To me, its always felt like folks look at space from the wrong direction. Like, we use all this nautical terminology with space travel, which I get. The concept of crossing a vast, inhospitable ocean translates easily to space. Space space, space, that's all there is out there, a big fucking void, just like the ocean is water and more water as far as you can see. So anyway, people think about it like Earth is an island, and when we blast off, we head out away from it, to the side. We even depict it that way, right? Each of the planets in a cute little row beside the Sun. I think we kinda have to think about it that way, you know, for it to make any practical sense. We evolved in a lateral world, so we extend the model out laterally. Maybe if we'd grown big brains while we still lived in trees, instead after learning to walk, maybe then Up wouldn't be this thing you can't hardly reckon about at scale.
It barely even makes sense to talk about. You can't really get around it, though; when we go to the moon, we're going fucking Up. The moon is up there, up there, over our heads, all the time, no different than clouds, just a hell of a lot further away. Standing on the moon, you're standing on a big rock that just happens to be sufficiently large enough to keep you barely stuck to its surface while you hang millions of miles above the earth's surface.
I imagine that, if the world were flat, this wouldn't be such a weird concept. Like, if the horizon never wrapped itself up into a neat little ball the higher you got. But you get up there to the edge of space, and suddenly the Earth doesn't look any damn different to any other thing we're used to seeing floating over our heads. We shift our frame of reference to keep ourselves sane; that is to say, we have to keep our definition of up and down relative to ourselves. The earth becomes the thing a million miles in the air, and the moon, for instance, becomes the ground. Theoretically.
And, like, I'm not saying this isn't a sane thing to do. If I'm in Taiwan and you're in France, one of us is hanging upside down from the other's perspective-- like I said, the earth is round. But those two reference frames are always like that, opposite one another. You could say all of space, all the other planets, its all over head at some point or another. And when you're up there, the earth revolving without you doesn't make it feel any less the ground you took off from.
Maybe it's just me. You'd think vertigo wouldn't be an ideal trait for an astronaut, but when I was just an airplane pilot it was never an issue. When I used to fly, it felt like exactly that-- flying. When you're in the cockpit, there isn't any sense for me like I'm gonna fall. You're going. You're rushing forwards at a hundreds of knots. You can pass the fuck out, and the plane still won't nose dive. Put me on a balcony ten stories up and I might puke, but not when I'm flying. When I'm flying its like I'm in control of gravity, not the Earth. And there's nothing like seeing the countryside below rushing beneath your feet.
NASA was the next logical step for me. I didn't think it would be any different-- why would I? But there's this sense when you're taking off-- it isn't like in a plane. You're going straight the fuck up. You're going several times faster in a rocket than you ever do in an air breathing plane, but you don't feel it. You don't get to see the ground flying under you, you just have a sense that the ground is getting farther away. Farther and farther, higher and higher. No real sense of control either. People don't fly rockets, math does. Then gravity cuts out all-together, and that just makes it worse. Maybe if this was fucking star-trek and we could waltz around the ship with a magical gravity field insisting that down is now wherever you want it to be, maybe then it would be different. But they call it free-fall for a reason. It makes me sick.
Drugs help, but only so much. I put up with that baseline dizzying feeling all the way to Hell. No one in the industry calls it Mars anymore. All that twenty-first century optimism and romanticism about the red piss-hole dribbled away when it started eating people. Mars isn't really a place, it is a vacuum of a place, an absence of a where. Literal space is more interesting and engaging than Mars. Hell is an endless desert. More dry than the Sahara, more cold than Antarctica. No weather, no life, barely any geology, every day is the same unending nothing that aches to kill you as quickly and thoroughly as possible if it is given the slightest glimmer of a chance. There is no relaxing. It even lacks the sterility of space; every excursion out of the habitat means bring dust back in. Sharp, machine fouling, lung tearing dust.
Ezra, I hear you saying. Why the fuck do they keep sending people to Mars if it sucks so fucking much? What an absolutely fantastic question, I'm so glad you asked. I have absolutely no idea.
That's a lie, I know exactly why. Its because before you go to Hell, everyone, including myself, thinks what the fuck are they talking about, it can't be so bad. Its another planet, you get to walk on another pissing planet for Christ's sake. I can't pass that up.
Well, here is my experience. I had been running missions to and from the space stations for several years-- hating every moment of it, mind you. The pay off, for me, was the ol' Red Bastard. I wanted to know what it was like, to feel it. I figured, I could put up with all the free-fall, all the hanging in the air, all the bullshit would be worth it because its another planet. It wouldn't feel like Up any more when I got there. My poor little monkey brain would feel like it was safe and sound on the ground again.
The regular missions to Mars began several decades ago. The facilities there were set up remotely. There wasn't much consensus on what constitutes an appropriate habitat for several humans for several months, absolutely cut off from the rest of humanity. But the accommodations are fine, I think. All sorts of entertainment, research to lose yourself in, space enough to feel comfortable without it being so big you can really get lost. The first crew was five people, two men, three women, several million crickets. It took them seven months to kill each other.
The MMC, the Mars Mission Committee, they tried several experiments. More than six or seven crew members felt too crowded. Less than four had other problems. Humans are absolutely fucking predictable. It doesn't matter how professional the astronauts are. How long they've known each other, or how attached/detached they are from family, careers, passions back home. It doesn't matter if the crew is all men, all women, co-ed, whatever. Trapped in a tiny box, effectively a whole universe away from the earth, every single person tries to fuck one another, then they try to kill each other.
For a few decades, China held a majority of the committee seats, and passed the wildly unpopular decision to keep the crew on libido blockers for the extent of the mission. The results of that "experiment" had, invariably, one of two outcomes. Either they would, one by one, just stop taking the pills, or they would opt to skip the "fuck" step and mosey right on ahead to the "kill" phase of the the pattern mentioned above.
Despite what the internet likes to say, mars isn't cursed. This would happen anywhere sufficiently isolated from earth, I think. Its the isolation, the boredom too. It doesn't matter how big a media library they give you. When the view outside your window literally never changes, and you can't go out there and plant some flowers or something, the window stops feeling like a window. The breathtaking views of yawning Martian vistas of bullshit sand and rocks stop being Mars, and start being cute little museum dioramas inset into the walls. Very expertly crafted shadow boxes. You stop feeling convinced that you aren't just in the basement of one of the training buildings, where they literally do have a simulated habitat like that, with fake windows and a conspicuous lack of the fucking murder dust.
That was my first impression, anyway. After the committee had its fill of love-triangles and murder-suicides, they came to the decision that it would be best for every one involved to send a single astronaut for each mission. AI could pick up the workload slack easily enough. Ironically, this actually necessitated increased funding, because again, contrary to sense, everybody still wanted to go to mars. That meant more frequent missions-- also because the missions had to be somewhat shorter to keep the poor bastards they sent from losing their minds. That still happened often anyway. Nobody went to mars twice. Nobody, that is, except for one poor, stupid bastard. Me.
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