This summer, NASA puts four humans on Mars with their feet on Earth

The experiment that simulates Mars habitat may put humans on track to be an interplanetary species

This summer, four humans will start “living on Mars”. This will be the first batch of humans on the “red planet”, before two others follow. This Mars habitat, though, will be on Earth.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has created a Mars habitat at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, which it will open to mediapersons for a visit on April 11.

The Mars Dune Alpha habitat is being prepared as the site of the agency's first year-long Mars mission.

This will be part of NASA’s Crew “Health and Performance Exploration Analog,” or CHAPEA, which is a series of experiments where the agency aims to simulate the living conditions on Mars to study the potential effects of a long-term stay on the planet on a human being.

Each trial would have four crew members living in the Mars Dune Alpha habitat, a 3D-printed 1,700 sq ft site that is completely isolated.

The crew is expected to simulate all the actions that would be necessary for survival on Mars. This involves simulated spacewalks, critical communication, crop growth, meal preparation and consumption, exercise and hygiene activities, equipment repair and maintenance, scientific research, data and sample collection, personal time, and sleep.

The crew is also expected to study and provide data on their health and behavioural performance during the exercise.

NASA plans to conduct three such analog missions, with the first one slated to begin this summer. The other two are scheduled for 2025 and 2026.

This is part of NASA's Moon to Mars plans for research and exploration. The agency has embarked on the Artemis mission to put people back on the Moon. With the first crewed flight on the Artemis II scheduled for November 2024, this trial will provide invaluable data on the living conditions of another celestial body so that NASA is better prepared to meet its goal of sending the first astronauts to the Moon (Artemis III, launch expected in 2025) and its first crewed mission to Mars in the future.

NASA's aggressive push towards establishing a sustained presence on the Moon and other planets comes on the heels of a paper published by Jonathan Jiang, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology. The research paper stated that humans could become a truly interplanetary species within 200 years.

With the climate catastrophe causing increasing devastation each year, the study claimed that the only way humans can avoid extinction is to develop the technology to escape the planet. In 2021, after its Crew-2 mission was launched into orbit, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said, "We don't want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species".

Major space missions have also brought private and commercial space exploration into the mix, along with the genesis of space tourism. The launches of Virgin Galactic Unity 22 with Virgin group founder Richard Branson, Blue Origin NS-16 with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and SpaceX's Inspiration4 have all brought on the genesis of commercial human spaceflight. This development made the eventual possibility of commercial space tourism suddenly become a very near future.

So significant is the development that the US Federal Aviation Administration changed the definition of "astronaut" after Bezos' voyage on July 20, 2021. It eventually ended its programme that awarded commercial space astronaut wings and settled on recognising individuals reaching space directly through its website.