A full day without power. Gregorio and I took flashlights and went out early this morning to determine what had happened the night before when the third generator, Lil' Bro, went down. But neither of us know much about two-stroke engines. We tried everything we knew how to do in order to restart it. We pulled the starter cord over and over until our arms were sore. We opened the choke; we closed the choke. We fiddled with the throttle. Nothing. Like the other two that preceded it-the China Special and the back-up, Lil' Genny-Lil' Bro was dead.

With no means of communication, we were forced to drive into Hanksville to inform Don Foutz that Lil' Bro had died, and to communicate this new development with Mission Control. Three generators in less than twelve hours. If we accomplish nothing else during our mission, we will still go down in the annals of Mars analog exploration as perhaps the most cursed crew to ever rotate through MDRS. It's not entirely clear to me when our generator problems began to cascade from temporary nuisance to catastrophic systems failure, but a couple crewmembers are growing increasingly concerned, almost to the point of apoplexy, that they will not have enough time in simulation mode. To me, it's all interesting, simulation or no simulation.

Today I gave the crew their long-awaited navigation training. We began around 10:30 with a basic lecture on GPS, leaving out complicated issues such as radio signal propagation, map datums, coordinate systems, and so on. The night before I had ventured about two miles into the desert, plotting a route for the crewmembers to trace during the navigation exercise. GPS units in hand, we set out along the route. At first, the GPS software seemed to confuse them, which was understandable. But they caught on quicker than I expected. In fact, they blazed so quickly from point to point that they began to use the exercise as an opportunity to inspect the terrain and take pictures of rocks. I began to wonder if I hadn't made the exercise too easy. So I halted it and reconfigured the GPS units, forcing them to navigate from point to point instead of along a preset route. This slowed them down a little, forcing them, I hoped, to concentrate on navigation concepts. By 12:30, we reached the terminus of the route, at the edge of a dry lake bed. It was baking hot, and the crew was flagging in the heat. On the march back to the Hab some of us began to feel ill, despite the fact we carried plenty of water.

As night fell, we still had no power, but that didn't seem to matter anymore. We had grown used to it. Personally, I enjoyed standing on the deck outside the airlock door, feeling the clean night breeze that, for once, didn't carry the smell of diesel fumes and the ceaseless hammering of the China Special.