Volunteers came to value simple things, each other

MAUNA LOA >> Two days before exiting the dome habitat, Sheyna Gifford, the crew’s chief medical and safety officer, blogged about the questions she and her fellow Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation crew mates had already answered numerous times (“What do you miss?”) — and she offered a list of questions she hoped the media would ask instead once their mission wrapped.

On Sunday the Honolulu Star-Advertiser took her up on that suggestion, asking Gifford some of the questions she suggested. Here’s an excerpt:

Star-Advertiser: What message do you have for the folks designing the human Mars missions?

Sheyna Gifford: You’re going to have to let the crew pick themselves. Assigning a crew is all well and good, but at the end of the day, they have to choose each other. You can’t just throw a bunch of people together and expect it to work. We made it work; we’re very, very flexible people. But at the end, for the actual three-year thing (mission to Mars), they need to have to choose each other.

SA: Name one total disaster — suits, radios, experiments, food recipes — and how, if you were able to salvage something from it, you did.

SG: The biggest continuous total disaster is email communication. Email is not for communication; it’s a fact-transmission tool. But here they tried to communicate everything from happiness to disappointment to panic through email. They could’ve just recorded a video. … They could’ve audio-recorded and sent that. Without a doubt, trying to communicate for a year via email is going to cause you problems. Email contextualizes nothing. You have no idea how happy, sad, upset, panicked somebody is. We have the technology to do so much better.

SA: Name an epic win and how you accomplished it.

SG: A lot of the epic wins were, like, repairs, like, “I cannot believe I just fixed the treadmill.” We got the 3-D printer running. That thing was stubborn for weeks.

SA: Did any of you get sick or get hurt? If that had happened on Mars, would you have been all right?

SG: The injuries were mostly field injuries — falls. It’s lava. As you know, pahoehoe lava can drop you. Bumps, scrapes, bruises … yeah, we fell on this stuff. What happens on Mars if you fall and, let’s say, break a femur? Now the good news about your suit is you’ve got an air-pressure layer, and breaking a femur may actually be impossible. But it might not be impossible to, say, break a rib which then punctures a lung and you start bleeding out.”

SA: What advice do you have for choosing the next crew?

SG: Ask questions. Ask why something is the way it is. Assumption is the root of all disaster. Ask, ask, ask.

SA: In a place where there’s no money and nothing to buy, what do you value?

SG: You value each other. You value the heck out of food. Like, I would sit down and say, “One of my crew mates made this cheese. It took them days. God bless that person. One of my crew mates spent months running an aquaponics system to make this leaf. God bless this person, and God bless this leaf for hanging in there.”

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To read Gifford’s blog, visit livefrommars.life.