Page 53 of To the Moon and Back
STEPH THE EARTH OF EARTH, THE EARTH OF MARS
In a small, white dome, on a volcano, we practiced the protocol of Mars.
Before I climbed into my hazmat suit, my crewmate Adisu took my temperature.
On Mars, if this were Mars, I’d have a suit with built-in heaters, protection from a cold more than a hundred degrees below zero.
Here, in Hawai’i, I wore a tiny fan on a string around my neck.
Our comm system was a walkie-talkie, clipped to a fanny pack at my belt.
Adisu gave me a thumbs-up. He noted my trip in the log and motioned me through the air lock.
What we called the air lock was a hanging clear tarp, before a gap, before another clear tarp.
I stood in the gap for five minutes, simulating the time needed to adjust the air pressure.
It was the honor system; Adisu had already returned to his research.
An egg timer dinged, and I stepped outside.
The slopes of Mauna Loa looked similar, somewhat, to the Tharsis region on Mars.
The volcano was as close as we could get, and for now we focused on research—on morale, stress management, and best practices for group cohesion.
Together with my crewmates, I was part of that.
One year of total isolation, of logbooks and rations and constant surveys measuring factors and trends in conflicts across crew relationships.
I looked behind me at the hab. It was a geodesic habitation dome, white with a frame of metal supports.
To our crew of six, it was home for the year.
(“It looks like Epcot,” my mother had said, clicking through photos before I’d left.
“Appropriating marginalized cultures on stolen land,” Kayla said, “ just like Epcot.”)
Kayla hated that I was here. She didn’t care how promising it was that I’d been asked, just one month into my life as an astronaut candidate.
(In our entire, newly sworn-in ascan class of twelve, this honor had gone only to three of us: me, Aziz, and Nadia.
Our peers would spend the year in Houston, in some combination of training and desk jobs.) If I answered the call to serve, if I was uncomplaining and never rushed my way through the air lock even though it wasn’t real?
A likely recommendation from my commander.
A necessary step toward a mission , the real kind.
When I reached the day’s collection site, I paused to rest. I sipped water through the tube that hung at my shoulder.
Exercise in the hab was limited—we took turns on a treadmill in the kitchen.
It would be boring if not for Nadia, who averaged out her personal best each week and posted it on a whiteboard. We were always neck and neck.
I’d met her the night before our swearing in.
It was mid-December, at a house party in the Houston suburbs by and for the new ascans.
Three Apollo Era astronauts and a young woman in a bikini showed up together, uninvited, and made a beeline for the hot tub.
Nadia picked an ill-advised fight with one of them about 1960s gender norms before being chewed out by the woman herself, a petite but fully adult astrophysicist. By the hydrangeas I held Nadia’s hair, small curls pouring out over my fists, when she thought she might (but thankfully, did not) throw up out of embarrassment.
Over brunch the next day, where I’d planned to ask if she was gay so we could become colleagues with benefits, Nadia said that she deeply regretted her outburst. Ascans were colleagues, she said, not friends, and in the future she’d behave more professionally.
For the last two months, nearly all of our mission so far, I had unprofessionally thought of her many times.
Within the hour, I’d bagged six samples at the collection site: mugearite, alkali basalt, and tholeiitic basalt. I labeled them in awkward, uppercase writing, and snapped them shut in the case I carried.
My walkie-talkie beeped. Allison’s voice was garbled and staticky, like she was drowning. “Allison to Steph. Do you copy?”
“Copy that.”
“I got an alert from mission control, level orange. We’re looking at an unauthorized group, upwards of thirty civilians, approaching the hab on foot. All crew members return to base; we’re on lockdown till they’re ID’d.”
“We thinking extraterrestrial beings?”
“Cute. Hurry back. Over and out.”
The sun was overhead. I was hungry and tired, walking quickly, a fast drumming in my heart. I felt caged in my suit, though they’d trained us not to feel that way.
Static again. Allison. “Well, come on,” she said. “You gotta move faster.”
I saw them, close behind.
Protesters. Native Hawaiians. “Kānaka Maoli,” as Kayla always said. For almost a year, she’d been tweeting and posting and blogging and protesting, all in opposition to the thirty-meter telescope planned on nearby Mauna Kea.
But we weren’t even there! We were in a temporary structure, on Mauna Loa, which as I understood from my pre-mission googling was also sacred but maybe—at least from what I could tell—not quite as big a deal?
When I’d told Kayla this, she’d said it wasn’t my place to rank how sacred other people’s volcanoes were.
“What I’m hearing,” I’d told Kayla, “is that the Mauna Kea protesters will leave us alone on Mauna Loa.”
Kayla groaned into the phone. I was in Houston, packing for the mission. I heard the sliding of the screen door, imagined Felicia coming home from the beach. The drag of her surfboard laid out on the deck. Sand everywhere. Kayla said, “That’s not at all what I’m saying?”
The protesters, now coming up the slope behind me, wore shorts and T-shirts, jeans and sneakers.
They wore lauhala hats and aloha shirts, and held flags with green, red, and yellow stripes.
There was a boy in a loincloth, holding an umbrella over the head of an older woman in a long, loose dress.
People carried signs. I couldn’t read them through the fog on my face shield; I was running too fast and breathing too hard, afraid to know if my sister was among them.
When we were younger, and she’d started going to protests, I’d always come along.
I’d had this idea that I was there to protect her.
A shirtless Hawaiian man with black tattoos on his legs bent to carry a long-haired little girl.
A Black woman with bright purple glasses ran past them, waving something in her hands.
She was holding a flyer, jogging, trying to slip it between my gloved fingers.
“Wait,” she said. “We just want to talk?”
I gasped, ran straight through the air lock, and slammed the real door behind me.
I leaned against it and tried to catch my breath.
Adisu was waiting for me with his clipboard. He didn’t say anything about the rushed protocol. He unzipped my suit and helped me out of it. My hair stuck to my neck and shoulders; I was sweaty and worn out and hoped Allison would authorize a second shower.
There was a single porthole by the door, and the crew crowded around it. Jed put his hand on my shoulder. Jed who was always trying, always doing too much. The concern in his eyes was like I’d narrowly survived.
Nadia stood apart from us—back straight, hair pulled into a high bun. Silent, interested, she studied the protesters from afar.
“Mission control just confirmed an offshoot of protests against the thirty-meter telescope,” said Allison. “The hab is now a secondary target.”
I moved closer to Nadia and looked out. A banner stretched across the crowd and bunched at the top, held in many hands. Its message was painted in red, dripping at the feet of each letter, a message repeated till the cloth ran out.
YOU ARE ON SACRED LAND.
YOU ARE ON SACRED LAND.
YOU ARE ON SACRED LAND.