On Episode 423, the CHAPEA 2 crew shares the latest updates from inside their yearlong simulated Mars mission at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, including updates on daily life, holiday celebrations, and habitat routines. NASA experts discuss how CHAPEA simulates Mars EVAs and spacewalk opera-tions on Earth.
CHAPEA 2: Audio Log 2. I’m Kenna Pell, and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring in the experts: scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight, and more.
We’re back with another audio log from the CHAPEA crew. CHAPEA, or Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, is a yearlong analog mission in a habitat right here on Earth that’s simulating very closely what it would be like to live on Mars. We’re lucky enough to have check-ins with the crew: Commander Ross Elder, Flight Engineer James Spicer, Medical Officer Ellen Ellis, and Science Officer Matthew Montgomery. This is the second analog mission for CHAPEA.
This isn’t so much a technology demonstration or a dress rehearsal for a human Mars mission. The primary purpose of this study is human research – a deep study into understanding what life would be like if you were living on the red planet for a full year. Now, as much as we’d like to have live interviews with them, they are simulating what it would be like on Mars.
So video interviews, phone conversations, or really any form of communicating with Earth will be significantly delayed. Any information sent at the speed of light could take somewhere on the order of three to twenty-three minutes, and that’s one way, depending on relative distance between Earth and Mars as they orbit the Sun. This makes a two-way conversation, very, very difficult.
So to meet the needs of fitting in this analog, the crew is recording an audio log based on the questions that we have drafted for them. And on today’s episode, we’ll play recordings from February 2026, just over four months into the experiment, which is here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and just past their 1/3 mark of the mission.
We’ll also be bringing on two special guests, Patrick Estep, Technical Discipline Lead for the EVA and Environmental Physiology Lab, and Alex Baughman, Human Performance Engineer and Technical Lead for VR EVAs, to learn more about CHAPEA space walks. It was so great to hear from the crew. We’ve got lots of updates in this episode from how they spent their holidays. What type of work is keeping them busy?
On the flip side, how they are spending their downtime or off duty time? And can you guess who has the green thumb? And, of course, another much anticipated band update. Hello, Houston We Have a Podcast.
This is Matthew Montgomery, and I am the Science Officer for NASA’s CHAPEA Mission 2. Right now, we’re about 1/3 of the way through our mission, and we’re past that kind of initial settle in period, and everything is feeling normal in mission life at this point. Touching on some highlights from the last month, the crops have been a big one for me, both as a science officer and personally.
I really enjoy growing vegetables and different leafy greens and things. We have hydroponic systems inside of the habitat, so that’s how we do our growing. And we’ve been growing leafy greens, herbs, tomatoes, both sweet and hot peppers. I’m a big fan of spicy food, so having the spicy peppers have been a real delight to add to some of the foods.
Just brings out a little bit more flavor and adds to the variety. We’ve also been growing these smaller like lunch box style sweet peppers. I personally have never grown the sweet peppers like that, and the first time I had them, it reminded me of the first time I had fresh lettuce grown or fresh leafy greens. You have this kind of flavor and freshness overwhelm when you first bite into them.
It’s different than some of the things you get at the grocery store. So I really enjoyed that experience with the sweet peppers, and looking forward to continuing to grow other things. Aside from that, we’ve done a lot of science work as well. Different things like rock analysis, core analysis, material analysis.
With that, we do it both on the EVAs, or extra vehicular activities. So some experiments will be conducted in that environment, and then some are done inside the habitory, in our different science setups, part of the EVAs, that’s been a big one over this period.
Also, a lot of the non-Virtual Reality ones we’re doing, things like surface equipment builds- and you can think of those when the first people go to Mars, things are going to need set up. So there might be some robotic prepositioning or pre-setup done, but there’ll be a lot of equipment. Even if it’s set up, it will need monitored or checked. It’ll need to be continually maintained.
And then a lot will just need that human presence to get it set up as well. And then on the science side, thinking about those first people on Mars, you know, we have rovers there right now that are doing science work, and they’re doing incredible research that have unlocked a lot of information for us, but there’s still a level of abstraction there, so having people on Mars will just bridge that gap a little bit further and let us dig into that science a little bit more.
So we’re trying to replicate a little bit of what that might be like for them. In general, I would say we have found ourselves in a routine. But probably the best way to think about it is that there’s a different routine based on whatever the main task of the day is. So let’s use EVAs for an example.
The EVA is going to depend on, is it a virtual reality or VR, or a non-Virtual Reality EVA. And then within that, what is your role? So are you going on the EVA as one of the Extra Vehicular participants, or are you going to be inside as the local Mission Control? And depending on that, you’re going to have a different routine.
So if you’re going on the EVA, there’s a lot of personal preparation. Are you physically ready to go on it? Is your equipment set up and ready to go? Have you gone through the procedures?
Do you understand those in a way that you can execute on those just with limited instruction or verbal instruction from the localized Mission Control. Some other ones we have exercise performance along with bio collections. So those are like way points to gauge the effectiveness of, say, the food systems or the exercise counter measures.
