Hollywood scriptwriters have had a lot of fun over the past 50 years fantasizing about space travel and life on Mars. The current thriller “Red Planet” is the latest entry in a long line that includes such exquisitely awful fare as “Mars Needs Women” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” But the drama of life on Mars may shift from big-screen fantasy to TV-news reality sooner than we think.
While NASA has no formal plan to send people to Mars, its consultants and aerospace engineers have been actively planning such a trip for nearly a decade, and many of them confidently predict a manned landing by mid-century. They believe the physical perils of long-term space travel can be overcome, but other scientists, the ones who study human behavior, worry that the six-person crews will face challenges more daunting than deadly radiation and zero gravity-namely, staying sane and getting along for 2 1/2 years in close quarters with little privacy under relentlessly hostile conditions. Imagine a 30-month-long family car trip through Antarctica.
So we asked Eva Maddox Associates, a Chicago firm specializing in interior architecture and design, to figure out how NASA might keep the space pioneers happy after a hard day crunching around in the red dirt, peering into craters and discovering alien life forms. The main threat to the crew’s psyches, the Maddox creative team decided, is plain old-fashioned homesickness. The cure is to throw a party, actually several parties, with a serious purpose: to maintain a cosmic bond with friends and family 50 million miles away.
“Celebratory experiences bind us socially, spiritually and emotionally,” observes Maddox, and the isolated and stressed-out Mars explorers will need to share in the important rituals back home. The team imagined sending regular cargo flights to Mars orbit–“Party Pacs”–that would provide the ingredients for an instant celebration of a traditional holiday, a birthday party or a cocktail soiree. The goal is to re-create a comforting sense of home–“the aroma of a Thanksgiving dinner, the sound of children’s laughter at a birthday party, the ooh and ahh brilliance of Fourth of July fireworks.”
Pictured here is a New Year’s Eve celebration, complete with disco light, party clothes and digital connections to family and friends.
