Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  It was only after being selected for HI-SEAS that I began quite literally to dream of Mars. There was the one where I headed out to the Red Planet in a leaky Winnebago with the dog, oxygen slowly seeping from our ship, and me, when we were too far gone, realizing I didn’t have the math to get us back home. There was another, this time with Jill, when we tried to launch from the Martian surface and land on Phobos to hopscotch back into orbit, but the touch screens weren’t working, and it seemed like a long shot anyway.

  Once I actually began to live on Mars, though, my dreamscape shifted. And here, another confession: while I am surely prone to fantasy, I had a hard time sustaining the delusion that we could actually be on the next planet over. I suspect the same was true for my crewmates, although judging by the way they talked, most of them seemed to have an easier time slipping inside the story than me. They spoke of feeling most on Mars when in their simulated space suits, communicating by radio, and hiking over red lava rocks or exploring caves. I, however, was far too concerned with practical matters during these excursions—keeping my suit’s cooling fans operational, maneuvering inside the bulky suit so as not to break an ankle—to drift into any real Martian reverie.

  For me, my most Mars experience did in fact happen on a space-suited hike, but it wasn’t on Hawai‘i. It was in Hanksville, Utah, where we met ahead of the four-month mission for a two-week practice session at another Mars-simulation site called the Mars Desert Research Station. This facility, built in the early 2000s, mostly consisted of a two-story cylindrical structure, similar to the one on Devon Island, boasting an adjacent greenhouse and night-sky observatory. The space-suit simulators were brown jumpsuits with traditional globe-shaped helmets. There were even ATVs we could take out to explore our surroundings.

  It happened on an EVA with Simon and Angelo. They wanted to scale a nearby hill, and I did too, but I also had to pee. Buddy-system rules were in effect and we were nothing if not conscientious. I wasn’t going to walk back to the hab by myself so, seated on a rock, I decided to just wait them out.

  Inhaling deeply, I took in the landscape. Here I was, I thought, just arrived on the planet next door after an unprecedented eight-month journey. Even though the people of Earth were wishing us the best and, I imagined, hanging on our every correspondence, our home planet was just a fleck of blue in the night sky, more than a hundred million miles away.

  And with that thought, a vision, vivid and unexpected, appeared before me. Technically, I was staring at a barren and rusty Utahan landscape—rocks and dirt all the way to the horizon—but what I saw were grassy hills, a small stream, and trees with shimmering leaves. How? I held on to it for as long as I could, but the mirage quickly vanished. Still, it was exhilarating. And it made me realize that a number of my dreams while living on Mars during that two-week mission had also featured various forms of green. In one I was picnicking with my family under a weeping willow gently swaying from breezes that I also vividly recalled caressing the hairs on my forearms. In another, I walked through an immense field of tall grass, toward what, I didn’t know, but I kept moving forward, smiling as the blades tickled my face. It seemed that when I finally convinced myself that I was farthest from home, all I could see and feel was a lush and verdant Earth.

  There’s a Russian song for that, Oleg told me when I talked about what I was seeing. In English, its title translates to “Grass by the Home.” He found it on YouTube and sent me the link. In one stanza, the cosmonauts recount their dreams and note that they aren’t about the cold darkness of space or the sounds of the spaceship, but rather, “We only dream of home, of love and friendship, / And grass of green near babbling mountain streams.”

  It was nothing new, my visions of Earth while on a journey far away. I wonder about the arguments against going to Mars that claim we need to first focus on fixing problems here at home. Might going to Mars be a way to help us see our planet and ourselves anew? Couldn’t a human expedition to Mars be good for those on Earth too? Though, as with many things, it could very well depend on who does the going.

  * * *

  Our eyes have been watching the fourth rock from the sun for eons, and naming it since at least 3000 BC. Egyptians called it Her Desher, meaning “the red one.” In China, it was “the fire star.” More recently, the ancient Greeks named it Ares, after the god of war. The modern Western world calls it by its Roman name, Mars.

  Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn are brighter in the night sky, but even without a telescope, you can recognize Mars by its reddish hue. Compared to stars, whose positions stay fixed with respect to each other, planets’ paths through the sky are variable; the word “planet” comes from the Greek planìtis, which means wanderer.

  Also, unlike stars, planets don’t twinkle. Stars are so far away that their light reaches us as if from a single point. The swirling air of our atmosphere distorts this light point, making it dance its way to our eyes. Planets, in contrast, are close enough to us that their light shines as if from a very small disk. These disks produce parallel light rays that robustly break through the atmosphere as a collective. No twinkle.

  Galileo turned a primitive telescope on Mars for the first time in 1609. In 1672, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens noticed the planet’s white ice cap at its south pole. Later, in 1698, Huygens published Cosmotheoros, one of the first treatments on the possibility of life on Mars. And so it began.

