Episode 1: This Is the Way Up

April 18, 2018·29 min·2 clips

Lynn Levy drives through black jagged rocks in Hawaii that look exactly like the Martian panoramas NASA's robot sent back.

Narrator Lynn Levy drives through black jagged lava fields in Hawaii, describing how the landscape closely resembles photographs returned by early Mars rovers. She introduces the HI-SEAS experiment — Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation — set up by Kim Binsted, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Binsted explains the experiment's purpose: not to test rockets or spacesuits, but to test humans, since if the astronauts fail psychologically, the mission fails as surely as any hardware malfunction. Six volunteers have been chosen to live in a small white dome — roughly the size of a two-car garage — for one year, treating the outside atmosphere as poison and wearing spacesuits when they go outside. The crew includes Carmel, 26, a runner and the designated commander who grew up in Montana on a lambing farm; Shay, a doctor who describes missing the chaos and unpredictability of ordinary life; Anjay, an engineer and passionate pilot who flew himself to a favorite restaurant for a final meal; Christiana, a German scientist; Cyprien, a French scientist; and Tristan, an architect who dreams of building things in space and serves as crew comedian with a constant supply of bad jokes. Levy introduces herself as someone who refused to go on a boat party in case it got awkward, and who dated her partner for six years before agreeing to move in with him, framing her own discomfort with confinement as the lens through which she will tell this story. Two days before entering the dome, the crew walks a lava field learning ground-truthing — the practice of verifying a map by walking its terrain. Within minutes, the crew stalls out in an argument about which direction to walk, whether the map is in feet or meters, and whether it is safe to split up. Commander Carmel is eventually backed against a historical marker by crew doctor Shay, who pressures her to make a decision, while three crew members drift away and stare at the ground. Tristan breaks the tension with jokes, but Levy later discusses the incident with Binsted, who confirms the tension was between Carmel and Shay and wonders aloud how they will manage when locked together. On launch day, the crew dons matching red polo shirts and enters the habitat. Levy observes their faces glowing with excitement rather than fear, and reflects on the 44 active NASA astronauts currently alive — and the millions of people who dreamed of space and never got there. She describes the crew as people who chose to get as close to that dream as possible.

As heard by us

A Mars simulation that opens with spectacle and settles into a study of people under pressure.

The Habitat opens on a Mars simulation with real texture: road noise, crew chatter, and the uneasy confidence of people trying to prove the setup can hold.

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Want a Mars story that stays grounded in dust, nerves, and human friction?

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