MAUNA LOA, HAWAII » For about 15 minutes Saturday, 1980s rock anthem "The Final Countdown" blared on loop across this jagged, desolate landscape, piercing the usual quiet.
It was the kind of musical repetition that would drive a normal person crazy — but not the group of six aspiring astronauts who’ve spent the past eight months atop Mauna Loa, sealed off in a crowded dome tent while pretending that the rocky surface outside is Mars.
The group — the latest team of test subjects with the NASA-funded Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project — played the tune over and over while eagerly counting down to freedom outside of their dome bubble, where they had been isolated all that time from the rest of humanity.
When they finally emerged Saturday, the sky looked clearer, the air felt crisper, the food was fresh — and they had made history conducting the longest-running space simulation to date in the U.S.
"When we first walked out the door we were like, ‘Wait, is the air OK?’" crew member Jocelyn Dunn said Saturday as she enjoyed her first breakfast in ages to include fresh fruit. Any time a HI-SEAS crewmember ventures outside on assignment or to explore, they have to wear either a mock space suit or a hazmat suit.
"We’ve spent so much time pretending," Dunn said.
Dunn and her fellow crewmembers represented HI-SEAS’ third Mars group to wrap at Mauna Loa since the University of Hawaii-led project launched in 2013. It’s part of a worldwide push to better study how crews might better get along during a lengthy, dangerous and high-stakes voyage to the Red Planet.
More than 700 people originally applied to participate in HI-SEAS back in 2013 but only a fraction of them qualified, said Kim Binsted, a UH professor and HI-SEAS’ principal investigator.
Binsted and her HI-SEAS colleagues look to accomplish the exact opposite of what most television reality-show producers aim to do.
Instead of wrangling together roommates that will create the most drama possible, the Mars researchers instead seek a team that will create the least. They want to pinpoint the personalities that will best resolve the conflicts that would be inevitable during a difficult, stressful multi-year journey across space.
For Binsted, the best crew members not only have the expertise for a Mars mission, but also a "thick skin, a long fuse and an optimistic outlook."
It’s not unlike crews needed to survive the risky long-distance canoe voyages across vast ocean distances that the ancient Polynesians once took. Indeed, those sailors’ modern-day successors, such as those with the Polynesian Voyaging Society, carefully select crew members who aren’t just skilled sailors but also positive, upbeat and supportive.
"How are you going to select a crew so that they have the skill sets you need but also are going to get along well on these long durations?" Binsted said Saturday. "They’re the same problems that humanity has faced in exploration all the way through, but particularly in Polynesian voyaging."
PVS President Nainoa Thompson often describes Polynesian voyaging canoes as "the spaceship of our ancestors." The "HI-SEAS" acronym was picked with Hawaii’s Polynesian seafaring heritage in mind, Binstead said.
Just because a scientific pursuit shares a link to Hawaii’s past doesn’t mean the full community will embrace that pursuit, as the recent demonstrations against Mauna Kea’s observatories, and their impacts on the environment and culturally sensitive sites, have shown.
However, Hawaii’s Mars science expeditions, located about two-thirds of the way up Mauna Loa, haven’t faced any of the resistance seen atop Mauna Kea, Binsted said. She said that’s because HI-SEAS "worked very hard to stay on the right side of things."
The 36-foot diameter, 1,000 square-foot dome habitat rests on a defunct quarry. Project officials draped the dome with a camouflage cover to reduce its visual impact against the mountain’s natural charcoal grays, chocolate browns and smoldering oranges. When the project eventually ends, it can be packed up to leave the site as the researchers found it, Binsted said.
A fourth crew will enter the Mauna Loa dome in August. They’re slated to spend a full year and break the new U.S. record set Saturday. A $1.2 million grant from NASA has helped cover most of the Mars studies there — and officials say they’ve just secured an additional three years’ worth of funding for more habitat studies after the one that starts in August.
Other Mars simulations not connected to HI-SEAS are occurring in rocky and remote sites across the world, including in Utah, Arizona, Canada and Antarctica.
The longest simulation, dubbed "Mars 500," took place several years ago in Moscow and lasted 520 days, officials say. Researchers say an actual Mars mission might take about two to three years to complete, with return trip to Earth.
It’s not the first time Hawaii island has played a role in taking manned space exploration to the next level. In the 1960s, astronauts with the Apollo lunar missions visited the island’s volcanic sites to train for their eventual geological surveys of rocks on the moon.
At HI-SEAS, Dunn and other crew said that the lack of privacy over eight months became a huge challenge. It could be nearly impossible to ignore activity while trying to get rest.
Crew member Sophie Milam said she would get irked if someone stayed up late watching TV.
"Despite sort of the isolation, it’s a very intense social situation. You’re around people more than certainly I have ever been," Zak Wilson, the crew’s chief engineer, said Saturday. The constant interaction "takes some getting used to."
But the crew eventually started holding Sunday meetings to help clear the air. They helped to relieve stress by working out, cooking meals using freeze-dried ingredients, and emailing family and friends. At night they would play board games and watch television shows.
Three men and three women made up the latest HI-SEAS crew, ranging in age from 26 to 39. There were five Americans and one Canadian. All aspire to one day be actual astronauts. Binsted said she aims to have a more international makeup for the next crew.
There was also an unofficial seventh crew member this time around: a pet Siamese fighting fish named Blastoff McRocketBoots. (Elementary school students came up with the name in a competition, crew members said.)
Wilson said that it helped to stay busy with personal research projects in the dome. (Wilson’s project was to design and create tools that the crew needed with a 3-D printer.)
They would sometimes communicate with Binsted and others using special 20-minute delayed voice software.
They had six to eight total minutes of water allotted each week for showers. It was essential to keep the toilet power running, said crew member Allen Mirkadyrov, because otherwise the stench in the habitat would become unbearable.
After leaving their dome habitat Saturday, the crew celebrated by sky diving over Kona out of a Chinook helicopter with the Army parachute team the Golden Knights.
Binsted said she’s still not sure what the future Mars missions at Mauna Loa might look like. It’s also not clear when an actual mission to Mars would take place.
Binsted said it’s always been about two decades on the horizon — for the past 50 years or so.
If political leaders seriously pursued a mission with the necessary funding in resources, Binsted estimates they could plan one in about a decade.
The latest HI-SEAS crew’s medical officer, Neil Scheibelhut, said he was constantly aware that his group’s study did not have the same high stakes as a real mission to Mars.
"If there’s a hole in our space suit, we know we’re not going to die," Scheibelhut said Saturday. But the data they provided on how crew members interact in close quarters could one day help decide the best crew to go to Mars, with the best chances of success.
Asked whether he would want to actually go to the Red Planet, he enthusiastically replied, "Yesterday."
CORRECTION: The HI-SEA’S principal investigator is Kim Binsted. Her last name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story and the story in Sunday’s paper.
