Tag: Mars

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A Familiar Space

Don’t look now, but NASA is looking for people who can live away from human contact for an entire year.

Gee, I wonder who could possibly qualify?

OK, yes, they’re looking for potential space crew here – specifically, people who are ready to set up shop in a mock Martian habitat at Johnson Space Center. But once you peel away the specific (and strenuous) science and engineering requirements, the needs sound curiously familiar to anyone who faced down calendar year 2020.

Spending months on end with the same handful of faces? Check.

Working with limited resource availability and sudden unexpected emergencies? Check.

Planning for regular walks outside the home – pardon me, the habitat – and a whole lot of Netflix consumption to fill time after work? Check and Check.

Really, all that’s missing is a Zoom elementary school and regular Amazon deliveries and it’d feel just like home.

I know, it’s a serious study, not reality TV. They’re not just going to grab some Joe Average off the street, no matter how good a simulation of the Red Planet might sound in comparison to delta variants, wildfires and the latest breaking news stories about “The View.” NASA wants some lessons it can build on, and I hope it gets them.

Nonetheless, it’s one heck of a reminder. We really have been living on another planet lately, haven’t we?

We’ve learned more than we ever wanted to know about isolation and its effect on the human psyche, an aspect of human psychology that was once mainly of use to submariners, astronauts and the crew of the USS Minnow.

We’ve had to be as alert as any astronaut about making safety and security a part of the daily routine. We learned how far away six feet really is in the grocery store, how long 20 seconds is at the bathroom sink, and just how many masks one wardrobe can hold.

And yes, we’ve been as tethered to electronic communication as any space traveler dreamed, with just a few differences in content. (“Hulu, we have a problem.”)

But in among it all, there’s one huge difference. (OK, there’s a lot of huge differences, but work with me on this.) There’s one shift in perspective that makes this particular ride one of the most challenging of them all.

Space colonists in training know when their mission ends.

Astronauts know their expected return date.

But in our case? That’s in our own hands. Ours, and our neighbors, and a lot of strangers we’ve never met.

That’s daunting.

It’s a little like those group projects we all endured in school. You can work like crazy to do everything right, but if someone on the team doesn’t take it seriously, it makes it that much harder for everyone else.

That doesn’t mean “give up.” Far from it. It does mean that even in these days of semi-demi-hemi-normality, we have to keep doing the work to make things better and encourage others to do the same. Getting the shots. Staying alert and taking precautions where we need to. Learning from what we’ve gone through and then applying the lessons, as surely as any experimental NASA team.

Because the last thing any of us wants to do is keep cycling through the 2020s hamster wheel.

Pandemics take time to resolve. They always have. And if we keep our eyes on where we’re going and how we get there, we can find our way through.

That would be out of this world.

Even by Johnson Space Center’s standards.

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Space to Dream

In the midst of a cold and frozen week, a text from Heather sent me out of this world: “perseverance touched down on Mars ok.”

Over the next several minutes, I couldn’t have missed it if I wanted to. Images. News stories. Cartoons. And of course, posts up and down social media, all celebrating the same thing: The Perseverance rover had made a perfect landing on Mars and was already sharing its surroundings with one and all.

A big geeky smile spread across my face. For a moment, the impossibilities of the world didn’t seem to matter.

For just a moment, we were on higher ground.

My friends know that I’ve been a space geek for a long time. In grade school, I devoured books about the solar system and spacecraft, and then watched the moon eagerly with Dad through a Christmas-gift telescope. As I grew up, my heart was broken by Challenger, amazed by comet Hale-Bopp, and utterly overwhelmed by the images from Hubble. Even now, the Great Beyond has never lost its magic and wonder for me, from midday eclipses to fiery black holes.

And every now and then, I’m brought up short when someone says “So what?”

Mind you, it’s a seductive thing to say. After all, here we are, fenced in our homes, waiting for a vaccine to set us free – maybe. Here we are, in the depths of a bitter winter, watching much of Texas go dark in the world. It’s easy to be pulled “down to Earth,” easy to say “Don’t we have more important things to worry about?”

And yet.

