NASA's year-long Mars simulation ends with a hot sauce finding that changes everything
The second crew left NASA's simulated Mars habitat today, and the data on condiments is grim.
"...so by day twenty-six the hot sauce was gone, and honestly nothing after that is worth publishing," said Dr. Ines Marlow, who studied the crew's meal records.
The crew of NASA's second year-long Mars simulation walked out of their habitat in Houston today. They had spent a year inside a 3D-printed building, pretending to live on another planet. That part went fine. Marlow did not want to discuss it.
Her study tracked four people. That is the sample size. The control group was everyone else on Earth, who had hot sauce the entire time. The crew grew vegetables, fixed equipment and walked across a virtual Mars. They coped with isolation, delayed messages and a year without fresh air. For the rest of the year, they ate food that tasted of nothing at all. Marlow calls this period "the dark age."
She is careful about the result. It could be chance. She has checked, and it is not chance.
Marlow now considers the rocket the easy part. Humans can clearly survive on Mars. Whether they would want to is a separate question, and her data says no.
She has asked NASA to pack the next crew twenty-six bottles. She expects them gone by March.