  The modern life-on-Mars obsession can be traced to Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who, in 1877, spent night after night at the telescope meticulously mapping the planet’s features. In particular, he sketched straight lines that crossed the surface, what he presumed were natural waterways, and what he called channels or canali in Italian. But some people translated canali into canals, and a French astronomer named Camille Flammarion concluded, after analyzing Schiaparelli’s sketches, that the structures were likely made by “a race superior to ours.” He wrote a book about it. The American textile scion Percival Lowell read that book and decided to make his own observations confirming the existence of these structures. But ultimately, Lowell set out to popularize the idea that there were indeed canals on Mars, likely used, he purported, to transport water from the ice caps at the poles to the drier equatorial regions.

  Even persistent skepticism in the scientific community—and a thorough debunking early in 1894, by E. E. Barnard, who wrote that not only were the canals not canals, but there were no straight lines seen by Lowell or Schiaparelli, that they are optical illusions or some kind of wishful thinking—did not stop the popular hope for and an unflagging belief in some kind of life on Mars.

  Today, of course, most people believe there are no little green thems. But what about some kind of exotic, perhaps microbial, life? On Earth, scientists have found extremophiles, usually very tiny creatures that can survive extreme heat and cold, ultra-low pressures, highly acidic environments, and other hellish locales. I think of the tardigrade, also known as the water bear, a microscopic organism with eight stubby legs and a prominent, circular mouth opening in its chubby face, and how it can hibernate for years, surviving radiation, extreme cold, and the vacuum of space. Might there somehow be something like a tardigrade on the Red Planet?

  The Mars 2020 rover, a robot almost identical in structure to Curiosity currently rolling on the surface, will be outfitted with instruments to collect samples for later retrieval and delivery back to Earth. There is no real expectation of finding living organisms with this new mission. Instead, the hope is that these samples will contain some kind of chemical signature of ancient organisms. And so, after all these years, like some iconic outlaw still wanted dead or alive: life on Mars.

  * * *

  Christmas Eve, 1968. Aboard the Apollo 8 capsule, the first to loose the bonds of Earth’s gravity and orbit the moon, William Anders, the pilot of the lunar module and crew photographer, scrambles to put color film into his camera and snap the shot: a half-Earth rising over a desolate moonscape. It was the first time such contrasts
had ever been put on film. The brown-gray desert of the moon, the void-black of space, and hanging there within it, the blue-and-white marble of the Earth, our one and only.

  While utterly strange to human eyes, for 4.5 billion years, the earthrise has been a truly ordinary astronomical event. But this earthrise in particular and that image—it’s almost like it was sitting there, just waiting to be activated. To put us in our place. There’s a theory that Anders’s photograph helped spur the environmental movement. And indeed, the first Earth Day was just sixteen months later, though an awareness of the environment and humanity’s effect on it had been surging before that, with many crediting the explosive success of Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring.

  What’s amazing to me is that photography was something of an afterthought on the Apollo 8 mission. Anders was primarily a pilot. His job was to make sure the capsule was running properly. Once he proved it was, he was allowed to take pictures and run the video camera, piping in a live feed back to Earth. In one of these black-and-white videos, you can hear Commander Frank Borman provide a measure of the Earth’s brightness in lumens as well as commentary on crewmate Jim Lovell’s stubble, saying that Lovell was outpacing his crewmates in “the beard race.”

  The camera lingers on Lovell’s face. Ten seconds of silence pass, and then without warning or context, Lovell turns to the camera, smiles, and says “Happy birthday, Mother.” Then silence for another twenty seconds. It’s moments like these, the display of unmediated humanity within such a stark technical environment, that I find particularly affecting.

  There was no plan from anyone at NASA for the astronauts to take pictures of the Earth during the Apollo 8 mission. “NASA’s interest was focused on the mission … [photography] was just one more thing to divert the crew from actually completing the mission which was to go around the moon and get back alive,” Anders says in an interview for the New York Times short documentary called Earthrise.

  It was a chance view by Anders, about midway between the Earth and the moon, that inspired the first shot, a half-Earth, hanging like an upside-down bowl, just hanging there, alone.

  Borman said in an interview: “I never thought a bit about what it might mean to people on Earth. I only know what it felt like to me. What they should have sent was poets because I don’t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we’d seen.”

  Still, many of the archival images, videos, and observations from these early space missions strike me as poetic. There are artifacts in the videos that may seem amateurish yet embody a beautiful purity and innocence, like a blurred, overexposed video of a shaky Earth overlaid with mission-control audio instructing the camera to be held steady. This documentation necessarily points back to the creator of the work, highlighting the act of creation as well as the collaboration with mission control. A wholly new kind of looking is revealed in these videos, and the collaborations to me—who’s deciding where to look and how, and when and where those handoffs occur—are fascinating for what they say about autonomy and power and the systems that were established for a space mission to be accomplished. The experience is captured so exquisitely, without guile or affect, completely undiluted, that I can’t see it as anything other than poetry.

  There’s more: one astronaut’s observation, upon re-entry, that atmospheric friction creates flames outside the capsule window, that it’s like “flying through a neon tube.” And even videos and pictures taken by fixed cameras outside the rockets and capsules—often off-center or somewhat obscured, placed for engineering purposes but inadvertently producing images captivating to the eye—have their own poetry. For instance, a video made just before the landing of three red parachutes that deploy partially out of frame and against an electric-blue sky as the craft descends into the sun-dazzled north Pacific Ocean.