For me, there’s always an “And yet.” It goes beyond the obvious, like the spin-off technologies from the space program that make life better on Earth. (Like say, those weather satellites that enable us to prepare for freezes like this.) It even goes beyond the notion that space and Earth are not an either-or, that attending to one does not automatically mean neglecting the other.

For me, it goes down to something deeper. More aspirational.

Moments like this prove that we’re capable of better.

They show that we can look beyond ourselves and our immediate needs to something grander.

They show that our perspective doesn’t have to be limited to our own doorstep.

They show that we can still ignite imagination, reach out with learning, and achieve wonders that once would have seemed impossible.

Most of all, moments like this show that we can hope. That we can dream. That we don’t have to be locked into a perpetual cycle of despair.

Looked at from that angle, the question isn’t “If we can land a vehicle on Mars, why can’t we keep Texas warm?” It instead becomes “If we can land a vehicle on Mars, what else could we possibly do?”

There are real and serious needs here on Earth. Despair won’t beat any of them. But if we face them with diligence, wonder, creativity and hope, we just may find a way forward.

We’re in a time now where even much of our science fiction – a language of dreams – is tied down in dystopic visions of grim survival. If we look out rather than burrow in, if we dare to give our dreams a chance, who knows what we might prove capable of?

Let’s set our hopes high. As high as the stars. And then labor to make them real.

After all, we’ve seen how that can put a world of possibilities in reach.

All it takes is a little Perseverance.

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Touching Opportunity

This week, a lot of people have taken a chance – an Opportunity, if you will – to look to the heavens and thank the little robot that could.

The story’s well-known by now. How the planned mission of the Mars rover Opportunity was for 90 days. How, like other rovers before it, it kept going long past its expiration date – by more than 14 years, in fact.

And now, like other rovers before it, it’s gone silent. Nothing had been heard from it since last June, when a Martian dust storm covered its solar cells. After hoping that another wind would clear the rover and allow it to recharge, NASA finally declared Opportunity “dead.”

“The last message they received was basically ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark,’” science writer Jacob Margolis tweeted. The words were Margolis’s poetic interpretation of the June signal, not a literal sentence from Opportunity. But the “last words” added an extra touch of heartbreak to the moment, turning it from the shutdown of a machine to the silencing of a beloved explorer.

Does that sound silly? I don’t see why.

Caring for things is what we do. Even when they can’t care back.

We read books or watch movies and anguish over the fate of people who never existed, except in our minds.

We name cars and say goodbye to childhood homes, so interwoven with our lives that we can’t imagine their absence.

We become part of a story. We invest a little, or a lot, of ourselves in it. And when a good story ends, it touches us. It leaves us a little different for the experience.

But with a good story, there’s always one chapter left, even after the volume is closed. The one that we write.

Having taken this story into our hearts, what do we do with it?

That, too, may sound a little odd. Most of us, after the age of six, don’t try to don a cape and cowl and fight evil on the streets after watching a superhero movie. One does not simply walk into Mordor after reading or viewing The Lord of the Rings, or search crowds for Rhett Butler after completing Gone With The Wind, or build up a high-tech loadout after reading Tom Clancy. (OK, there may be some exceptions on that last one.)

But we do take Lessons. Inspiration. Examples. Even hope. The stories we invest in, the people and experiences we treasure, all teach us something. And maybe even inspire us to a next step.

It might be the simple reassurance that, even if they can’t fly or shoot energy beams, heroes may already be among us, looking just like you and me – could maybe even be you and me.

It may be the reminder that fighting evil is a hard and grueling task, but that even small actions can add up to huge differences, even without the aid of a magic ring or an Elvish sword.

It can even be the lesson, taught by a machine of our own making, that we can be capable of so much more than we believe. That we can keep going beyond everyone’s expectations, even our own.

Maybe even far enough to one day thank Opportunity in person.

The skies don’t have to be the limit. The story can go where we choose to take it, both inside us and beyond us. That’s inspiring to me as a writer, as a space geek, and even as a human being.

Care. Follow where it takes you. Write the next story.

After all, Opportunity is where we choose to find it.