So when we have a week that are very heavy with those tasks, we know what that is going to be like and how to prepare, and there’s a rhythm to that. Then we have other days that we kind of refer to as in habitat days, and those are filled with a lot of the other kind of catch all tasks, so things like exercise. Are we doing resistance that day, or are we doing a cardio routine?
And then maintenance is a reoccurring one. There’s maintenance both, just to keep the Hab in good shape. So, you know, cleaning task and those kind of things. And then there’s maintenance for the different flight-like systems.
We also do training and science work’s a big one for me, so making sure some of those are set up for the team to be able to do, and that kind of rotates around for everyone within their specialty. So those in habitat days come around quite a bit too, and break up some of the more mission focused, EVA style tasks. I’ll share a couple of fun facts around the time delay aspect of the mission.
So you probably have heard, if you’ve been listening to the podcast or other things that were between a thirteen and twenty-two minute time delay. So you go, “Okay, what does that mean? ” Specifically, the time delay is changing based on the relative position of Earth and Mars, and that’s simulated very accurately in CHAPEA so right now we have a timer that shows exactly what that time delay is. So I’m looking at it right now.
We are at twenty-one minutes and seventeen seconds. And that varies every day. It adjusts just a little bit based on that relative position distance. So over the course of the year, you get those swings, and that’s why you hear that different range given because it’s talking about kind of, you know, it could be anywhere in that range, depending on where we’re at in the year.
But for us, in the lived experience, you just see a little subtle shift every day, and we can look at it. And then another one, like, how does that affect our daily lives? We have our schedules kind of laid out in a software and it shows us each of the blocks and what we’re supposed to be doing at any given time.
And there’s a red line that shows the current time, but then you also have two other lines that show the time delay aspect. So they’re out forward ahead of time. So the first one shows what is the time that your message would be received by the ground crew if you sent it right now.
And then there’s another line even further out that shows the first possible time that you could receive a return message back from the ground crew based on sending a message right now. So that shows that minimum communication time delay of the sending out and coming back message. And you can use that to gauge: is sending a message going to help me with whatever situation I’m currently in?
So say you’ve only got 15 minutes to execute a task, you can look at it and go, I know I’m not even going to get my message to the ground team, let alone if they instantaneously respond, I wouldn’t get it back in time. Or if you’ve got quite a bit of time, you can use it to say, okay, yeah, there’s plenty of time to at least get a message and have them send it back if they respond, like almost immediately or very quickly.
So that kind of gives a idea of what the lived experience around the time delay is. It’s much more complicated than that, because there’s compounding factors like not just the time delay, but what we refer to as the human delay.
So is somebody able to respond to it right away, meaning it’s a quick answer, or does it need further investigation from subject matter experts, and how complicated is it for them to solve it and then get it back to you? So lots of aspects to the time delay that’s a big piece of CHAPEA and trying to gather data on this new kind of time environment, that’s not really a big factor for Space Station communications.
An unexpectedly human moment I had was one that turned out to be one of those, like duh realizations. It was after I had been working on the crops. So we were cutting a lot of basil and a lot of the leafy greens, and really just handling the plants and moving them and cleaning them and all those. So my hands had gotten pretty dirty in the process.
So when we finished up, we were cleaning up, and I had washed them, and it was before dinner. So I sat down to dinner, and I was kind of looking at my hands, and I had realized my thumb had been dyed green from just all the plant matter and debris and everything. And in that I looked at it and realized, oh, green thumb is a literal term. This isn’t just some like, made up phrase.
So, yeah, it was one of those I was today years old when I realized green thumb actually meant you have a green thumb. One aspect of living and working on Mars that was a little bit more challenging than I anticipated.
I think some of the secondary effects of the time delay, like, I had anticipated that there would be challenges around that time delay of 13 to 22 minutes, like I was talking about, but like, what would that actually be? And I think for me, it’s the writing aspect. So the vast majority of our communications have gone into writing. So that’s, you know, typing emails or writing into the Mission Log, different ways like that.
It’s possible that we can send voice recordings, but to do that, you’ve got to find a device, you’ve got to set it up and talk to it, then you’ve got to move the file. So it’s a little bit more cumbersome than just typing out a message. Same thing with video. It’s possible to send video, but we have bandwidth constraints.
So if you record it, it’s got to be in pretty low resolution. Normally, you have to compress it. There’s just a lot that goes into that. So the most efficient form tends to be just writing and typing emails or messages.
And there’s pros and cons that come with that. Writing is a great form of communication because you can be very precise, but in that you have to bring the discipline to be very concise and really hit on the points that you want to get or that you need answers to.
So thinking about it from like a Mars to ground perspective, if you need an answer on something specific, you’ve got to take the diligence to write that out very accurately so that it’s interpreted correctly. And if it isn’t, then you’re just adding to or compounding the time delay of getting to the answer that you need, and potentially, you know, spinning up the ground team to work in a direction that isn’t accurate, and this also kind of applies with your friends and family.
