Third Pod From The Sun

If someone offered you the chance to drop everything, fly to Hawaii, and spend four months trapped in a dome with seven strangers in the name of science, would you do it? For writer Kate Greene, the answer to that question was a resounding “yes.” Greene was one of eight people selected to crew the very first HI-SEAS Mars analogue mission in 2013. In her recent book Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, she looked back on that time and what it taught her about the psychological challenges of long-haul space travel. For decades, NASA has been running simulations on Earth to prepare astronauts for their time in space. But the six HI-SEAS missions taking place between 2013 and 2018 represented a shift in thinking towards the logistics of journeying to the red planet. The very first mission focused on something we all spend a lot of time thinking about: food. Greene’s crew spent four months in a habitat on the side of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Volcano, tasked with chronicling their relationship to food over time to bette