Author: David Barber

Someone asked me once what I remembered best about Mars. It might have been a TV interview, or that woman writing a book about the Ares missions.

The sun afire behind closed lids came suddenly to mind, or was that a wishful memory of sighted days? Besides, it felt more like something from childhood, or possibly my first Orion flight, seeing dawn rise over the rim of the world and bars of sunlight slanting through the docking windows.

No, she wanted a Mars memory.

Though we worked out like jocks the whole way, our bones grew as frail as twigs, muscles slack as the elastic in old sweatpants, and no one guessed fluid pressure was slowly pinching my optic nerves, a rare side-effect of prolonged weightlessness.

Mars looked pale and dim through the portholes, a sign that my eyesight was already affected. I told no one, so I could still go down to Mars as planned, so all those years of my life wouldn’t be wasted.

The debriefs afterwards were highly critical, though I’ve spoken to astronauts since and some of them hinted they might have done the same thing. After all, I was the just the Mission Specialist; Sally Eiger was the lander pilot. She always maintained my eyesight didn’t cause the accident.

Ours was the unlucky second mission, the one with the planet-wide storms. The dust made us equals; a gloved hand was just a shadow, a radio voice the only clue. We collected rocks but doing proper science was impossible and Mission Control was debating whether to cut the mission short.

In the fog of dust, Sally stepped onto nothing and stumbled down into a crater. Instinctively I grabbed for her and also fell. She slid safely down the slope, and I rolled and thumped into a rock.

Sally was doing the awkward tortoise thing they train us for if we end up on our backs, while I just got to my feet.

My helmet display lit up immediately: fan, backup power, coolant temperature warnings. Probably a connector knocked loose, so one by one I silenced the alarms until there was just the insistent low-pressure warning. Then I felt the spit on my tongue boiling as air escaped from a leak.

We frantically checked my suit front and back for a tear. It was only later that we found the backpack had been damaged, a cracked air coupling that wasn’t fixable out on the Martian surface.

“Don’t you go passing out on me,” Sally warned as she plugged her buddy connector into my suit.

Her suit was now breathing for two, but it was like running a tap into a leaking bucket. Astronauts in a three-legged race, we hobbled back to the lander with minutes of oxygen to spare.

The near miss tipped JPL into ending the mission.

I recall when we came home, we were wheelchaired to the microphones, grinning at our own weakness. By then flashbulbs barely pierced the dark.

It would be years before our bodies, long seethed in radiation, betrayed us. I heard lessons were learned from us. These days our ailments seem quaint as scurvy, or the sepia lives of pioneers.

Sometimes it seems to me that the universe doesn’t want us out there, where nothing is easy and any mistake can kill. But then I think of Spanish sailors chancing Atlantic storms in tiny caravels, or Polynesians crossing the Pacific in rickety canoes.

It was long time ago, but yes, I recall the smell of Martian dust on my suit, the iron tang of another world.