posted 01-08-2020 06:47 PM               

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars is an essay collection, inspired by the author's four-month stay inside a simulated Martian habitat.

In 2013, Kate Greene was selected as a crew member for NASA's newest Mars analog ― a project called HI-SEAS. Its home base is a dome on the Hawai'ian volcano of Mauna Loa, situated at 8,000 feet above sea level. The mission's main goal was to test food systems for a three-year journey, but there were other studies too: Assessing anti-microbial clothing, sleep patterns, the way isolation affects stress, health, and social interactions. Kate and her fellow "astronauts" lived and breathed these and other research studies for four months of isolation.

The essays in Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars are shaped by Kate's relationships with the scientists who created HI-SEAS, her crewmates, her family, and friends back home. It's informed by personal reflection as well as by literature, film, music, history, philosophy, and scientific research. It is buttressed by reportage beyond Mars, conversations with countless subject-matter experts as well as actual astronauts.

• Hardcover: 240 pages
  
• St. Martin's Press (July 14, 2020)
  
• ISBN-10: 1250159474
  
• ISBN-13: 978-1250159472

posted 07-25-2020 09:24 PM               

It was the crew's first night, we had just arrived, we were settling in. Kim Binsted, principle investigator on the HI-SEAS project, was preparing to leave for four months, nervous, I think, about launching this Mars mission, a project whose actualization was so uncertain throughout the buildup — NASA nearly pulled funding, there were delays in the construction of the habitat — that at times it almost seemed if any of us were to look down, we'd collectively run ourselves off the edge of a steep cliff. And yet here we were. In the shipping container attached to the dome, she and I stood surrounded by four months of shelf-stable food, hand tools, and mountains of toilet paper and paper towels. In the shipping container, I followed her gaze to an ax leaning against the wall. And then I heard her say, "Maybe I should take this with me."