Trying to have communications and maintain relationships purely over that written form of communication adds a layer of challenge to things, so you’ve got to find ways around that. Some strategies that I’ve come up with on that front is trying to think of messages like we do in texting. So, you know, we’re all used to texting our friends and family. We communicate over email.
So I feel like when you’re on email, you tend to want to type or message in a certain way, but trying to pull that more like texting style aspect into the email style communications has been one strategy to just try to reduce message size and increase frequency, to maintain that connectedness feeling. Then kind of supplementing that when you have more time to type a little bit more detailed message out to those friends and family to give the kind of richness or depth to the conversation.
So yeah, the written aspect definitely unique and something I wasn’t quite expecting. On the more rewarding side of things, I wasn’t anticipating. It’s just the level of support for all things space and NASA and particularly our mission and Mars. So we got a little bit of a flavor for it before entering the Hab during training.
But we’re doing a lot of outreach, and, you know, communicating with my friends and family who are sharing information. And just I’m hearing feedback just how supportive the general public is, and the thirst for knowledge around space and these boundaries that are being pushed. It’s really refreshing and motivating to see kind of that coherence around something from everyone.
So I’m taking motivation from that, and I feel like that makes these kind of engagements even more worthwhile, so that we can share what’s happening and hopefully increase even more engagement and support for the space program. For things coming up that I’m looking forward to. We’re in an interesting period right now, I’m always looking forward to the drone and rover activities. I think that’s my favorite task in mission.
So high level overview of that: Basically we remotely pilot a drone and a rover, and the rover has a collection arm and a basket on it, so we can take those out, and it’s simulating going into locations that we wouldn’t be able to traverse to ourselves on the Martian surface. And these can relate to things like geology tasks. So maybe there’s minerals or rocks of interest in a specific area.
The drone would give you kind of an orthographic view of the area so you have a layout of the land. And then the rover, you could pilot that via its onboard camera systems, to specific sites of interest, observe and then collect potential samples of interest. And that one has a real, I think, solid feel of what actually being on Mars might be like.
You would really be exploring, though remotely, places that haven’t been touched before, necessarily, or sites of interest that might hold information that is very critical to our understanding of not just Mars, but maybe the development of the solar system, or potential life signatures on some of these rocks or minerals. So being able to, you know, control and collect some of those and have eyes on some of those remote locations, I think, would be a really exciting experience.
It’s very engaging and a lot of fun. So looking forward to doing that again. I don’t know about you, but I loved hearing Matthew’s excitement for all things space crops. In his last audio log, he told us how he was excited to dive into the plant growth side of his science officer role.
He mentioned how it mirrors some of his controlled environment agriculture background. It struck me when he was talking about growing peppers, and he said he likes them because they bring out a little bit more flavor, which, yes, as a spicy food person myself, I’m totally biased and get it.
But what I found funny too was that the astronauts in microgravity, such as aboard the space station, they also crave spicy foods, and they always have hot sauce on deck. So Matthew, while you are still grounded by Earth’s gravity, you are totally on the same page. Hello, Houston We Have a Podcast. This is Ellen Ellis.
I’m the Medical Officer for CHAPEA Mission 2. Back home I’m an officer in the Space Force, and I’m very proud to be part of the crew that will help NASA better prepare for long duration human space flight. Things are going well here at Mars Dune Alpha. By mid March, we’ll be approximately 150 days into mission.
I was thinking the other day about comparable human experiences to living in an isolation on a simulated Martian surface for a year long mission. In a nutshell, Ross, Matt, and James and I left behind life as we know it, and we went on this adventure because we want to better understand what that experience might be like for future astronauts.
I was thinking in particular, of the concept of Rumspringa, where Amish adolescents are given the opportunity to explore life outside their community. We kind of went the opposite way. We turned in our cell phones and gave up our internet access, but we’re making do just fine. Our schedule is pretty compressed, and we’re always moving from task to task, so there really isn’t any time to feel bored.
Honestly, it feels like just yesterday we were sitting in the studio at Johnson Space Center recording our first Houston We Have a Podcast together. So yeah, the crew is doing well. We are healthy and happy and going strong. Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a crew getting into a flow state when we need to accomplish an objective.
So the highlight for me is when the four of us synchronize on a task without even discussing it, where each person determines how best to support each other. It’s, it’s like crew ballet.
For instance, earlier this week, we had to move some supplies from the air lock into storage, and we wordlessly self organized into roles where one person lifted and another person transported from A to B, handing off to another crew member to stow. Mission Control must think we’re like little bees maneuvering in the habitat. If you’ve ever played sports on a team that perform well together, I think you’ll know that feeling.
It’s a really good one, except the sports we have here are construction projects on the simulated Martian surface or habitat maintenance activities. Not every team gets there. So for me, it’s the difference between playing on a team and being a crew. It’s been awesome to have the crop towers filled with leafy greens and peppers, tomatoes and herbs.
We alternate crop chores like watering and pollinating. It’s been really nice having fresh vegetables augmenting our food system. Food is going to be a great mass and resource driver on future long duration missions, and the crew will likely have more limitations on a Mars mission than they do on the ISS today. All of our food is dehydrated, thermostabilized or irradiated.
