Anger Out the Wire

Inside the Printed House

Eli: June 25th, 2023, at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kelly Haston, a Canadian research scientist, walks into Mars Dune Alpha with three crewmates. It's a 3D-printed habitat of about 1,700 square feet, built to stand in for a base on Mars. NASA calls the mission CHAPEA, a yearlong Mars simulation. The door closes. They won't walk back out until July 6th, 2024. That's 378 days.

Mara: A listener asked what happens to people who spend a whole year sealed inside a fake Mars base. Today's angle is the outward displacement of confinement stress.

Eli: Two crews went before her, one on a Hawaiian volcano, one near Moscow, and their records show what a sealed year does to bodies and moods. Whether four people in one printed house can last that long without turning on each other is something nobody could promise them on day one.

Mara: So for a year, the whole planet is one printed house.

Eli: Inside a warehouse, with a covered, Mars-styled yard outside. NASA printed it because lumber can't be shipped to Mars. Still, a warehouse in Houston is a warehouse in Houston.

Mara: What makes it feel far away is who's missing. For all 378 days, Haston saw nobody but her three crewmates. That's total isolation here: no visitors, no strangers, just the same three faces. And the days ran on a script, roughly 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Haston put the start of it this way: 'Every day I would get up, and pretty much as soon as I'm moving, I'm weighing myself, I'm starting to take data about my personal health or how I'm doing.' Then breakfast, a planning tag-up to coordinate the day, scheduled work, exercise, meals.

Eli: And she said they kept to it: 'we very rarely even deviated from that.'

Mara: Some days had a walk outside, sort of. Two of them would suit up in mock spacesuits, go out through airlocks and step onto Mars in virtual reality. The two left inside played mission control.

Eli: Ross Brockwell's review of those: 'The virtual reality was amazing.'

Mara: The real mission control was harder to reach. Every message took up to 22 minutes to arrive, the one-way trip a signal can take between Mars and Earth. That's communications latency: no live conversation, ever, more like letters always in the post. Even a simple exchange ran about 45 minutes. So the crew fixed things on their own. In Haston's words, 'we are often troubleshooting issues on our own while waiting for mission control to get back to us with additional information.'

Eli: Anca Selariu ranked it top: 'The most challenging aspect, although it doesn't sound like it, was the communication delay.' She said it takes 'a completely different mindset' for how messages get worded, delivered and timed.

Mara: Haston called communication with loved ones and family their biggest challenge during the first month, because of time delays and data restrictions.

Eli: Four people, one door, and every word home on a delay. What a year of that does to a body, older crews had already started measuring, Mara.

The Strength in the Thighs

Mara: Haston's morning weigh-in tracks what they went through.

Eli: HI-SEAS: a white dome about 8,000 feet up Mauna Loa in Hawaii, standing in for Mars. Its fourth crew stayed sealed a full year. Water was tightly rationed. Crews reported two-minute showers, chilly ones. A whole week might add up to six to eight minutes. When a pump failed, there were stretches with none. One member of an earlier 2013 crew listed the concessions: 'mostly bathing with wet wipes, forgoing real-time social media and zero access to fresh fruits or vegetables.'

Mara: So even getting clean ran on a ration. The deeper record comes from Mars500: six men sealed in a facility near Moscow for 520 days. That was 2010 into 2011. Researchers kept monitors on their wrists the whole way. Movement while awake dropped by about 7 percent, and sleep and rest went up. Then the surprise: their quadriceps and hamstrings lost strength even though they exercised. That's confinement deconditioning, strength draining away in a sealed space, workouts or not.

Eli: Calves held up, oddly.

Mara: Sleep came loose too. Sara Whiting and her co-authors reported most of the crew had at least one disturbance of sleep, alertness or sleep timing, 'suggesting inadequate circadian entrainment.' Their body clocks weren't locking onto the day. One man drifted into a cycle of about 25 hours.

Eli: The six men told it their own way at a Moscow press conference in November 2011. A Russian surgeon on the crew said it was hard at times to deal with so many nationalities and cultures. Another crew member said the mission 'put me more in contact with my own humanity.' He'd learned he had limitations, he said, to overcome by himself and with his crewmates' help.

Mara: Friction and leaning on each other, out of the same six men.

Eli: Weaker thighs, wandering body clocks, cold two-minute showers. What all that does to a crew's patience by month nine is still open.

Hunger for the Wind

Mara: Back inside Mars Dune Alpha, Haston had expected not being outdoors to be tough.

Eli: It wasn't, at first. She said the outdoor thing didn't bother her as much as she thought it would, 'until the end.' Then it caught up with her: 'By the end, though, I was really missing things like hearing the wind, the sound of trees, and the smells — there were no smells inside the habitat.' That's sensory monotony: the same walls, the same air, the same sounds, day after day, until the senses go hungry.

Mara: The timing has a shape. Researchers followed three HI-SEAS crews, six people each. Their missions ran eight to twelve months. Stress hormones fell as routines formed. Dopamine, the brain chemical that drives motivation and reward, and serotonin dropped during deprivation. Team conflict came in the third quarter, then shifting sleep schedules as crews coped. That's third-quarter syndrome: the stretch past halfway where lows and friction pile up.

