Episode 6: I Feel Like A Million Dollars

Hi Lam, that's me, Castellano. Finally I find time to make your recording or the recording for you, rather. So let's see. After the crew has been in the dome for a long time, I ask them, "What do you miss from your life on Earth?" And Cristiana has a really simple answer. Being able to just walk, like, you know, you're looking at the window, the sun is shining and you can just go out, take a walk, listen to the birds, watch people pass by, whatever. We don't have any of that here. I mean, we haven't seen the sun, well, we have seen the sun, but we haven't been exposed to the sun in a year, almost a year, close to a year. It really, really sucks. Yeah, it's definitely affecting me. I don't feel locked in as in prison, but I definitely feel like a bit. Yeah, almost like an animal that's an cage. But every once in a while, Cristiana gets to do something that she loves. She gets to go outside the cage. Because as imitation astronauts, this crew does imitation spacewalks. They go out there and explore the strange new planet they've landed on. The dome is on a huge volcano. The ground is covered in lava rock, alternating stripes of gray and black and red rock that stretch out as far as you can see in every direction. There are spikes of rock and ribbons of rock and underground caves, and there's the big blue sky. It's a landscape as vast and open as the dome is tiny and suffocating. But the thing is, even when the crew is outside the dome, all the problems from inside just seem to follow them. Plus some fun new ones. This is the habitat. This is the sound of a high seas spacewalk, also called an EVA. Late in the mission, Tristan agrees to record one for me. And I now have one of the little recorders in my suit. He straps an audio recorder to his body, puts on one of the imitation space suits they have up here, helps some of his crewmates into their suits, and gets ready to bust out. But he can't just bust out. Before they can leave, the crew has to do decompression. Decompression is something astronauts do before they leave a spaceship, and it's very important if you're actually in space. Of course, the high seas crew isn't in space. These people are totally on earth and could absolutely walk out at any time. But to keep the simulation going, they all cram into a tiny room together, they close the door to the room, and then they just stand there, while absolutely nothing happens. When I listen to this recording, I think about that feeling you have at the end of a long flight. You've been in the airplane for like 6 hours, squished up next to some loud, sweaty guy who keeps stealing the armrest and snoring right into your ear. And the flight has landed. You are on the ground, but you're not allowed to get up yet. You're still trapped, waiting for the captain to turn off the fastened seatbelt sign. You can only sink into that feeling. That was 15 seconds. The crew stays like this for 5 minutes. And then finally, they're free. They open the door and walk out onto the volcano. The thing is, even though the crew is finally outside the dome, they're now inside spacesuits. The most annoying thing on EVA is being inside the suit. The suits are thick and heavy, and they cover every inch of your body. The face part is supposed to be clear, but over time there's been wear and tear. So that extraordinary landscape you've been waiting to see. This looks kind of warped and wobbled. You get out there and you're like, oh it's nice to be outside, I wish I could see it. And maybe even worse is the sound. What does it sound like in there? It's frickin loud, you know, having the fat and blood in your face right beside your ear. Just the noise, it's noisy all the time. The fan is that noise you're hearing in the background right now, but I've turned it way down. Imagine that right next to your ear. You cannot feel your surroundings, you don't feel the wind, you feel the sun, but not on your skin only because it's making your suit very hot. The sealed up suit is like an oven, and you cook in there. You just sweat like a demon in these serums. My whole lower arm, including the hand, is just soaked and sweat, and so is my upper body. It's not a nice feeling, but it's no way around it. I mean, you put rare sweat or so, at least the sweat doesn't, you know, doesn't run down your arm, but then you're even hotter. Instead of smelling the fresh air, you're smelling your own sweat, your own breath, your own burps and farts. I remember one time, in like the third month or something like that, I had a first week. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I thought it'd be really funny to fart inside my suit, and I thought that you had to fart and you're like, "Yeah, why not?" Yeah, it was a big one, and it stays in your suit, so I wouldn't recommend it, because yeah, I had a relationship with that fart. ETAs can have a kind of slapstick quality. There's the burping and the farting. The terrain is hard to walk on, so people fall down a lot, and no one can understand what anyone else is saying. You can't hear anything through the suit, so you're supposed to communicate by radio. You understood that, right? The radios suck balls. They're awful. They sound terrible, and half the time people can't hear you, so they radio back in asking you to repeat it. If it's quite airy and we could hear it, please can you do something, and we didn't hear the rest. And then you have a three-minute discussion telling them to shut up. I did it. I did it. I did it. I did it. Can you take a first pick? Of course, that's assuming they answer you, at all. Sometimes people just disappear. Cyprian and Cristiana, in particular, have kind of a reputation for doing this. They see something cool, some tiny plant, or super cool rock, and off they go. Can you hear them at all? So this is the other annoying thing about EVAs. Even though the crew has escaped the dome, they can't really escape each