You’d be surprised how enjoyable the crunch of a sweet pepper can be after a few months of going without fresh vegetables. I’ve actually enjoyed the process so much that I suggested to my husband that he buy a grow tower for himself for Christmas. I packed a small tool kit with odds and ends. There’s a multi tool and hex wrenches, a little ratchet jewelry screwdriver.
Every time I go in there, I find the tool that I need, and I think, yep, my dad would be proud of me, and that brings me joy. My Kindle has been awesome. We have blocks of exercise scheduled daily. I really enjoy putting on an audio book and learning something new.
I’ve got a wide range of nonfiction books across different disciplines, from science and economics and personal development, and a favorite author of mine right now is Mary Roach. She does a great job of blending science and humor. It’s just delightful. I brought some fiction as well.
When you’re in isolation or confinement, books can really transport you. Our schedule is such that we have tasks Monday through Saturday, from morning until well into the evening. So Sundays are a really nice opportunity to rest up and get lost in a book. But the most meaningful to me personally is the care package that my husband assembled for me prior to ingress.
Each crew member was allowed to bring a care package from our families. Mine has dated letters meant to be opened over the course of the mission with small games for the crew, holiday decorations. It was incredibly thoughtful. Every month I get a new little Ziploc bundle of cards to open.
They really mean so much to me to have the support of my family and friends from growing up in Rhode Island and from different military assignments, Minot Air Force Base in Los Angeles, my classmates at the Naval War College, I’ve heard from Belgium, New Zealand, Nigeria, Montenegro, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. One of the first letters that I opened was from a friend from middle school that I haven’t connected with in years, and it was just really great to hear her words of encouragement.
And most recently, I got a letter from my niece Adriana’s seventh grade science class that just brought tears to my eyes, so to all my friends and family out there that took the time to drop in a note, it’s helped me more than you’ll know, and I can’t wait to see you in person and say thanks when the mission completes. One aspect of working in isolation that can be challenging is the give and take with the ground team supporting the mission.
We’ve all become accustomed to having information instantaneously available at our disposal. If you want to better understand something, you could easily pick up the phone and call someone or stop by their office to sync on an issue, but we don’t have that luxury, and it’s very easy for a miscommunication to occur. This is also an integrated study between nutrition, behavioral health, exercise and there’s so many elements that require coordination.
As a crew, we found that incremental information, even if it’s not the final solution, is quite helpful and allows us to move forward as a team. That’s been a really rewarding experience as well when we’ve successfully been able to work through an issue with the ground team and arrive at a mutually agreeable solution. There are a few things coming up on the horizon that I’m looking forward to.
For mission tasks, one thing in particular is getting experience with some of the medical technology that we’ve been provided in the Hab. On a long duration mission astronauts will likely be exposed to a range of health issues, including bone density loss, radiation exposure, muscle loss, not to mention all the other hazards and perils of interplanetary travel. They’ll need good diagnostic tools to assess physical health. The crew is getting some experience with ultrasound imagery, which is exciting.
We’re figuring things out. I’m looking forward to seeing our continued improvement. For our crew. Matt’s birthday is coming up, and that’ll be our first birthday celebration here in the hab.
I know James and Ross will want to do something fun to celebrate him. We’ll have to save him all the best food options, or volunteer to take all his maintenance tasks for the week or something.. We’ll get creative. It’s what we’re good at.
Ellen, I feel completely the same. It feels like just yesterday we were sitting here in the studio together recording our first episode. And when I think about it, we actually just surpassed six months since ingress. And I know at the time you recorded these audio logs, you had just hit the 1/3 mark into the mission, but six months, wow!
I absolutely loved Ellen’s poetic, as always, ways to describe the team’s flow state when they need to accomplish an objective. She told us how they’re at a point where the four of them synchronize on a task without even discussing it. It’s like crew ballet, for instance. She said it was a fascinating look at how future Mars crews will have a lot of autonomy and decision making, especially with comm delays.
Well, we’ve officially made it past our 1/3 mark, and we’re all still standing. I think we’re pretty solidly in a routine as the mission keeps moving forward one day at a time. How about you James? I agree things are going very well.
We’ve been enjoying eating vegetables that we’ve been growing as part of our crop activities. We’ve been working through plenty of space walks, plenty of science experiments, getting to know our way around a geology kit. So lots to do, lots of excitement, and we’re looking forward to the rest of the mission. Well, it’s been a bit of a learning curve.
Mission Control is keeping us busy. They schedule our days from morning till evening, and that does include meal times and downtime, but there’s certainly a lot to do. Our schedules on the weekends are lighter, which is nice. Gives us some time to rest.
We’re getting used to the astronaut food that we eat every day. One thing I wasn’t used to coming in was exercising six days a week, which can sometimes be quite challenging. and sometimes we have space walks on top of those workouts as well. So certainly lots to get used to. The last month has been very heavy with EVAs.
