Tired? Me? Having taken on the responsibility of the morning generator refill, I found I had a really hard time sleeping, for fear that 6AM had arrived or because the sound of the generator had changed slightly. However, I found myself dreaming very intensely in short bursts, sometimes even when I didn't even feel fully asleep. I guessed I was starved for the REM state, even more than for physical rest.

Anyway, there we were on the simulated Mars outside of Hanksville Utah, late getting started but finally beginning to move forward. The terrain was pleasingly and rather surprisingly Marslike, with only the occasional tuft of grass to prove this really was Earth. Oh, sure, there was also the blue sky and the intense sunlight, but the human eye works on a logarithmic scale - a 10x reduction in actual illumination results in a perception of "half as bright." The sunlight at Mars is only 1/2 as bright as on Earth, but it would look like about 80% -- not much different at all. Standing on the daylit surface or looking out through a hab window, you would not see the kind of dim, cartoony, special-effecty Mars of TV and movies, but a very real landscape of dirt and rocks, hills and formations. Just like this, or nearly. On a moonless night, the illusion is even more convincing!

So if first impressions matter, this Mars was off to a good start. Our first view of the habitat was appropriately striking against the afternoon sky, and upon entering I amused myself by looking out the windows and telling myself there was no air out there. Not enough to breathe. In this lifeless landscape, it didn't require any great stretch of the imagination.

But it wasn't time to settle in. Handover of the facility from Crew 26 to Crew 27 was complicated by one of our crew coming down with a 24-hour illness, and by a host of transportation problems, so that half our crew ended up camping out on the cold habitat floor, while the old crew slept in their bunks and two of ours slept soundly in a hotel in Salt Lake City. But eventually we got the old crew safely back to the SLC airport and the rest of our crew safely down to the hab. One of the most interesting (and truthfully, intimidating) things about the handover was watching the old crew, not only in action but also at leisure. Not that there's too terribly much leisure here, and I don't want to imply that everyone got along with everyone else 100% of the time. We're all human beings. Still, there was a definite rapport there -- every person had a task and every task had a person, and it all seemed to flow very easily. After two weeks together they were laid back and very tired, not taking things too seriously, and yet getting an awful lot of work done. Something for us to aspire to.

Frustratingly, by Day 3 we were still doing training and setup. Testing radios in the morning and then, after organizational meetings and lunch, we messed around a bit with the spacesuits and ATVs -- not "in sim" (actually pretending to be on Mars) but just to familiarize ourselves. We also had a request from Mission Support to move our main diesel generator 10 feet, so it would sit behind a manmade rock wall instead of in front of it. There it would be quieter, and wouldn't spoil the view. Who could have guessed this would mushroom into a three-and-a-half hour task for six people?

As it turned out, the little rain shelter protecting the generator was anchored in solid rock. Working it loose, and then devising a new means to anchor it in the rock-hard soil on the other side, turned out to be a really involved, creative process. Under the hot Utah sun, in our t-shirts and ball caps, we didn't feel much like astronauts. That was the frustrating part. Still, we got the job done, and even spared half an hour before sunset to pretty up the platform with a welcome mat and some stapled-on plastic sheeting. And as we high-fived each other and photographed the completed job site, I felt like we were starting to build a bit of that same rapport we'd seen on Days 1 and 2.

And with internet access and a dinner of salmon and rice, we weren't exactly roughing it. So began our adventure on "Mars."