Eli: Christiane Heinicke, on one HI-SEAS crew, wrote that it took her almost nine months, 'toward the end of the much-feared third quarter, before I began to feel really alone and forgotten.' By then, she wrote, some crew members were dealing with emotional lows.

Mara: Hard to tell whether that's the walls talking or the missing people.

Eli: Mars500 has both in it. On top of the drifting sleep, after their simulated landing the men withdrew into private capsules and lost interest in talking. Impatience at outside requests grew. Disagreements among teammates and conflicts with outside operators both came more often, and that lasted until the exit.

Mara: So late in these missions, crews are worn down and short on patience. What isn't clear yet is where the friction lands.

Eli: In 1,700 square feet, the obvious target is the person across the table.

Mint Tea and Broken Lines

Mara: The Mars500 numbers point somewhere else. In the crew's own reports, conflicts with mission control came up five times as often as conflicts among themselves. That's externalized conflict: the frustration goes out the comm line instead of across the table. And it peaked during the 30 days of the simulated Mars surface stay.

Eli: And it wasn't spread evenly. The two men with the highest stress and exhaustion accounted for 85 percent of the conflicts reported.

Mara: The delay is part of the mechanism. One analysis found that delays of up to 20 minutes significantly impair mission control's 'effectiveness as a team member,' and crews lean less on the ground.

Eli: Which brings back Selariu calling the delay the hardest part, and Haston troubleshooting on her own. The same lag that strained the line to the ground left four people answering mostly to each other.

Mara: So the strain mostly ran outward, and inside, the crews held.

Eli: Nathan Jones, the crew's physician, took up drawing: 'I have even surprised myself with how well some of my sketches have turned out.' They marked birthdays and holidays together. They grew dill, and a mint plant so pushy they named it Minty Nefario, and finally turned it into tea. Call those autonomous coping routines: rituals a crew runs for itself, with nobody on the ground to run them.

Mara: A takeover attempt, settled with a teapot.

Eli: Everything was finite. Food was rationed, and so were water and coffee. Brockwell said the finiteness of everyday items becomes immediately apparent. Of the food, though: 'Given the constraints, it's really impressive how healthy and tasty and simple it is.' And at one point they rode out a simulated two-week communication blackout.

Mara: Two weeks with no ground at all, after months of a slow one.

Eli: Off-hours were puzzles, board games, a PlayStation 4, books. Brockwell got through most of the habitat's library. Selariu tried to get better at drawing: 'I cannot claim I've been successful.' But she knew what she'd miss: 'the luxury of being unplugged in a world that now validates humans by their digital presence.'

Mara: The crew held together, with the strain sent outward and the rituals filling the rest. What the open door did to their senses is where Eli takes it.

Too Much Earth

Eli: July 6th, 2024. A NASA astronaut knocks on the habitat door and welcomes the four out into a cheering crowd. Nathan Jones says the 378 days 'went by quickly.' Haston says how wonderful it is to say hello. Then the world comes in all at once. 'The stimuli is overwhelming, because we have been in that habitat for a long time, and we're very used to our routine and each other,' she said.

Mara: The woman who missed wind and smells got all of it back at once.

Eli: Even a supermarket was too much. That's post-isolation sensory overload: ordinary noise, light and crowds hitting senses that spent a year on four people and one quiet habitat. For the first 24 hours, she said, she was also 'incredibly itchy.'

Mara: And, in her words, 'I was so excited to smell things again.'

Eli: As for going for real, she'd pause. Being away from her partner and family was hard, especially in the tougher stretches. A real Mars mission, she said, means 'it would be very difficult to leave my partner, to leave my people, for that amount of time, because it would be far more than a year.'

Mara: So that's what a sealed year does. Across these missions, crews held together on shared routines and on running their own days. The cost landed in bodies and senses: sleep drifting, thigh strength fading, and the world coming back too loud.

Eli: And NASA is running it again. A second crew went into Mars Dune Alpha in October 2025 for another 378 days, scheduled to end in late October 2026. Sara Whiting holds that terrestrial analogs reliably capture key behavioral, social, and circadian stressors. One of them, Michael Stenger, said, 'we'll be able to translate the knowledge from these experiences to Moon Base and beyond.' The other reading is set down by Dennis Bushnell and a co-author: 'There are no analogs on Earth that can fully represent the combinatorial conditions for a human to Mars mission.'

Mara: That's the built-in limit of any ground test: no deep-space radiation, no altered gravity, and a door that can open in an emergency. Kelly Haston is counted among those who hold that reading too.

Eli: Two things to watch. Whether what these habitats show holds up in real Mars gravity, just over a third of Earth's. And what the second crew's full mind-and-behavior data shows, once it's released after their scheduled finish. The four who linked arms behind a closing door in 2023 came out still close, and stepped into a world that was suddenly too much.

Mara: Look up Mars Dune Alpha.

Eli: And stay with us on health.

Mara: That's it for today. I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Thanks for listening, and until next time on Angle.