  None of these videos, images, or the astronauts’ observations seemed to have been made with sentimentality. All were captured either as a matter of engineering protocol, by happenstance, or by pure human impulse to record something wondrous. The circumstance itself transformed the astronauts into artists, who brought back a new kind of beauty and truth of our world for everyone else to see.

  Borman says the power of the TV camera took him by surprise. “I was wrong on things at times and I was terribly wrong on the television. I didn’t even want to take a television camera with us. That was stupid on my part. The television brought back the reality of what we were doing.”

  The earthrise photograph that became a trademark of the mission was presented everywhere the astronauts went on tour after their return, including Western Europe and the Soviet Union. “It gave people hope and transcended national boundaries,” Borman said. But he is quick to acknowledge the photograph’s limited power. “Of course,” he says, “everything got back to normal rapidly.”

  Over the span of the Apollo program, twenty-four astronauts in total experienced an earthrise. And these images are some of the most widely distributed of any in history. Many of us have seen these pictures, Earth suspended in the emptiness of space. But it’s easy to forget what it actually is we’re looking at, and some people might even refuse to take in its meaning in the first place.

  I wonder if the French philosopher Roland Barthes’s observations on photography might suggest at least one reason why the initial awe inspired by the earthrise image is hard to sustain. Barthes writes, “The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”

  To conceive of something as grand and otherworldly as the Earth as it actually is in the cosmos is in many ways a terrible burden. It upsets everything so many of us think we know about reality, revealing the grandness of it and in contrast, our smallness, our fragility and onliness. It’s a sublime experience to see that photograph, if you truly see it, awesome and terrifying. But awe and terror are not the emotions of most people’s lives, and in fact tend to impede day-to-day living. To allow an earthrise and all its encumbering associations to impose upon an individual and collective psyche is indeed a violence. It’s no surprise that some of us find it necessary, at least at some point, to turn away.

  * * *

  I knew a little boy once, he was six at the time, who, when he found out that I was interested in space and space exploration, perked up. I asked him if he wanted to be an astronaut or thought about going to space. He said he didn’t want to be an astronaut, but he did want to build rockets, he said, so he could make a lot of money.

  In February of 2018, SpaceX, the reusable rocket company that launches satellites into orbit, sent payloads of toiletries, fresh fruit, and scientific equipment to the International Space Station (and should soon send NASA astronauts there), affixed a convertible car to the upper stage of the debut launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket. The car was officially used as a dummy payload. But, unofficially, it was a blatant publicity stunt. The convertible was a Tesla Roadster, and in the driver’s seat was a mannequin decked out in a space suit. This “driverless” car is currently orbiting Earth. There’s a way to track its position online. It’s easy to find photos and videos of the car on the internet, sometimes with the Earth in the background, sometimes with a camera lens flare from the sun.

  Tesla, the electric car company, and SpaceX are both owned by Elon Musk, the wealthy entrepreneur who is one of the main advocates pushing Mars colonization. Musk says he dreams of one day dying on Mars, just, he hopes, not on impact. And he’s outlined vague plans to send millions of people to the Red Planet, making tickets cheap, if a six-figure ticket is cheap. To Musk, Mars is an insurance policy. Earth can’t sustain humanity forever, he says, just look at what happened to the dinosaurs. Right now, Musk and his dreams of Mars are the loudest space dreams most people, young and not-so-young, see and hear. What are the benefits and drawbacks of allowing a planet’s dreams of space to be guided by such a billionaire, one who is good at building rockets and has a knack for specta
cle, who caters to a public with an appetite for drama, served at the speed of the social-media news feed?

  Keeping up with online news and viewing our home planet from an outsider perspective are two very different sensations. Lovell, of Apollo 8 said, “I suddenly realized everything in life is relative. When you’re in a room the world revolves around those walls. When you’re outside then the world revolves around what your eye can see. And suddenly, when you’re in a spacecraft, you think in terms of oceans, of islands … you don’t realize what you have until you leave it.”

  I also had a similar sensation though I never left Earth, never actually risked my life going into space to orbit the moon. But I did feel it—the sense that I didn’t truly appreciate this planet until I couldn’t access it at will. It’s made me wonder. How can this sensation—a sensation that is perhaps the opposite of scrolling through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, a sensation that sits solidly at my core and assures me that we are all irrevocably connected to one another through and with this planet—be shared?

  Jim Lovell says: “I personally thought that everyone should have that view as we did, to see the Earth as it really is.” Yes, but not everyone can be an astronaut. Not everyone can self-sequester in a NASA test study. Not everyone can be a billionaire space tourist. Not everyone can spend $200,000 on a hypothetical SpaceX Mars ticket. So how can this feeling scale?

  For a moment it did, thanks to an unscheduled, amateur earthrise photograph. But I suspect, in contrast, that the Tesla-in-space pictures didn’t achieve it. There was no re-seeing Earth as it really was. How could there have been with such a self-conscious display of human ego eclipsing the view?