other. Every EVA includes a task. Sometimes the crew makes a plan, picks something they want to do, or someplace they want to explore. And sometimes it's the researchers who give them instructions. To collect samples, or take measurements, or map the terrain. How well the crew does those tasks, how effective they are, is data. Data that will help the high seas researchers answer one of their big questions. If we send a crew to Mars, and they are stressed out and worn down and sweaty and exhausted and totally sick of each other, will they still be able to do their jobs? So when they're out here, the crew has to work together, they have to stick together. It can be a huge pain in the ass. All right, but I'm bored of waiting for these two. We have like a thousand other places to go. Can you hear us? But the conflict around EVA goes a lot deeper than this, and it causes a big split in the crew. It's after the break. You're listening to the very first NASA EVA. A spacewalk performed in 1965 by astronaut Ed White. This is the moment when White emerged from his ship and came face to face with the universe. He's out there all alone floating, connected to his ship by just the thinnest little bit of nothing. It's a little hard to hear in this recording, but the astronaut inside the ship looks at white through the window and says, "You look beautiful." And White says, "I feel like a million dollars." High above the earth, orbiting at more than 17,000 miles per hour, Ed White would have looked down and seen the vast Pacific Ocean under his tiny human feet. Then the mountains of the California coast, in just a few short minutes he would have moved across the American mainland, across the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico and Texas, past San Antonio where he was born, past Houston where he did his astronaut training, every minute getting closer and closer to the dark side of the earth. When control starts warning him, get back in the damn ship before everything goes dark. White wants to stay out just a little bit longer, to take one more picture, one more look. But. "The flight director says, "Get back in!" "Get back in!" "What? Got your message for us?" "Gimme for it! Get back in!" "Okay!" Mission control is not having it. I love how Ed White sounds like an excited kid in this recording, like begging for just a few more minutes, and mission control sounds like a stern parent. And that is pretty much how it's been on every NASA mission since. Mission control is in charge. They make the decisions, they set the schedule down to the minute. They are in constant communication with the astronauts. But on a Mars mission, that won't be possible. The distance between earth and Mars means that ground control can't talk to the crew in real time. There will be no one shouting, "Get back in!" There will be no one making a minute-by-minute decisions for the astronauts. Whatever happens, they'll have to work it out amongst themselves. And that's not so easy, especially when you're not getting along. Something happened a few months into the high seas mission. Shay went out for an EVA, and she was in her suit trying to get from one part of the volcano to another, but she came to an area that looked kind of hard to navigate. So I took a step, and I was like, "I don't think that's a good way to go. Took a step back, and my leg collapsed." The ground under her leg suddenly crumbled, and she broke into what's called a lava tube. These are underground caves. The caves can be really deep, and the rock layer above them can be really thin. So, there's always some risk of falling through. And Carmel looked over and saw that I was hip-deep in lava and started walking towards me, and I started waving my hands like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, unstable lava. Back, back. Do not approach." The last thing you need is two people up to their hips in lava. Carmel managed to pull her leg out of the hole. And basically, it was just banged up and bloody. I could walk on it, not well, but I could. So I then said, "You know what? I'm going back to the dome." And after a few weeks, the cuts and bruises healed. It seemed okay. But then she tried to go back to her regular routine. It's like, "Okay, it's not okay." There was this pain in her knee that just would not go away. It's hard to say exactly what happened next, because the people involved don't quite agree on the details of the story. And I didn't even realize there was a story until after the mission ended, when I called Tristan on the phone. Here's how he tells it. She had hit her knee on a rock and gotten a bruise. He says the problem started when she fell and hurt herself. It looked completely fine. It wasn't even marked after a week's bud for the rest of the mission. She would continually try to write ground, support, and say that as the crew medic, like she is deemed the outside to be unacceptably dangerous and basically reduce our ability to explore outside by a massive amount. In other words, from what Tristan could tell, she was asking mission support to keep the crew from exploring the areas they wanted to explore. It'd be like instead of going to Plainer neighborhood, you can only go into your front yard. And Tristan was pissed. I enjoy going outside and I was very comfortable out there and I don't appreciate somebody trying to take that away from me because they are not comfortable walking out there. Now when I ask Shay about this, she says she didn't like to mission support trying to restrict people from exploring. Yeah, no. I didn't try to restrict anybody. She says she just wanted more information from mission support. Like when you send us to do stuff on EVA, why are you sending us to such far off dangerous places? Is that really necessary? I wanted them to tell me why. Why are we going here to do this thing? Just tell me why. And for Shay, the crew doctor, the bottom line is always, tell me that it's safe. If