6 Hours in a Space Suit

Ladders are a fixture of the modern home, but only when we need to get up to the attic or the roof. Most of the time, we stow them away out of sight. But here in the hab, the only link between the upper and lower floors is a kind of staircas-ey, laddery thing like you'd see on a navy ship. Going up it is straightforward -- literally: you simply face front and start climbing on the balls of your feet, but coming down the stairs are just too narrow. To keep your balance you need to use a kind of sideways step-step step-step, keeping a firm hand on the railing. If your hands are full, you put something down and make two trips, because it's a fall of ten feet and the rungs have sharp corners. One member of Crew 26 took that tumble, and a week later she was still downing ibuprofen for an aching wrist and tailbone. And she was lucky; she could have broken something.

But part of getting used to a place is getting used to its dangers. You never lose your respect for the ladder and the damage it can do, but after a while you lose your fear. You start going up and down in flip flops, while toweling your hair, while thinking about EVAs and psych reports. You start using the space around the hole in the floor as a mini office and laboratory. You stop noticing it at all, except in the vague, back-of-the-mind way you notice the walls and floor. The skills for coping with it have migrated into the unconscious parts of your brain, and require no further attention.

In a very similar way, I found myself getting really, really comfortable climbing mountains in a space suit. Or one particular mountain, anyway, where I completed my sixth climb today to reinstall the Hab Remote Radio, with Bill and Julie assisting. Practice makes perfect, right? Even (or perhaps especially) with tractionless space boots and a heavy tool box and an imperfectly defogged helmet dripping condensation in the desert's morning chill. It also helps to be in a good mood; the radio had checked out on the bench, we knew the cable had no breaks in it, and we'd assembled a fairly sturdy structure to protect it all. We were full of hope.

Unfortunately, up on the hill it still didn't work. Or rather, it got decent power and was able to transmit when the TALK switch in the hab was engaged. And the repeater, which last week we were convinced wasn't working, picked up and repeated every message. Hurrah! Unfortunately, the earphone at the Remote Radio console was not receiving good sound. When a transmission came in, Alex (who was playing HabCom at the time) could faintly hear the "roger beeps", but the voices were coming through as clicks and pops, not even remotely intelligible. An earphone is inherently a low-power device, and apparently the resistive losses in a thousand feet of weatherbeaten cable were enough to brown it out.

The good news was that with the radio and cable in known-to-work condition, this might just be a problem we could resolve from inside. Shortly before dinner I managed to get rid of an annoying 120-Hz hum in the transmit line, which at least proved that indoor fiddling of this sort could be productive. Or keep me out of trouble, anyway.

But I digress. The main feature of the day's narrative is the marathon EVA I did with Bill Foltyn, to address Mission Support's request that we examine and photograph the R2 repeater on Skyline Rim. We could have visited the site out of sim, or we could have taken the "pressurized rover" (also known as a pickup truck) and suited up when we got there. But the truck was a real hoopty (for fun, you can look this word up on wordwizard.com/slangstreet), whereas the two surviving ATVs were in good condition, and anyway we figured it would be cool to make the whole trip in our suits.

And it was.

Part of the journey carried us out onto the shoulder of State Highway 24, where we must have made a strange sight for the six or so cars that passed us. But we had already surprised a couple of ATV riders near the hab, in that delightful (if accidental) way the Society for Creative Anachronism calls "freaking the mundanes." And I have to say, if riding an ATV is cool and riding one in a space suit is REALLY cool, then riding in a space suit on a public highway is downright surreal. Mad Max meets The Andromeda Strain. It doesn't feel normal at all. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn't a B movie.

But we got there, accomplished our mission, and got back. The view from the Rim is staggering: a 250-meter drop to the flat expanse of Mid Ridge Planitia, with the red Harris Hills -- the area immediately around the Hab -- rising low in the distance, like gopher mounds. And beyond that is some lower, redder country, and to the west of Skyline Rim, after five kilometers of flat bedrock known as Factory Bench, rise the Blue Hills, and behind them the 460-meter sandstone towers of Factory Butte and Caineville Mesa. The landscape is essentially a westward rising staircase, fifty kilometers long and more than half a kilometer high. It's one thing to see it all on a map, and quite another to see it all, period.

But it was a long day. We put the space suits on at 9:30 AM, and didn't take them off again until 3:30 in the afternoon. Six hours of sweat, of pulling/pinching backpack straps, of duct-taped gloves that were literally designed to cause astronaut-like hand fatigue. By the end of the trip we were knotted up like the rubber drive band of a balsa wood airplane, and I had a serious case of "throttle thumb" and "radio ear," and was saddlesore besides. Remarkably, according to the map and GPS, and including a couple of wrong turns and sightseeing (er, scientific exporation) detours, we covered a total of 70 kilometers. Could this be an MDRS record?

When we finally got home and desuited, the rest of the crew were all very concerned that we'd missed lunch and must be hungry. We were, sort of, but my personal heirarchy of complaints ran: shoulders, ears, hands, lower back, bladder, email, and THEN hunger. But Peter very nicely made sandwiches for us, and they did pretty much disappear in four bites.

Although this was "just" a simulation, I felt a real sense of accomplishment at this outing, because for real astronauts in the Shuttle and Station programs, six hours is the maximum EVA time, and they don't have gravity or rough terrain to contend with! In fact, the longest EVA on record is 8 hours and 29 minutes, so for fake astronauts we weren't doing too badly out here. Even if our psych evals made us look like monkeys.

Also, Pete and Jim took a long, meandering ride in the morning while Bill and Julie and I were up at the Rockpile with the Remote Radio, and after we got back from it Julie went out again with Alex for a ride to the extreme northern end of our contour map, to the water-rich site called Eden, where Crew 26's illegal terraforming experiment (the planting of radish seeds) took place. Alex took pictures and samples from the area, which is notable for its several distinct colors of mud. So everyone got outside today, and for the first time in her fake-astronaut career Julie Swardlow, our 19-year-old student from the south of England, went out twice. So it was a full, fun, productive day for all of us.

I'd like to say we celebrated and then went to bed early, but Mars exploration (real or simulated) is a job that begins shortly before 6AM and ends shortly (or sometimes not so shortly) after 10PM. With 3 hours off for meals and perhaps an hour of personal time distributed throughout the day, that's still twelve hours of continuous and often back-breaking (or cold, or smelly) labor. We wouldn't trade this experience for the world, but it does get tiring. Now if you'll excuse me, the main generator is browning out and requires attention. In the rain.