Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars
Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When it comes to Mars, the focus is often on how to get there: the rockets, the engines, the fuel. But upon arrival, what will it actually be like?
In 2013, Kate Greene moved to Mars. That is, along with five fellow crew members, she embarked on NASA’s first HI-SEAS mission, a simulated Martian environment located on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawai'i. For four months she lived, worked, and slept in an isolated geodesic dome, conducting a sleep study on her crew mates and gaining incredible insight into human behavior in tight quarters, as well as the nature of boredom, dreams, and isolation that arise amidst the promise of scientific progress and glory.
In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Greene draws on her experience to contemplate humanity’s broader impulse to explore. The result is a twined story of space and life, of the standard, able-bodied astronaut and Greene’s brother’s disability, of the lag time of interplanetary correspondences and the challenges of a long-distance marriage, of freeze-dried egg powder and fresh pineapple, of departure and return.
By asking what kind of wisdom humanity might take to Mars and elsewhere in the Universe, Greene has written a remarkable, wide-ranging examination of our time in space right now, as a pre-Mars species, poised on the edge, readying for launch.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and science journalist Greene writes of isolation, deprivation, and boredom in this enlightening account of her sojourn in a habitat mimicking the conditions of a future Mars mission. A dozen essays cover her four-month stay in a geodesic dome, where, as she describes in the introduction, she was sequestered in a dome "with five other not really astronauts" on Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano as part of a NASA-funded research project on "space food systems for Mars and... the food's impact on crew psychology." Greene reports the study participants "lived and breathed survey questions for four months.... No sunshine on our skin, no fresh air in our lungs." In "The Standard Astronaut," a systems analyst determined that "a crew of smaller astronauts would launch for half the payload cost" due to lesser weight and food requirements, concluding, "The logical thing... is to fly small women." In "Guinea-Pigging," Greene contrasts her own agency and project transparency with the abuse of the hundreds of black men with untreated syphilis in the Tuskegee Study. Tidbits on space travel and how outer space expands Greene's inner self are filled with wonderment and awe. By project's end, the unexpected outcome for Greene is gratitude: "though I never left Earth... I didn't truly appreciate this planet until I couldn't access it at will." Greene's eloquent memoir is equal parts escape and comfort.