As of yesterday, we just completed the 50th EVA of the mission, with many, many more to come. Together, we’ve had to work through power outages, lost communications, and more. They tend to be more an all hands on deck kind of moment to steer the ship back on course. But honestly, enjoy the challenges the most.
I feel like that’s where we have the best opportunities to learn the most. Completely agree, those have been some exciting moments. Other things we’ve been working on is doing some science experiments during our space walks. We’re working on an experiment right now testing the effect of long duration exposure of materials, to the simulated Martian environment we have outside.
We’ve also been harvesting some vegetables as part of our crop activities. We’ve been enjoying some tomatoes, lettuce and radishes, amongst other crops. And one of my favorite things has been testing the medical equipment we have here as part of our mission. I don’t get to work with a lot of medical equipment in my day to day life back on Earth, so that’s been particularly interesting to me.
Because we don’t have access to the internet here. We aren’t able to access streaming services, and our bandwidth is very limited, but one of the crew had brought along, which we watched the other day as a group. And given that we are simulating a year on Mars, we suddenly empathized with the protagonist in the story.
James, something that you had mentioned is that we have no access to the internet, and one of the things that I think has helped is actually computer programming. It’s been a big help for automating some of the more routine tasks.
Despite not having any code editing software, I’ve managed to write over 5000 lines of code in a fairly uncommon programming language for applications because we’ve had no access to internet, it’s been a real test of my coding knowledge and creativity. Often happen to find some pretty unique workarounds to make everything talk to each other. How about you? For me, one skill that has become more important is patience.
Because we have the Mars to Earth time delay of up to 22 minutes in each direction, there’s no such thing as getting a quick answer via Google, for example, or texting a friend, calling an expert or getting instant answers by email. If we do have questions, it could be 45 minutes minimum before we get an answer.
So we often have to make decisions by ourselves and move forward or just accept that this isn’t a question that’s going to get answered today. We’re going to have to wait. And this is the first time that Houston We Have a Podcast has been checking in on us after the holidays. James, how did we celebrate them?
Well, because we’re on Mars, Christmas and New Year’s Day, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, they were just regular work days for us. we celebrated Christmas with a space walk. We did manage to decorate the habitat with paper snowflakes and Christmas trees that we had brought along with us.
We watched a Christmas movie to get into the spirit of the season, and without really planning it, we all had brought along gifts for each other, so we had a fun exchange of gifts the evening of Christmas day. So Ross, the question that all the listeners at home are waiting to hear the answer to, how has band practice been coming along? Well, we’ve had at least a couple practices so far during our team activities have.
I think we’ve been having a pretty enjoyable time chipping away, learning some new instruments. Then you’ve got James the seasoned veteran on the keyboard. Ellen’s even found a liking to some electronic drums and mixing. Since we’re a bit limited on our instrument selection, and we’re definitely still looking for the right set list, but I think we found a few things here or there sounded pretty decent.
It’s a start. I’m hoping we find some more time in the future, and I’m looking forward to it. All right, James, so what’s One fun fact about living on Mars that you’d like the people and our listeners of Earth to know. Well, I’m not sure how much of a fun fact it is, but to me, CHAPEA and a lot of human spaceflight in general is a bit of a contradiction.
On the one hand, we’re extremely lucky to be here, and our simulated Mars mission represents one of the grandest ambitions of humanity. But on the other hand, we do spend a lot of our time mopping floors, mending things, sewing our clothes, cleaning toilets, and so a lot of our activities day to day aren’t as glamorous as people on earth might expect. And how about you?
Yeah, the one fun fact that I was going to mention is kind of in the same vein where one of the tools that we have for the not so glamorous work is a mallet, which is an exceptionally effective and multi-faceted tool, especially here on Mars. The possibilities are truly endless, sometimes a swift blow by mallet fixes the stubbornest of parts when building. I couldn’t agree more.
I used to think that the Marvel Thor movies were unrealistic because they depicted a large man using a huge hammer to solve a multitude of problems. But if CHAPEA has taught me anything, it’s taught me that this is actually more realistic than one might expect. Well, because we have no internet here, we don’t watch a lot of movies.
However, Mission Control has managed to find some time to upload a new movie for us, so we’re excited to watch a movie calledin a few weeks, which I believe was a movie that came out last year about an astronaut who gets stranded on a distant planet. So excited to hear how that works out. All right, that’s it from us here at Mars Dune Alpha.
Thank you, Houston We Have a Podcast for having us on and we look forward to chatting with you again soon. That was Commander Ross Elder and flight engineer James Spicer. Well, it’s more like James interviewing Ross, which was fantastic. Wow.
I don’t know about you, I was surprised to hear how many space walks they’ve done, more than 50, with a lot more to go. And okay, so to break down an EVA or a space walk, we traditionally hear about those on, say, the International Space Station, it’s when an astronaut or cosmonaut exits the space station to perform upgrades or maintenance outside. But what does that mean in a simulated Martian habitat?
So, similar to the International Space Station, it comes down to when the crew exits the spacecraft. And the crew has two ways of doing this. One is in a sandbox, just as it sounds, simulated Martian soil where the crew gets in a space suit and performs tasks. The other is in a virtual reality simulation.
