Journalist Report
01/29/2013
Melanie Newfield
Could you just water those plants again please?
This morning I took my first shower at MDRS. To try and avoid wasting
water, I’ve been keeping
clean by having hiker’s showers, using a couple of wet wipes. It’s pretty
effective, but it’s not
quite as nice as a warm shower. Plus I’m yet to discover a technique for
washing my hair with wet
wipes.
There was a bit of a run on the shower this morning, leaving Emma filling
the tank earlier than
usual. The occasion that prompted this sudden bout of hygiene was the
arrival of a film crew from
Channel Seven Australia. They can cover anything from Hollywood
celebrities to war zones, so I’m
really not sure what they made of us. But at least we were able to show
them that there was a lot
more going on at MDRS than people walking around the desert in space suits.
Working in television is a lot like space travel. It’s one of those
professions seen as glamorous,
but there’s a lot of monotony in there that few people ever see. We
quickly became acquainted with
the words “can you do that again please” as we walked around the strange
landscape in our space
suits for the first time. The film crew apologised for making us walk the
same little track again
and again, but I think I could have done it all day.
While we were supposed to be providing footage for the camera, it was my
first chance to really
move around in the landscape, since the ground had finally dried out
enough that I wasn’t worried
about constantly falling over. So half my mind was trying to follow
instructions, and the other was
thinking, “man, this place is weird”. I’d have to walk over this ground
many more times than I did
today before the landscape around me became mundane.
Somehow it didn’t quite sink in when I arrived here – the cover of snow
and then the flowing
meltwater masked the alien harshness of this place. Now it is drying out,
it’s suddenly easy to see
why MDRS is right here. I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating
– this place is weird.
There’s something about a landscape without evident life that totally
confounds our brains – or at
least my brain. It’s the life around us that gives our landscape its
scale. We know how big a
person is, we have an idea of the scale of a tree, even if they vary
rather a lot. But here, when
we see a hill, we have no idea whether it’s a small bump in the landscape
or a monolith. And then
there’s the colour.
But that’s why we’re here of course.
The filming wasn’t just about walking around in space suits. We fed the
crew on dehydrated space
food for lunch. Well, I cooked it into fresh bread and a tomato and
vegetable soup, and they seemed
pretty happy with it. I’m starting to get more familiar with what I can do
with the dehydrated
vegetables. The tomato is particularly useful – there is both diced tomato
and tomato powder and
I’ve found that if I use them together I get a good tomato flavour and a
reasonable texture too.
After lunch I headed out to the green hab to do a bit of repotting while
the crew filmed other
things, but they eventually came to film life in the green hab as well.
The collards ended up
getting watered three or four times, but I think they’ll survive. We ended
up discussing the
practicalities of growing food in extreme environments – I’ve visited the
greenhouse at McMurdo
station in Antarctica and the challenges of growing food on Mars would be
very similar. When asked
what I would choose to grow, I nominated strawberries (which we already
have) and cherry tomatoes.
They’re easy, and there’s something magic about the smell and taste of
those succulent fruit. We
may not be able to supply all of an astronaut’s food requirements off a
little greenhouse, but
surely the tastes of an Earth summer will give them something to smile about.
So it was a definite high point in my day when later I was rummaging
around the bags of seed and
discovered a packet of cherry tomatoes. I won’t get to eat them, and maybe
we won’t have enough
time this season to get them to fruiting size, but I’m giving them a go.