tamaranth | 2026/020: Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

2026/020: Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars — Kate Greene

What if a mission to Mars didn’t have as its main goal a barrage of scientific studies, or the demonstration that humans can build ships to send us to faraway lands and keep us alive in the harshest environments? What if it’s not driven by the fear of our eventual extinction or by opportunities afforded it by current economic systems—mining for resources, etc. Or what if it is those things, but also, in its design, it contains questions about what it means to be a human being alive and alone and unable to achieve contact with others in this universe? [p. 131]

In 2013, Kate Greene spent four months as second-in-command of the Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission, which was designed to simulate life on Mars. The six crew members lived in cramped quarters, with artificial communication delays, pre-packaged food, constant surveys for one another's experiments, and compulsory spacesuits for excursions beyond the habitat. The essays that comprise Once Upon a Time I Lived On Mars -- subtitled 'Space, Exploration and Life on Earth' -- are all rooted in Greene's HI-SEAS experience: but that's a launchpad to discuss climate change, the breakup of her marriage, the history of space flight, and the thorny questions of whether humans should go to Mars, and who gets to decide.

In some ways this book, published in 2020, feels very dated. There's such a sense of hope for the various planned Mars missions (some of which were cancelled or postponed due to Covid) and for the possibilities offered by spaceflight. Reading in 2026, after Trump's cuts to the NASA budget and the damage to Russia's only launch facility at Baikonur, it feels like a lost future. And though Greene has major reservations about Elon Musk's role as cheerleader for the space programme, the book was clearly written before his more egregious exploits.

Yet there is a great deal of interest here. Greene is a science journalist, and her background shows in areas such as the assessment of whether all-male crews are the best option. (They're not: small women use half as many resources as large men, according to former NASA researcher Alan Drysdale.) I also learnt that Neil Armstrong's spacesuit was designed by Playtex, that Jeff Bezos 'dumps roughly $1 billion of his Amazon stocks into Blue Origin to keep the company in cash' [p. 175] and that, four billion years ago, the Moon was only 20,000 miles from Earth.

Often lyrical, often hopeful, but more about life on Earth than life on Mars.

I wonder about the arguments against going to Mars that claim we need to first focus on fixing problems here at home. Might going to Mars be a way to help us see our planet and ourselves anew? Couldn’t a human expedition to Mars be good for those on Earth too? Though, as with many things, it could very well depend on who does the going. [p. 162]