The Daily Telegraph - Features
What a week in ‘space’ taught me about living on the Moon
Christopher Cokinos takes one small step towards the experience awaiting Nasa’s new lunar astronauts
As I push the red airlock handle down and step into our space station, I half-wonder: will I end up losing my mind and have to be hauled out? After all, in the TV drama For All Mankind, one of the first astronauts to live long term on the Moon does just that.
I’m not really on the Moon, of course, but sealed up in the Space Analogue for Moon and Mars (Sam) – a research centre in the Arizona desert that boasts of being “as close as you can get to living on Mars without reducing gravity or dropping the temperature to 100C below zero.” Ditto for the Moon.
I will spend a week inside, living in a habitat meant to simulate missions beyond the Earth, helping us prepare for our first steps as a multiplanetary species.
I’m a little anxious. I’ve been in extreme environments and know the price you can pay. Twenty years ago, I spent a month living with scientists in Antarctica. I began to suffer from insomnia, obsessiveness and, finally, from serious depression. Before the expedition ended, I was evacuated after having suicidal thoughts.
This mission – Imagination 1 – would go a lot better than that.
I was living in Sam with three artists – a poet, textiles designer and dancer – from the University of Arizona, from which I’d just retired as a creative writer. If we are to make permanent homes in space, after all, we will need to take our cultural lives with us. Our dancer Liz George, for example, rehearsed moves for when she’d don a space suit on a simulated moonwalk. I took notes, planned articles and wrote daily mission reports.
But practicalities dominated, as they would on the surface of either Mars or the Moon. We monitored CO2 levels. We recycled our breath in the form of condensate into drinking water. We took turns cleaning the snug 1,200-squarefoot facility – its crew quarters, engineering bay and greenhouse module. We prepared dinner and dehydrated the food scraps – ultimately to be fed to mushroom colonies for future “astronauts” at Sam. We had to monitor and adjust the pressurisation system.
Our only contact was by email, as though we were in deep space, cut off from the rest of humanity, and we felt our isolation deeply.
All this despite training in advance for the mission, meeting multiple times before “launch” and becoming a close-knit crew, which was essential as we worked from morning to night on our projects and on maintaining Sam’s
high-tech systems. We even projected giant images of the Moon on the walls.
There were problems, inevitably. Small groups in confined spaces experience poor sleep, along with stress that can lead to moodiness, tempers, anxiety, mild to severe depression, even decreased dexterity. As the only man on the crew, I moved my sleeping pad from the crew quarters to under a shelf in the engineering bay. Even that didn’t stop the women from hearing my disruptive snoring. Days were long with housekeeping: from cleaning dishes with very little water to final checks of air pressure and the hydroponics rack at bedtime. Little irritations can take on major proportions in confinement.
But, to our credit, we handled disruptions well. We checked in on each other’s wellbeing. When one of us wanted space, the others kept quiet and distant. Yet when something had to be done, we told each other – and never flinched. There wasn’t a single eye roll.
But add a few more weeks and that surely would have changed. I know from my time in Antarctica that the extreme nature of such places can induce the “thousandyard stare” and worse.
Those are the challenges that the real astronauts of the Artemis programme will face. Nasa is sending astronauts on a lunar fly-by later next year followed by an actual landing with Artemis 3, scheduled for autumn 2026. The crew will land at the rugged south pole region of the Moon, where water ice lurks in permanently shadowed craters. The sun is low on the horizon, casting long light and longer shadows.
This, though, is the mission that may start a new era of long-term exploration and science, for that ice can be turned into drinking water, air and rocket fuel.
The Artemis 3 crew will spend several days on the Moon’s surface, longer than any Apollo mission, and the vision (shared by China, which is advancing its own space missions) is for permanent “base camps” on the Moon. Some of those may in fact be underground, in empty lava tubes shielded from the many dangers of lunar living.
The Moon’s surface is beset by sweeping sheets of radiation, from the Sun and other stars, even other galaxies, near-light-speed particles that slice through any living tissue that is not protected, cutting DNA molecules like rice paper and leading, eventually, to cancerous mutations. Long-term Moondwellers could suffer also from the lingering effects of exposure to one-sixth gravity. A lot of exercise will be required to keep hearts, muscles and bone-density strong.
Moon dust is also a huge problem. The Apollo astronauts after 1969 were vexed by the powder, which got under their fingernails and into their noses, lungs, mouths and eyes. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean said dust in the lunar module cabin “made breathing without the helmet difficult, and enough particles were present … to affect our vision.”
Yet from this grey land we will try to conjure the green world. In 2015 and 2016, Scott Kelly grew the first flowers in space – zinnias. Before International Space Station astronauts dine on lettuce grown in hydroponic racks, they eat up the views, smells and textures of these reminders of the Earth. They’ll do the same on the Moon.
They will also create, as we did. For as we came to the end of our week it was clear to me culture will become as essential in space as CO2 scrubbers, radiation shields and dust filters. If we don’t bring creativity, our lives will be impoverished – those of both the astronauts and the rest of us, who will want to know what it’s like.
I was the last in the group to go on a simulated moonwalk. As I donned my spacesuit, helped by my crewmates into the bulky, garment, I appreciated how hard it is to be an astronaut. The gloves were big and inflexible, yet I would use them to press buttons on a camera. I remembered being claustrophobic in all my coldweather gear in Antarctica. The pressure suit was far more confining. After being fitted into my helmet, air flowed like a river by my ear. In a partially landscaped industrial-like yard, I walked in galumphing steps while fixed to a counterweight system that simulated lunar gravity.
It felt a bit awkward at first, then, tip-toe by tip-toe, arms wide as though I were floating, I grew accustomed to this new effect on my body. I wasn’t exactly graceful, but I smiled. As a 60-something child of Apollo and amateur astronomer, I knew that this was as close to the Moon as I would ever get.
Our only contact was by email, as though we were in deep space