Now that’s the gist, but just here, in a moment, we’ll hear from Patrick Estep and Alex Baughman, who will give us the 101 on all things Martian spacewalks. There were also some logistical things that Ross and James brought up about the space walks that were quite fascinating, and I will definitely be asking Patrick and Alex about that too. Patrick, Alex, thank you so much for joining us on Houston We Have a Podcast.
Let’s go to you first, Alex, can you tell our listeners about your role and how it supports the ongoing CHAPEA mission? Yeah, I’m the technical lead for CHAPEA’s Virtual Reality Extra Vehicular Activities, or VR EVAs. And throughout the entire mission, crew will perform a lot of different EVAs.
Some of them are done in virtual reality, and we measure a lot of their physiology and try to capture different performance measures metrics as they’re going through these different EVA tasks in virtual reality. I’ve been supporting CHAPEA pretty much since I got here. So about 2021, when they’re doing the first mission one, and doing all the planning and prep for the first mission.
So it’s definitely been a big project that I’ve been working on while I’ve been at NASA. Sure. So officially, I am the co-investigator for the VR EVA efforts that occur during the missions, so kind of supporting a lot of the overarching design of the study, the measures that go in there, and really trying to answer the questions about if and how EVA performance might be impacted, especially when we look at this, this holistic, integrated Martian simulation.
Okay, and you’ve been a guest on the podcast a few times, so this is, I think, is your third. Can you tell us you know from the previous CHAPEA mission, has anything changed in your role from CHAPEA 1 to 2?
Within the project, specifically, not really. outside of the project, some of my day to day roles and responsibilities have changed some, so I’ve had to step back a little bit from parts of CHAPEA, and so I really kind of bring more that big picture lens, but that’s what allows awesome people like Alex to really step up and shine and put their mark on the future of space flight. And Alex, you’re new to the podcast… no pressure, sitting next to Patrick’s been on a couple times.
No, I’m just kidding! But I did ask you how long you’ve been here. Can you tell our listeners how you got to your role today. What did you study in school?
Just, you know, your journey to NASA? Yeah, I went to school at University of Colorado Boulder, where I got my bachelor’s and master’s in aerospace engineering. And while I was there, I was also working in a research lab, doing a lot of virtual reality research and kind of as it relates to human space flight, specifically. It is.
Yes, yeah, it can. It all started out just like this undergraduate research program that the university offers, and I got paired up with this professor, and she was doing a bunch of virtual reality research for NASA, and was actually funded by the lab that I’m currently working in right now. So a lot of that work and relationships that I built at university sort of helped line me up for NASA.
So as soon as I graduated, I moved down to Houston, and then I’ve been helping out our lab, the EVA and Environmental Physiology lab, with a lot of our virtual reality projects and how we can do EVA research using these new sort of virtual reality tools. Super cool. Let’s talk about what we’re here to talk about, our CHAPEA EVAs, or you’ll hear us call them Martian EVAs.
And we got to hear from Matthew, the mission science officer in this episode’s audio logs, and he spoke about these. Can you walk us through what these Martian EVAs entail? How about Patrick, let’s go to you. Yeah.
So the current concepts for operation, or Con Ops, as we call them, for Mars, include a lot of different kinds of tasks, general exploration and science. And as we look to establish, you know, permanent structures and live on these surfaces, we’ll have pioneering and maintenance and more things along those veins.
So generally, in CHAPEA, we’re trying to simulate the best of what we think a Martian mission will look like, including those provisions for Mars walks all the way from start to finish. So getting in your spacesuit, getting out the door, doing your tasks and then coming back in after a successful EVA.
And so we’re trying to look at these multi hour end to end EVAs with different tasks, and especially looking at them in a relatively short timeframe, as well. Doing back to back EVAs, doing multiple EVAs in a week, which is a different paradigm than what we currently do on ISS. I keep going back to you said CONOPS so concepts of operation, is that kind of planning for the unknown or what you don’t know?
I think it’s more along the lines of, we think this is how we’re going to operate and what we think we’re going to do. It’s a very common term, I think at NASA. It just again, we generally know what we’re going to do.
The specifics may not be there yet, but there are several documents and papers that kind of outline, you know, we’re going to go do this, and we’re going to do that, and we’re going to do that, and this will touch that, and we’ll interface with these different things. So really trying to understand the- just what we think we’re going to do. We may not know the specifics just yet, but we’re building towards understanding those specifics.
Got it. Got it. Alex, is there anything you wanted to add on, just general what these Martian EVAs entail? Yeah.
I mean, a lot of it is pulling from some of these architecture documents that NASA has sort of outlined what these different CONOPS are, and a lot of that is kind of just met general maintenance tasks, doing science on the surface, and then, of course, exploration, so sending the humans out and our unique capabilities to go and explore the unknown. And within CHAPEA, we’ve tried to pull a lot of those different concepts and just try to make them very functional sometimes they’re walking around the habitat, doing inspections, sometimes various maintenance tasks on the habitat.
