Journalist Report
02/21/2013
Kent Nebergall
Wednesday PM: Hab Sweet Home
After weeks of planning, monitoring, and otherwise feeling like a driver in the Baja 500, I finally relaxed for a couple hours today. We
are starting to figure out how to end things rather than start them. I took some time to just look at the structure of the hab in some
detail about an hour ago and take some pictures of how this place was built. It’s a bit deceptive in pictures. The bulk of it is actually
suspended about a foot above the ground, but there’s a skirt around the bottom to keep the cold air to a minimum. In some ways,
it’s an environmentalist’s dream, because once they pull up the stakes on the “landing legs” and cart it off, there will be little
evidence on the surface that it was ever here.
There are limits to round construction, though. Don’t try to open two drawers next to each other in the kitchen or they’ll collide.
People take showers mid-day because the shower is on the outside edge of the hab and gets much colder at night. Technically, any
crewed spaceship is a pressure vessel, so it wants to be a sphere or at least a cylinder.
You begin to understand why many designs for round construction cluster all the plumbing and so on in the middle core. Running it
around the outside walls is a bit likely to freeze.
From an organizational prospective, MDRS is an odd mix of as-designed and odd innovations that have creped in over the dozen
years of its existence. There are now pan holders under the air conditioner above the stove. There are clips for papers under the
bookshelf for some reason. There is a rubber bumper on the ledge above the insanely steep alternating tread staircase because once
you get past the extreme awkwardness of climbing it, your probability of smacking your head into that edge becomes excellent.
In short, MDRS is a really amazing study in contrast between NASA engineering, IKEA, and trailer park tree-house living side-by-side
in a place that people have a very hard time letting go of after two weeks. The last crew considered the port-a-lets an upgrade and
they had a hard time leaving. We won’t be so challenging to the next crew, but I have to admit despite my nice townhouse waiting
for me with my long list of creature comforts tuned to my wants and needs for decades, I’m going to miss this taped up hole in the
wall next to my painted plywood desk and my view of the moon going by my window every night. I appreciate saddling an ATV in a
spacesuit now and then and living with a half dozen crazy science people who know how to cook amazing food with dehydrated
ingredients. I realized this afternoon how little I miss television. There is a certain joy in going a week and a half without seeing any
commercials or for that matter anything else that gets packaged for television. No medical commercials or laugh tracks projected in
5.1 high definition detail in my living room. There is much to be said for a place where wonder is real and not metered out into
satellite signals into urban landscapes and living rooms.
I will go home changed, which is kind of why you go away in the first place. I’ve been kicked hard out of my comfort zone and
routine life. By changing my living and work arrangement so dramatically, I’ve learned a lot about what comforts and annoys me, and
it’s not always what I would have guessed. I’ve learned a lot of my own strengths and weaknesses. Life is a lot of fine lines between
too much and not enough of various things. We think we can build lives like architecture, but we usually spin plates in balancing too
many things on too many fine points, often with loud disruptions when we fail. MDRS is no exception, but it was nice to put the old
plates in the cupboard and spin some new plates for once. Or since this is Mars, am I spinning saucers? Whatever. I hand the keys
to Melissa on Saturday and drive to Grand Junction for stake and beer and a last night as MDRS Crew 124. I’ll probably never see
more than two of these amazing people at once in the same room again.
Thursday: The Last Dust
I did my last EVA a couple hours ago. We did some drilling and pictures and soaked in the landscape one last time through the
helmets. I managed to frame some amazing pictures, including a shot of Paula and I walking back with the sunset to the left and the
hab to the right. I think that’s getting blown up and framed when I get home.
I also realized that if I wait as long until my next mission, I’ll be 51 before I come back here. I somehow doubt the station will still be
here then, or it may be in a different form. So those memories I have been presenting to science fiction and technology conventions
for the past seven years – those amazing sights and sensations, those I soaked in through my helmet view one last time. Some
things are different. I’m commander another couple days, and I was followed around by a bratty robot. But MDRS is what it is. It’s a
mess and a world icon in one bundle of history and future hope. It has opened the minds of hundreds to the feel of life on a new
world by being here, and millions by seeing it here. It’s just been featured on Chinese television and another billion people may
potentially be mentioning it at the breakfast table.
So when I fly home Sunday night to snuggle my undoubtedly very angry cat and arrange my work bag for another day at the office
Monday, I’ll sleep in my own bed. But I won’t be quite the same person. And neither will my crew in their various time zones.
Because we did it right.
A famous old Japanese poem translates as, “This dewdrop world/ Is a dewdrop world/ And yet… / And yet…” We will find the sand
grains of this place in our luggage and dust in our cameras for months and years. And we’ll remember these few two weeks, this
sand grain world.
And yet, and yet.