MDRS Day 0 - Prelude

After a long day in airports and a nice rib dinner at Chili's with the 4 out of 6 crew members that had arrived by dinner, the next day seemed like it should have been easier.

To learn more about the crew, read our biographies. Everyone seems pretty nice, although not particularly outgoing. Apparently, from what Jen (the commander of our crew) was saying, they got a lot more applications for the MRDS Spaceward Bound program than they anticipated, so they had a pretty decent pool of people to select from. This actually surprised me, since I alread doubted I would get accepted when I did, but to find out I beat out a lot of other people makes me wonder who was on drugs when they selected me.

Before we left for the habitat, we had to buy two weeks of groceries for 6 people on a budget of $400. It was somewhat dissapointing that no one had learned from Boy Scouts that you always plan your meals ahead of time and come up with a shopping list rather than chucking everything you think you'll need into a cart and hoping for the best. Granted, I had seen my fair share of full shopping carts, but I could not have predicted how awesomely close we were to our limit. At checkout time, we had two and a quarter carts full, and the total was $381.62. Jen and I yelled out a nice "yes" because it was such great timing.

We went back to the hotel to wait for the Plymouth Voyager, aka the spacecraft that would take us to Mars analog. A crewmember from Crew 52 (we are Crew 53) brought the van back from the habitat so we could pack it. However, this was no luxury ride. We spent at least 20 minutes trying to pop the hood open to fill the oil and antifreeze. Turns out it take two engineers to pop a broken hood, one to hold in the little connector thingy and another to apply torque to the handle.

After a rather uneventful 5 hours of driving past the most amazing and unusual rock formations I've ever seen (think DragonBallZ, middle of nowhere fight scenes. It reminded me of that), we arrived in Hanksville, Utah. For an idea of how small Hanksville, is, we walked into a gas station that had t-shirts that said "Where the Hell is Hanksville?" At least they can take a joke. We stopped at to meet Paul, the leader of the Remote Engineering team, at a hotel that had several copies of the Book of Mormon in several languages. Yep, we're in Utah...

After a brief stop in another gas station carved out of a blasted moutainside, we finally entered the gates to the Hab. It was hard enough driving to the hab as it was even after someone blasted away crumbled sections of rock with dynamite, but we made it to Mars around 8:15.

Crew 52 was still living there and cooked us dinner. It was pasta and some peanut sauce that reminded me of Pad Thai. Right after that we went into responsibilities handover mode. It seemed that 52 had more than their fair share of power failures and things that the Crew Engineer had to fix, so if I'm lucky I won't have to fix that much this rotation since I'm Crew 53's Crew Engineer. The outgoing CE gave me rundowns of the power inverter, the GreenHab power systems and water filters, the main generator Casper (named orginally because it was painted white and very silent like a ghost. Now it's loud and you can't hear yourself talk around it), the giant pile of spare junk we have to work with in case anything breaks down, and a basic rundown of the Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVA) area where the space suits are located.

There are several webcams around the hab (that I'll have to fix) that show what we're up to when we're not out on an EVA. You can also check out the daily reports from the last crew (and ours as soon as we write them).

Once most of the handovers were complete, J.R., Robbie, and I passed out in the loft since Crew 52 hadn't left yet. It was comforting knowing there were mouse traps right next to my face, especially since 52 had enough rodent problems. Jen bought a ton of mousetraps and LaTasha hates mice and rats.

I really think this will be fun. It will definitely be a lot of work, but I will learn a LOT and be able to bring a lot back with me. That's all for now. Corbin Out.