Serious Pretending

Posted by tourdemars to Mars Society at March 27, 2002 12:00 PM

It's as close as she and her five-person crew may ever make it to the red planet, but for now, it's close enough. Their Mars Society Desert Research Station, a squat two-story pod about 25 feet in diameter, is plunked down in the red craggy terrain of the Utah badlands; they're trekking around in awkward, bulky spacesuits; and they're pretending — seriously pretending — to be living 35 million miles from Planet Earth. It's all part of a privately funded project, part science, part fantasy camp, part public relations campaign, sponsored by the Mars Society, a group of about 5,000 Mars aficionados determined to light a fire under the federal government's space exploration initiatives. The society is convinced that we could send a human team to Mars for about half of the $20 billion to $22 billion currently estimated — and it's trying to prove it. In Utah.