NASA’s most ambitious mission is a rare area where Washington, despite its ever-growing partisanship, still finds common ground in a vision for the future: Mars. Mars is an expensive, dangerous and scientifically controversial destination for humans, but both political parties have it in their sights. President Joe Biden has backed the Artemis program to land the next man and the first woman on the moon in the next few years — and NASA sees that as a stepping stone for sending astronauts to the Red Planet as soon as the 2030s. The 2024 Republican platform has its own special spot for Mars, an item about “expanding Freedom, Prosperity, and Safety in Space” by sending Americans "back to the Moon, and onward to Mars." It’s also the highest priority space destination for former President Donald Trump, who once said, “We’ve done the moon. That's not so exciting. So we'll be doing the moon. But we'll really be doing Mars.” Mars has consistently been a unifying motivation in Congress, in part to help NASA’s bottom line. Even this year — as congressional appropriators look to trim agency budgets — NASA fared better than most, getting its requested amount for deep space endeavors like the Artemis program, and more than that for another initiative to return rare samples of Mars to Earth. For now, the challenges of getting to Mars and keeping astronauts alive for the trip — let alone colonizing it, like Space X CEO and Trump donor Elon Musk has in mind — make the goal still as high-risk as it is high-reward. So… what would life actually be like on Mars? What are we spending all that money to achieve? There’s federally funded research underway to answer that question — and the results offer another way to appreciate what’s at stake, and the extent (and limits) of knowledge on the subject. This month, four volunteers emerged from a 1,700-square-foot, 3D-printed isolated habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston — marking the end of a yearlong simulation of a Martian stay. DFD spoke with Ross Brockwell, the crew’s flight engineer, who spent the last year in limited communication with the outside world, designing parts in a resource-restricted environment, eating self-grown space food and carrying out missions including hours of virtual reality-assisted Marswalks on red sand. He explained the limitations of recreating a hostile planet in Texas, the technical issues astronauts would face before establishing a habitat and the daily cadence expected from a crew on Mars. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why did you volunteer for this experience? I’m very interested in the Mars goal. I think it's hugely important and inspirational. Sometimes it gets debated whether it's realistic or whether it's necessary. And I think it is. So I wanted to try to help with that. How did actually living and performing tasks in that space match up with the expectations you had before the year? Certain things you can't simulate, like the difference in gravity, of course. But the 3-D printed habitat was really neat. That's a potentially viable technology for living on Mars, so it was neat to get to live in that for a year, and they did a really fantastic job of making some of the mission-specific tasks as realistic as possible. We didn't have the difference in atmosphere. We actually weren't in a sealed pressure differential environment. If we had a breach in the habitat, we weren't exposed to the Martian atmosphere …I really personally wish there was a way to simulate the gravity. That would be a very different experience. What were your days like? There’s balance. There was a couple different kind of main categories that occupied our day, so the science part and the exercise part, and food preparation and hygiene, habitat maintenance. Days where we had trips outside would change the baseline schedule. Sometimes, it was pretty regular, but it changed a lot as well. Did the experience change your personal conception of the future? It's really interesting to think about the timeframe that's necessary and the staging that's necessary, all the resource limitations and how you would address that, what you would send first and what you could make while you were there. Could you walk through what some of those early considerations would be? You'd have to think about what to send first. You'd have caches of supplies you would have to send, and building materials is a big question. That was part of what goes into the 3D printed habitat technology. You could potentially use some of the material you would find there as building material. The mass limitation of what you can send on rockets to Mars is a limiting factor, so finding the right balance of what to send versus what to use when you’re there is a big part of that. So figuring out how to build the first base would be, of course, early in it. And then what infrastructure you would need for power, water, atmosphere — all of those things are huge technical challenges. The technical challenge of just getting there from an engineering standpoint is an enormous challenge, of course, but one we're ready for and one we're getting ready to initiate. What is it about Mars that seems to excite people across politics and party? It's inspirational. It can unify humanity, and I think everyone can sense that, and we can feel how important it is. It's a good example of how nations are important, but obviously the global population and humanity as a whole is important, and so we can work together across all those lines. The concept of going to another world helps to unite. What has surprised you most in the year you missed on earth? AI is a big one. I actually had friends that had mentioned that I would probably notice the progress that had been made. It was a big topic a year ago, and it advances so quickly. I'm anxious to see where it is in everyday life and what aspects have gone noticeably further in the last 13 months. Our communication with the outside was all through email. We had communication with mission control through our software system, but it's all on a delay. So it was up to 22 minutes on a delay to simulate a real delay you would have with the Mars mission. I'm looking forward to it. The last few days have been a lot of post-mission stuff, so we're still kind of in the thick of it. So when it settles down, I'll start to see more. | 