Lot of geology tasks, some kind of sampling. Sometimes there’s some surface assets, like a solar panel they got to dust off and do some maintenance on the solar panel, realigning communication dishes. Sometimes they’re just inspecting the habitat exterior and going through various maintenance procedures, but trying to pull from a lot of these different architecture documents and the Con Ops that are out there within NASA, and trying to just recreate them in the virtual environments.
So…It’s fascinating what you were saying about things such as, you know, solar panels and stuff like that. And you think about, you know, this crew is at the time of, you’re about to hit 200 days in, and all of the planning that goes into all of these different space walks. So definitely have lots of questions on those.
But I do want to ask first Matthew, He had also mentioned VR based and non-VR based EVAs in his audio log. Can you explain why some are VR and some are not? Alex? Go to you?
Yeah, I think there’s just different pros and cons to each VR and non-VR. So the virtual reality is really great for simulating these long surface traverses and really immersing you in the simulation environment, walking on the surface, seeing the different environmental conditions through the headset.
And then there’s also a lot of different unobtrusive measures that we can sort of embed into the VR simulation, so we can capture lots of different performance measures of the crew as they’re going through these various tasks that we just talked about, and really trying to quantify their performance. And is that changing throughout the mission? And then what that means for us and for the CHAPEA mission is these different performance and physiology measures.
So that’s the virtual side, the non-VR side, there’s just a little bit more physical focus. So the VR controllers aren’t maybe the best at creating that, that physical demand of working within a space suit and using all these different tools to to open up different surface assets.
So the non-VR EVAs really kind of get at that physical effort of constructing different infrastructure and doing different maintenance, maintenance tasks, moving payloads in and out of the habitats for resupplies and all that. Things that we can’t really do that well in VR. So there’s just kind of the different pros and cons of both VR and non-VR EVAs.
So for ISS EVAs spacewalkers trained for a really long time, learning all about the suits that they’re going to wear and spending a lot of time over here in our Neutral Buoyancy Lab here at Johnson. What kind of training did the this crew do or receive before ingressing? Yeah, we try to replicate a lot of the kind of similar training pipeline that the astronauts will do.
So we start off with our classroom style training, where we literally just in a classroom, a small kind of meeting area, going through presentation slides to really just trying to introduce the crew to the various equipments, the operations of an EVA and then how they would begin to just sort of piece that together. And then we actually get into some hands on where we start to play around with the the space suit simulator, which is not a real space suit, but the different equipment, the VR equipment.
And then a lot of the training, at least for the virtual reality side, is just learning how to use that VR system, how to set it up, and really how to troubleshoot it. Because I believe we’ve talked about this in past episodes, but that comm delay that we simulate in CHAPEA the crew has to be able to understand what those different fault modes are, how to troubleshoot it, and basically just how to carry out the EVA independently of us.
It’s just learning how to, how to manage that communication delay. And then the training is a big part of that. So a lot of pre-mission training. And then even in mission, we provide sort of these, we call them just in time training videos.
So these short, little videos that crew can reference in mission to kind of refresh their memory of maybe what a particular operation or EVA task would look like. Got it.
I do have many other questions about that comm delay that we’ll get to when we talk logistics, but going back to one of the other questions I had about planning CHAPEA Mission 2 Commander Ross, he’d also mentioned the EVAs in his audio log, and I was surprised to hear that the time he recorded the audio log, they had hit 50 space walks already and had a lot more to go. Can you explain the importance of these space walks?
Are they all pre-planned? Are there any that maybe aren’t planned? I won’t speak too much to what might be planned versus not planned, but again, coming back to CONOPS, as we look to go back to the moon and to Mars and beyond, those operational concepts do outline multiple EVAs in a week, up to 24 hours of EVA per crew member per week.
So we expect that we’re going to be going out and doing a lot of science. We’re sending humans to these far away, vast places with all kinds of science and exploration to do. So we expect to do those things nominally, and that’s why we’re kind of testing them and studying them in the same. Same way in CHAPEA, really pushing kind of that human envelope and understanding.
Does this have an impact back on the human? How can we support them? Do these integrated countermeasures kind of come together and support the human to meet all of these objectives? So typically, we go in planning that, and though we don’t plan to have bad days.
Sometimes they do happen. And so if we’re conducting unplanned EVAs operationally, even though we don’t want this to happen, we train and prepare for those. And so as we’re looking, you know, to do these EVAs, we really try to understand all of the surface ops, from the science, the sample collection, building structures, maintaining them similar to what we do on ISS right now.
Even as we think about building habitats and infrastructure to support sustained living on these surfaces, we’re going to have to do some of those same kinds of things, I think, for the Martian environment. And then even just what we know historically, looking at the Apollo missions, especially 15, 16, and 17, those missions had a number of EVAs on each one of them.
So we expect that that’s going to continue on in some capacity, maybe bigger and better as the hardware and the technology just gets better and better to support humans doing those kinds of things. So the VR EVAs, in terms of trying to do data comparison within the mission. We try not to do too much of building off of the EVA.
