Missions End

I would have expected our last day to be a bit maudlin, but in fact it was the most relaxing day we've had, and truthfully the most fun. Bill, Jim, Pete and I enjoyed a liesurely morning of chitchat around the breakfast table, and with Alex and Julie out on an ATV ride that was both early and long, we felt free to let the humor turn a bit toward the bawdy side. I didn't realise I'd been holding that in, but although Julie is a "one of the guys" kind of gal, she's also 19 years old, and marooned in the wilderness with five older men. And if communal living has taught us anything, it's to worry more about each other's feelings than about our own. Always err on the side of diplomacy.

Anyway, our latest round of radio testing (which included prying loose a connector with a screwdriver blade) had damaged the Remote Radio, so I spent an hour fixing it again, and then Bill and I made a final EVA up the hill to put it in place, and test it in the send-voice-receive-static configuration we'll be handing off to Crew 28. (Hey, it's better than nothing, which is what we inherited.) That done, we saddled up the ATVs, which Alex and Julie had returned by then, and rode up onto Radio Ridge and followed the Blue Hills all the way to the base of Skyline Rim. By the direct route it's a surprisingly short journey, but the cliffs tower impressively over the flat bench of Mid-Ridge Planitia, and the ground beneath them is impressively littered with house-sized boulders that have fractured off over the millennia. You get a definite (if irrational) sense of not wanting to stand too close.

And as we climbed back into the airlock for decompression, the circle of our mission was closed; nine days ago Bill and I had done the first EVA for Crew 27, and today, as it turned out, we were finishing up the last. When we got inside and put our suits away, Commander Alex declared our research, repair, and exploration duties complete. From there on out it was all paperwork and handover operations. This involved cleaning, organization, the emptying of trash cans and deodorizing of space suits...

And then even that was done, and we were finalizing the written procedures we'd created, and typing up our final mission reports, findings, problems and recommendations. There were a lot of these -- we'd been a conscientious crew, intent on leaving things better than we found them. And when THAT was done, there was nothing left to do but walk out into the open air -- feeling the alien sensation of wind on our faces outside the "pressurized tunnel" for the first time in almost two weeks. We were standing right out there in front of the airlock! Without helmets! Seeing the actual landscape with our own two eyes! So we set the timer on a tripod-mounted camera and posed for some group pictures. Then we sent Jim and Pete and Julie into Hanksville for some beer. We had a lot to celebrate.

After ten long days we were finally out of sim, back in the Utah everyone else knows, with oxygen and convenience stores and whatnot. But in a way this was one of the most vivid and realistic moments of the entire simulation, because real space missions end, too. Shuttles de-orbit, space station crews rotate out, crew return vehicles blast off from some desolate surface and head at last toward the warm lights of home. It's a happy moment, mostly.

Was it exactly like Mars? No. We experienced a few days of heavy rain and mud, and a few more of anomalous heat, neither of which we'd encounter on Mars. We also enjoyed a minor infestation of desert mice, and a diet with improbable amounts of fresh produce and bottled juice. There was also the pressurized tunnel itself, which gave us all the chance to breathe fresh air, or diesel-smoggy air during the actual act of refueling the generator. And there's another unrealism, because on Mars we'd have either a large solar array or a small nuclear reactor, and neither one would have to be serviced three times a day.

And yet...

We did grapple with space suits and airlocks, radio problems and hard-driving astronaut schedules. We'd explored an alien wilderness and reported back meaningful discoveries (like the "blueberry fields" Bill found which closely resemble the ones recently photographed by the Opportunity rover). We'd been studied by psychologists and human factors researchers. We'd been driven inside by dust storms and dry lightning, and we'd successfully developed procedures for splicing teeny, tiny wires in a big, stiff space suit glove.

Even a video game can yield a sense of accomplishment, of new problems faced and defeated, new vistas explored. And this experience has been far, far more immersive than any game. Because it isn't fake: we really are here on a Mission to Utah, and we've done our jobs well. When a real Mars mission does finally take place, I'd like to think that most or all of the astronauts chosen for it will be, in one way or another, graduates of these Mars Society programs. And if one or more members of MDRS Crew 27 should be included, why, so much the better.