you remember the very first episode of this podcast, the first time I ever met these people, they were going on a hike. Some of them were really excited to get to the top of the mountain and they just wanted to go. And Shay was really concerned about safety. They went back and forth about it for a long time. The seed of this conflict was there from the beginning. And now that seed has grown. On one side, there's the argument for adventure and exploration. Ultimately, if you're going all the way to Mars, like it's not safe. So you have to accept some sort of measure of that, acknowledge that things can happen, and you take the risk, that's what pioneering is. And on the other side, there's the argument against falling into a giant hole. No one in that dome has ever seen what happens when you dislocate an elbow. People sit there and scream, an agonizing pain. And the thought of having to watch one of them lie in the floor, be carried in from the field, having fallen down one of those holes. Now they have a dislocated shoulder elbow, wrist, pick a joint. I don't have an ultrasound. I don't have anything. I'd have to ship you to a hospital, endangering the entire isolation part of our study. Is it worth it? Our mission is to be an isolation confinement for a year. What are you so interested in doing that you're willing to endanger that? And we're underground. After listening to the crew on this EVA, I think I know what they're so interested in doing. Because in spite of the noisy fans and the sweaty suits and the petty arguments, EVAs can be incredibly exciting. What I like most about EVAs is when we explore lava tubes. Because it's very surrealistic like we are in the sun, in the highway and sun, and then we go inside a hole, and the sun needs completely dark, and we switch on our light, and we never know what we'll find. Over time, Shay and Anjay pretty much stop going out for long EVAs. But Tristan and Carmel and Cyprian and Cristiana keep going, exploring further and further, trying to see everything. It can be tough to get through some of the smaller bits of the cave to get to the next part. Imagine trying to get in your house with a dog door. Sometimes you just fight over climbing, you climb over a large pile of boulders, or you crawl to a pinch point. And then on the other side, you have this huge chamber where you could build a human pyramid inside. It's big, and it's impressive. It's really impressive. It's one of the biggest ones we've ever seen. And they're so beautiful. Some are just very colourful, like one of the first caves or the very first caves we went into, had these stalactites covered in this dark brown lava that almost looks like chocolate. And then on the ground, in some places you're walking on something as red as tomato sauce. Oh, there's another cave that is so covered in salt crystals that it's entirely white. And it's just beautiful to be in there and have all these different colours, seeing the shapes of them and the rock formations in them, and just being in a cave and seeing something that most other people have never seen in their lives. And I'm pretty sure some of the caves around here have never been entered by anyone before. It's pretty cool to see something that no one else has seen. There have been moments during high seas, especially when the crew is bickering and moaning. When I've started to wonder, why even bother sending humans to Mars at all? Like seriously, people take it for granted that we should go up there. But why? We've been sending robots for a couple decades now. They work pretty good, and robot technology is only going to get better. Why not just keep sending the robots? Experts get asked this question a lot, and they all have their answers. We should send people to Mars because it'll lead to the development of new, exciting technologies, or because it'll teach us to live more sustainably on Earth, or because it'll bring us together. And I get what they're saying, but it's always sounded just a tiny little bit like bullshit. What Cristiana says about the lava tubes rings much more true. That's just cool. That's why we go in there. They're cool. I really think that if we end up sending humans to Mars, we're going to do it because sending humans to Mars is cool. And for all their faults, I'd still rather have humans up there than just robots. Yes, humans do all kinds of stupid things that robots don't do. We get mad at each other over little, inconsequential stuff. We hold grudges. We have pet peeves and bad habits, and we wander off where we're not supposed to. But also, we wander off where we're not supposed to. We're curious. We think, huh, I wonder what that is and off we go. We crawl through tiny, dark holes just to see what's on the other side. And if we're going to learn about Mars, I mean really learn about it. Then I don't think that's going to be done by robots. I think it's going to be done by people like this. Sweaty, burping, farting, terribly flawed people, crawling on their stomachs, and uncomfortable suits, looking for something cool. Wicked skylight ahead, sunlight pouring in, not my face. The heck is all for a work of this? Or because of an ash pass? From the next episode of The Habitat, the crew will finally feel the sun on their skin and the wind in their hair and the earth under their feet. It's time for these explorers to come home. [Music] The Habitat is a production of Gimlet Media. It's produced by Peter Brezenin, Megan Tann, and me, I'm Lynn Levy. Our editors are Alex Bloomberg, Jorge Just, Caitlin Kenney, and Blithe Tyrell. Music, sound design, and mixing by Haley Shaw. Music's supervision by Matthew Bowle. Her credits music in this episode is performed by Pavo Pavo, and written by David Bowie. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris, thanks to Caitlin Roberts for her help. And a very special thanks to the high seas crew. Anjay Cristiana Ciprian, Carmel, Shay, and Tristan. [BLANK_AUDIO]