Today the whole crew donned the suits for a six-person EVA. It was mostly just a desert frolic-turned-photo shoot. I’m hoping before the end of my stay here the group will have a chance to head out to the fossil fields about a kilometer to the east.
With the spacesuit on, it’s easy to trick myself into thinking I’m actually on Mars. Not that the suits are particularly high-tech, but they do their job. As awesome as it would be to run around Utah wearing a legitimate suit, they’re a tad expensive (thousands of bucks)! After all, we are (though I hate to admit it) still on Earth, so there’s no need for pressurized suits with fancy-pants regulatory systems. At MDRS, the idea is more to simulate how cumbersome normal tasks can be in a suit, and these suits certainly accomplish that.
We are all beginning to get very tired. As a crew, we have to be completely self-sufficient, which means there’s a lot to do besides the science and engineering projects we came for. Every four hours the generator has to be refueled (even in the middle of the night), we have to make our own bread, fix our own toilet, etc. … Thank goodness for my crew mates, or I would not have made it. Between them, they’ve built an impressive resume of cookin’ and fixin’.
It’s hard to believe I only have four days left here. I’ve just gotten it figured out.
