Once Upon A Time I Lived on Mars

Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth

“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”

-Elon Musk

I was one of the kids who sat screamed “10-9-8-7-6…” as the countdown to launch quivered on our small classroom tv set. I thought for sure I would be soon traveling to Mars and beyond for vacations. Alas, no.

Only 24 humans have been to the moon in history.

NO ONE HAS BEEN BACK SINCE 1972.

That’s why I was so excited to read “Once Upon a Time I lived on Mars”, a book of fascinating essays. Author Kate Green uses her experiences as a participant in NASA research to consider why we should have a space program, what we can learn from it, and how exploring space may help ourselves and the world in ways we may not have readily considered. Will we get to Mars?

WHY MARS?

At an average distance of 140 million miles, Mars is one of Earth’s closest habitable neighbors. Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.

JENA’S REVIEW

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth by Kate Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Once Upon a Time I lived on Mars, is the imaginative and intriguing name of this non-fiction book. And it’s something I once thought was guaranteed to happen in my life time- living on Mars. Like the author, when I was in the 4th grade, I was also fascinated and dazzled by space and space missions. I am 30 years older than author Kate Greene, inspired by watching Mercury lift-offs on a small tv in my grade school classroom. I couldn’t wait to fly to airlocked pods on faraway planets. Alas- I am still reading books about space. Fortunately, this is a wonderful book!

Subtitled “Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, this fact-filled yet easy to understand book is a series of essays by the author. In 2013, Kate Greene was selected as a crew member for NASA’s newest Mars analog—a project called HI-SEAS. Its home base was a dome on the Hawai’ian volcano of Mauna Loa. The mission’s main goal was to test food systems, but there were many other research projects during the 4 month project. What this really meant, was that the author and other professionals basically “pretended” they were living on Mars. Cool, right?

Ms. Greene tells us about the project through a series of essays. I found this to make for an engaging read, instead of a linear,”Here’s what we did today” project, although she does give us many snapshots of her life “on Mars”. Many of the daily experiments involved food. Is it better for astronauts’ health to cook meals, and have a variety of meals instead of pouches of food and Tang? As the subtitle suggests, she uses her experiences to consider why we should have a space program, what we can learn, and how it may help ourselves and the world in ways we may not have readily considered. For example, what if artists- poets, writers, painter, musicians went along on the first missions to deep space? Wouldn’t their perspectives help us on earth to realize the immense grandeur of space? Would we see our Earth in a different way?

Thanks to the author for such an engaging and inspiring book and many thanks to the brave astronauts who rocketed to near space, the moon and the space stations and may we continue our journey to the stars. Thanks to Net Galley and St. Martins Press for an advance review copy. This is my honest review.

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Kate Greene is a poet, essayist, and former laser physicist whose work has appeared in Aeon, the Atlantic, Discover, The Economist, Harvard Review, the New Yorker, Pacific Standard, Slate, and WIRED, among others. Her essays have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, CBS News Radio, and the BBC World Service. She has taught writing at Vanderbilt University, San Francisco State University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. In 2013, Greene was the crew writer and second-in-command on a four-month simulated Mars mission for the NASA-funded HI-SEAS project. Her essay collection inspired by the experience, ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth (St. Martin’s Press) was published July 2020. She currently lives in New York City where she is a teaching fellow at Columbia University. Kategreen.net