LIFE ON ‘MARS'

It’s hard to imagine anyone would volunteer to live with five strangers in a tin can in the desert. Yet each year hundreds of people from around the world apply for the chance to go to the remote wilderness of Utah and simulate the colonisation of Mars

- J OLIVER CONROY

THE Mars weather is beautiful today and an astronaut is about to suffocate to death under the cloudless blue sky.

The trouble starts after three crew members leave the safety of the Hab, their pressurised six-person living station, and venture outside to do some routine work. They trudge along in 16kg spacesuits, breathing air pumped by fan and watching the jagged, red landscape through their fishbowl-like glass helmets.

As they head back to the station one astronaut, Aga Pokrywka, begins acting strangely. Her movements are sluggish. She stops walking.

The radio crackles. “Aga, are you all right?” asks the crew’s commander, Sionade Robinson. The Hab is only a few dozen metres away, but Aga can’t seem to go further. She collapses on the red clay.

Robert Turner, the crew’s medical officer, radios the Hab, “Astronaut down, astronaut down!”

The three crew members inside begin emergency protocols. Two don spacesuits, grab a stretcher and enter the airlock. They must wait five painstaking minutes for the air pressure to adjust. If they don’t, they might be torn apart when they step into Mars’ thin atmosphere.

After the agonising wait ends, the rescue party rushes to Aga and rolls her on to the stretcher. They run toward the Hab, manoeuvre her body into the cramped airlock and begin the countdown all over again.

A crew member inside, Kay Sandor, holds a timer against the airlock window, “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”

They get Aga inside and onto the ground and remove her helmet. After a while, she starts to revive.