THE MARTIAN
( very British, tea-drinking )
How did our man on ‘Mars’ stay sane in a dome for a year? With a cuppa, he says in first talk since ‘re-entry’
A BRITISH engineer who spent a year locked away in isolation ‘on Mars’ told last night how PG Tips and Jammy Dodgers helped him to stay sane.
Andrzej Stewart, 34, made history living alongside five total strangers for 365 days in an isolated ‘space dome’ in an extraordinary experiment echoing the Matt Damon movie The Martian.
In his first interview since his ‘re-entry’ into the real world a week ago, Mr Stewart, originally from Banbury, Oxfordshire, told The Mail on Sunday how he staved off boredom by learning to play the guitar; was allowed a single, minute-long cold shower each week; and wore slippers from Tesco.
He kept in touch with his wife via time-delayed emails and admits the crew argued about ‘silly things’ such as how to do the washing-up.
And just as in the hit movie in which Matt Damon’s character has to fend for himself after being stranded on the Red Planet, Mr Stewart and his crewmates managed to grow meagre amounts of fresh vegetables in their makeshift space station using recycled water.
‘The biggest morale-booster was when we each had a single cherry tomato for dinner instead of freezedried food,’ he admitted. ‘That tomato tasted like heaven.’
Mr Stewart beat thousands of other hopefuls to take part in the Hi-SEAS experiment (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation), a joint project between Nasa and researchers at Hawaii University to study the physical and emotional effects of long-term space travel.
Crew members – three men and three women – lived in the dome-shaped, solar-powered ‘hab’ – short for habitat – 2,500 metres up the side of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, whose red rocks and isolation mimic Mars’s inhospitable landscape and which is inaccessible to tourists or prying locals. The ‘hab’ had 111 square metres of floor space below a loft area containing six tiny bedrooms, each with a single bed, a nightstand and a small storage cube. Mr Stewart earned just £12,000 for the year as the crew’s chief engineer, but says the experience was ‘priceless’ and shows that a trip to Mars, 40 million miles away, could succeed. ‘We proved it is possible to put a group of strangers together and successfully figure out problems over a long period,’ he said. ‘You had to suspend belief, but not too much. We couldn’t leave the hab without putting on a spacesuit.
‘We had no contact with any other human in person for the entire year. I could only communicate with my wife via email, and that was delayed by 20 minutes to mimic the delay in communications between Earth and Mars. The hardest thing was not being able to pick up the phone and talk in real time.’
The crew was banned from all internet access except Wikipedia and a US government-run weather site (‘for safety’). ‘You realise how much time you waste looking at cat videos on YouTube,’ said Mr Stewart. He added that while there were no stand-up fights, conflicts inevitably arose. ‘It’s like having a room-mate – things start to get on your nerves after a while.
‘We had silly arguments like how to wash the dishes. Some people wash up as they go along, others prefer to do the washing at the end of the day. This experiment was all about learning to get along with each other.’
Crew members wore sensors to monitor their stress levels, with data being sent back to researchers who will present an official paper on the project later this year.
While he is happily married to wife Christy and has a young son at home in Denver, Colorado, Mr Stewart said none of the single crew members – who also included a Frenchman, a German and three Americans – hit it off romantically. ‘There’s a percep- tion that it would be a great environment for something scandalous to happen but I’m sad to report everything was very tame,’ he laughed.
A real trip to Mars, which could take place as early as 2030, would involve up to two years of space travel, with experts saying they could get a crew to Mars but there is no guarantee of returning them safely to Earth.
Mr Stewart, who was born to a British mother, Theresa, an office administrator who lives in Nottingham, and a US Air Force father, grew up on military bases in Suffolk and Wiltshire and always dreamed of being an astronaut.
Before being chosen from thousands of other hopefuls to take part in the Mars experiment, he worked in mission control at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin in Denver and was involved in interplanetary projects, including the Juno probe to Jupiter and Nasa’s unmanned mission to Mars.
Each crew member was allowed to take in limited personal supplies.
Mr Stewart’s mother sent him PG Tips teabags, a selection of Cadbury’s chocolate, chocolate digestives, his favourite Jammie Dodgers biscuits and a Union Jack flag, along with a pair of slippers from Tesco.
‘Those items and the emails from home helped keep me sane and focused,’ he said. ‘Mum would write emails about sitting there with the dog. That sense of normalcy was comforting.’
There were also books and movies, including The Martian, which bugged the scientist because of a major inaccuracy. Mr Stewart said: ‘At the beginning of the movie, there is a dust storm which knocks everything out. But the atmosphere on Mars is so thin you would never have a storm capable of throwing around debris like that.’
And the first thing he ate when he left the pod? ‘A fresh Hawaiian pineapple. It was the greatest thing I’ve ever tasted.’