Sometimes you have to backtrack in order to move forward. We had a great day here, but a few things got messed up that were basically a hundred percent my fault.

The previous crew had told us that the Hab's remote radio wasn't working, and our naive testing confirmed their finding. The problem was, there was a Remote Radio Control Panel which they didn't tell us about, because the crew before them didn't tell them. In fact, the panel was hidden under a pile of junk, and from looking at the radio installation itself and reading the Mission Support comments about it, I got the impression that several crews had gone out to inspect it this season, tweaking and modifying it in a semi-clueless effort to get it working, while the controls lay hidden in (nearly) plain sight.

But I had an inside edge; I knew the guys who designed the system, and they emailed me a document which explained its design and operation in considerable detail. But I didn't read it carefully enough, or didn't quite parse what I was reading, and as a result we may have cut down a perfectly operational radio this morning for "servicing" inside the hab. Sigh.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Breakfast was a time of high excitement on the morning of Day 5, because we were finally "on sim." As far as we were concerned, there was no air outside the hab, and stepping out the door would kill us. After a quick meal and an even quicker organizational meeting, we all went downstairs to try on our space suits.

There were six suits and six of us, so we had to find the best match between garment and wearer. Each suit had a numeral on it, and a velcro patch to slap your name tag, and a backpack and helmet with the same numeral. It turned out I was McCARTHY 6, or "EVA Six" in the radio jargon of simulated space missions. I was no longer quite the same person I'd been when I woke up; for the convenience of my crewmates I had been renamed.

The plan was for all of us to get outside, two at a time, and the first scheduled EVA was for Bill Foltyn and myself to hike up to the remote radio and ascertain what was wrong with it. So when everyone else had hung their suits back up, Bill and I were helped into our backpacks, outfitted with drinking tubes, boots and gloves, radios and sweat-absorbing headbands. Finally, our helmets were latched in place like pressure cooker lids.

Was it claustrophobic? Not really. The air in the helmet was a bit stuffy at first, but our handlers quickly attached the air hoses and turned the backpacks on, releasing a cool, fresh breeze directly into our faces. But the backpacks were heavy and the chest and waist straps confining, and the helmets did limit our peripheral vision, and within a few minutes we were closed up in the airlock, with the red DECOMPRESSION light glaring down. Twenty minutes to kill while our (simulated) pressure equalized with the (simulated) near-vacuum outside. That makes it worse.

Twenty minutes (actually, less than the official safe decompression time on the Space Shuttle and Space Station programs) is a long time to sit around, and until you've had a space helmet on you don't realize just how damned often you touch your face. Imagine reading this entire report without scratching or rubbing or stroking your face even once. Does the very thought make you itchy? Well let me assure you, in the sensory deprivation of a two-man airlock, with radio chatter discouraged and only our toolboxes to sit on, I felt itchier than I ever have before. With lots of time to experiment, I managed to identify several rough points on the inside of the helmet where I could rub various parts of my face. Not necessarily the parts that itched, but it was something. It helped. There were the air vents, the bite valve of the drinking tube, and especially the lip of raised plastic between the transparent dome and the latching collar beneath it. Ah. That lip was a lifesaver.

Fortunately, once we got outside and started doing stuff the itchiness quickly subsided. We exited the airlock and started climbing up the ridge behind the Hab, where our observatory and Martian flag were located. Right away, I figured out that the airflow into my helmet was constant, regardless of how hard I was working, so as the climb got steeper I began to feel short of breath.

"EVA 6 to EVA 2," I said to Bill over the radio. "Let's slow it down. The spirit is willing, but the flesh needs oxygen."

"Roger that," said Bill, and from the communications station inside the Hab, Alex (here "Hab Com") chimed in his agreement. This was a thing to be undertaken cautiously -- we weren't in any rush. Indeed, this was really an experience we should savor, and we did. The views were staggering enough that we had to keep stopping for pictures -- a paractice which ended only when my camera declared itself full. Too, the experience of being EVA, being Outside, being fully immersed in the alien environment of the simulation... Well, it was more intense than I was expecting. It felt easier and less dangerous than a deep scuba dive, but there was nothing make-believe about it. We really were on a steep hike in the middle of nowhere with heavy loads to carry, with our bodies locked into potentially suffocating suits that we couldn't hope to escape from without help. It was thrilling, it was fun, it was serious business. The fact that this wasn't Mars seemed beside the point.

From the observatory, we followed the ridge line up and up, to the steep promontory where the Remote Radio was mounted. It took us about twenty minutes to get there and another twenty to complete our inspection. The most difficult part being an annotated sketch of the several-times-modified wiring harness running up from the Hab and into the radio itself. This was also where I found out just how hard it can be to retrieve a Fischer Space Pen from the bottom of a toolbox with space suit gloves on -- a task which consumed two minutes all by itself. Never doubt it: astronauts are immensely patient people.

Anyway, long story short, we verified there was no power in the wires, so we cut the radio down and threw it in one of the tool boxes, then hiked back down the hill. Recompression was way more boring than decompression, and once we got inside we geared down and went upstairs for lunch, still unaware of our error. Tomorrow we'll go back up there and undo the damage. To be fair, this sort of hasty refit is realistic for any remote outpost, and so are the communication problems. When your only link to the outside world is via satellite, it's hard to get the whole story.

Still, the trip wasn't a total bust. While we were up on the promontory we had spotted an anomalous reflection at the base of a nearby butte, named 4679T on our map, or "Phobos Peak" in the annotations of some previous crew. So after our maintenance debacle, we helped Peter and Julie, our British colleagues, suit up for a hike out there to see what this shiny object might be. It took them half an hour to get out there and half an hour to get back, and once we'd gotten them out of their suits they showed us the pictures they'd taken, of a large sheet of corrugated plastic which apparently blew away during the construction of the GreenHab. Mystery solved. And you have to hand it to Pete and Julie, for completing their first-ever solo hike in a genuine wilderness.

Alex and Jim went out after that, on a "non-recyclable materials transport" (i.e., putting our trash in a remote Dumpster several miles away), and after that it was dinner and dishes and email and reports. At least to this extent we're exactly like real astronauts: fun and games are a tiny fraction of what we actually do out here.