armstrong added, was that it worked. Prodigious layers of choice material, cleverly assembled, is all that separates astronauts on EVAs from a harsh death by void.
Space suit as spacecraft, then. A house not much bigger than a body, to paraphrase the poet Francis Ponge, who was writing more generally about monuments and their scale: a space suit can be seen as a shell of a person’s own size that employs humanity’s “genius for adaptation and not disproportion.”
Armstrong’s human-size spaceship was designed and made by Playtex, the women’s bra manufacturer. It’s a riveting underdog story told in Nicholas de Monchaux’s book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. The Playtex team, led by “a car mechanic and former television repairman” and made up of seamstresses and engineers, convinced NASA to let them send in a test suit for consideration, competing at their own expense against two other companies NASA had invited to the bid. With its twenty-one layers of neoprene rubber, metalized polyester films, and other materials, the Playtex suit outperformed the competition, proving it could protect astronauts from the dramatic temperature shifts in space—from 240 Fahrenheit in the sun to minus 280 Fahrenheit in the shade—as well as ultraviolet radiation and micrometeorites moving up to ten miles per second. Cosmic armor birthed by a bra company.
Some other reasons Playtex won the contract: precision stitching and a clever design that allowed enough flexibility so astronauts could move when the suit was fully pressurized. This flexibility came from bellows-like joints at the shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, and ankles, made of neoprene reinforced with nylon tricot—a fabric used in swimwear, gloves, and underwear. Steel aircraft cables acted as underwire, absorbing tension and helping the suit maintain its shape under pressure.
Our HI-SEAS suits were not nearly as engineered as real suits and certainly not as good looking, a source of discontent among some of the crew. These green monsters were bulky and cumbersome, which made them a fair simulation of the real thing, but even more frustrating, they didn’t actually fit the smaller crew members. The built-in faceplate was oversize and awkward. And when the cooling fans didn’t work as expected, the faceplates would fog, obstructing visibility. But more important, to the more media-oriented members of the crew, these suits did not look good when photographed. On a simulated mission, it’s not pictures of the crew sitting down for dinner—a dinner that could be anywhere—that people remember, it’s the space suits.
In the buildup to the start of HI-SEAS, we as a crew stayed in an apartment in Hilo, a town on the windward, east side of the Big Island. And in this apartment we spent many hours talking suit design with a local craftsperson named Jessica Cruzan. Binsted had enlisted her help in modifying the suits to fit us, to look less hazmat-y and more space suit-y and to field the critiques of the crewmembers who wanted something more flashy, less dumpy. Cruzan, who founded and runs Sew Da Kine, a successful business that makes handbags and wallets made of cork, did her best. And she did in fact improve the original suits so that they fit better, but ultimately, despairingly, some of the crew believed the suits still looked so different from any space suit that had come before that we would be mocked when the first photos of our mission hit the media.
A few weeks into the mission we still hadn’t posted photos from an EVA. Those first shots finally came when we received a new space-suit simulator to test out from the University of Maryland. It was a fluffy white getup with a separate dome-shaped helmet and looked very much the part. But it too had usability issues. The cooling system only cooled the torso, not the arms and legs, and it was heavy and bulky for smaller crewmembers. Still, this was the suit that we took the majority of those first pictures in. The green suits we kept as work suits for when we went on longer hikes or to do geological surveys. Photos of these eventually made it back to Earth and to my knowledge, they weren’t ridiculed. The drama of these suits on our mission, our human-size Earth-bound monuments to otherworldly exploration, drove home the fact for me that all non-space-suit space suits verge on the ridiculous if they’re worn by a person who’s not actually in or going to space. The suit is ever only a costume, highlighting the make-believe aspect of the experience. For me, these suits were a reminder of what was actual and what, regardless of how bad some of us wanted it, was not. They were always terrestrial vessels in spite of themselves.
* * *
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that “faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats.”
With four weeks left in the HI-SEAS mission, a hurricane approached.
Its name was Flossie, and there was concern, due to the position of the habitat on the side of a volcano, across from another large volcano, that there might be a wind tunnel effect, amplifying gusts to exceed the tolerance of the dome. Also the potential for mudslides and flooding. As a crew, we braced. Sian had come to Mars just off a thirteen-week internship with the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a sabbatical project. And Oleg, our crew health and safety officer, was a trained first responder. Simon also had emergency training.
A geodesic dome is one of the most stable and sound structures for its weight, thanks to the interlocking triangles that make up its surface. Still, we put most of our food and important equipment like the nose flute and the 3-D printer in the shipping container that we used for storage and as a tool shed, not knowing if the dome’s cover would hold. By our beds were bug out bags. Mine held notebooks, my laptop, phone, headlamp, and extra socks. I decided to leave my stack of unread New Yorkers behind.
On Mars winds can whip at up to one hundred miles per hour, which is hurricane speed on Earth. But because the atmosphere is only one percent as dense as Earth’s these gusts simply don’t punch. And while the wind is often dusty, producing storms that can cover the entire planet for weeks to months, the grains are fine. It’s less a sandblast and more a rusty cloud of smoke. On Earth, our storms are relatively short-lived, but they are powerful and can devastate lives and homes. Our worst-case scenario for Flossie would be to evacuate and hike out to a nearby military zone called the Pōhakuloa Training Area. Had this happened, it would have been the end of our mission.
The morning Flossie was to make landfall, I awoke to an unusual quiet. There were no winds, no thwapping of the habitat cover against the frame. All was still, and the air ins
ide our dome felt strange, heavier maybe. The storm, we learned, tracked north and then west, just missing the Big Island. We unloaded the shipping container of the food and equipment we had put there only twenty-four hours before and proceeded with an otherwise ordinary day.
* * *
As I write this, recalling that storm, recalling other Martian memories, I sit in a studio apartment in Washington Heights in New York City. I live here now because I’ve gone back to school for an MFA. Technically, I suppose this makes me bicoastal. My name is also on a lease of the San Francisco rent-controlled apartment I share with Jill, who is still my wife, though after many conversations and a summer living together again between the first and second year of the writing program, trying to figure out what the shape of our relationship would be—the phrase we use over and over again—we’ve decided to separate.
Perhaps I am here because my brother died. And then my cat. And then the dog. And now my relationship of fourteen years. In the film The Hours, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, the Virginia Woolf character announces that “someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” Life and value. Valium and vacuuming. Dust bunnies and love. Love and love. It’s possible.
We have different tolerances for going places and spending time apart. It takes Jill longer to settle into a home, and once she has, she doesn’t like to leave and start again, though it’s much more complicated than that. I think I have what’s called itchy feet. We’ve negotiated so much of our relationship around this issue in small and large ways, including while I was away on Mars. Now it’s time to try something else.