So each virtual reality is kind of a new standalone simulation from the same starting configuration, you can say. So that allows us to compare crew performance six months into mission to what they’re at at the beginning of the mission. But for the non-VR EVAs, that’s a lot more sort of construction tasks, and they’re building a lot more things in the sandbox.
So a lot of these can’t be done in a single EVA, and so it takes them multiple EVA, sometimes multiple crew members, so making sure that they have good sort of communication of what one EV pairing was doing on that EVA, versus handing off those notes to the the next crew, and make sure that they’re they’re building the same surface asset.let’s talk the logistics about these Martian space walks. Alex, can you tell us about the prep that goes into these EVAs?
Yeah, from the crew perspective, it’s usually kind of starting where they will review their pre-brief documents. So we’ll send them some information of what the upcoming EVA is going to look like, what some of those different station tasks are. So whether they’re going to be doing some geology or maybe they’re doing some maintenance tasks, so reviewing those pre-briefing materials, and then the morning of it’s going to be kind of getting sure all your equipment is ready.
So checking out your spacesuit simulator, making sure you have everything in the airlock. You have all of your VR equipment is charging and ready to go. And then from there, it’s pretty much just following the procedures so doing what you’ve been trained to do, and then donning your space suit simulator and egressing the habitat and beginning that EVA.got it. So donning your space suit.
Later, I had a question, is it in maybe you had mentioned this? Is it a helmet, or is it a headset when you’re doing VR? So we are wearing VR headsets when we do VR EVAs, and then on the non VR EVAs, they wear a helmet.
So you might have seen some images coming back from the CHAPEA II crew, yeah, where they are, maybe in a sandbox environment, and they’ve got this kind of nice helmet bubble, face shield on top of them. So that’s a difference between the non-VR and VR EVAs. But for the most part, they’re wearing the same suit simulator. So not trying to deviate too much between those, those two.
Got it. And then, speaking of suit simulators, Patrick, can you tell us about design concepts of those and then their use here in the mission? Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of spacesuit simulators that exist, whether that’s in our kind of government focused research or academia or even industry now, and they all have their pros and cons, and it depends on what they were designed to do.
Virtual reality kind of suit simulators are maybe very different from those that are really focused on the physical kind of elements and the shape and geometry and fit and sizing. And so some are really good at looking at that. Others might be really good at understanding the suits kind of weight and center of gravity and how the human moves in them. So there’s a lot of different suit simulators.
There’s a lot of pros and cons to them. Others might even be more focused on like cognitive aspects and immersive aspects, such as reduced dexterity, visibility, lighting, communications, all of these kinds of things that really play into what a human is having to interact with during EVA.
Some might even have provisions for things like life support, for cooling, for heat management, et cetera, depending, again, on what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to understand, whether that’s human health, performance, the human factors, you name it. So there’s a lot of suit simulators, but none of them are really perfect at simulating what it’s like to be in a real pressurized spacesuit at reduced gravity.
And so what we use in CHAPEA, it does have aspects that are common to some of those other suit simulators and architectures. So there’s some encumbrance to the human that they’re having to wear and manage. They provide maybe some level of limited mobility and dexterity in certain elements, whether that’s the gloves, for example. There’s a lot of literature about that during EVA.
We provide some of those basic elements for life support, water, for example, and then, you know, some limited informatics capability, so the crew have to communicate with each other as part of that. So there’s, there’s definitely some elements there within the CHAPEA suit simulator, but there are certainly some limitations as well.
So as we go off and we complete CHAPEA, and we start to look at the data, we’ll have to take that into consideration when interpreting the outcomes. Matthew and his audio logs mentioned local Mission Control and Alex, so did you with time delays of up to 22 minutes each way? Can you tell us a little bit more about how the crew supports in that capacity of having their own mission control?
Yeah, having their own mission control is maybe a little different than what we typically think of as Mission Control, where it’s, you know, the big room down in Houston, and there’s multiple flight controllers helping out with various aspects of the mission, but it’s really kind of impractical to do that for Mars when you have these long communication delays, and especially if there’s any kind of off, nominal contingency scenarios where crew needs to make a decision in a shorter time period than it takes to get a message back to Earth. So a lot of this is really even just trying to figure out how a crew can autonomously, autonomously perform their EVAs.
And this local Mission Control, as Matthew called it, is it’s really inside the habitat. So on our EVAs, you typically will have two crew members will go outside, and then the other two will stay inside the habitat in that local Mission Control. And they’re monitoring a lot of the different aspects that we do typically monitor here in Houston in Mission Control.
So crew biomedicals, communicating with the crew, you’ll have your science team taking various notes of what the outside crew is seeing and what they’re reporting on.
So it can be quite a lot just for those two interior crew members to support the EVA outside and make sure that they have everything they need to, they know what’s coming up next, and then that they’re not maybe overworking themselves,I think that’s a very real knowledge gap in this space is, you know, right now there’s so many people in such a huge structure set up to support like ISS EVAs, that is going to have to be different for Mars because of the comm delays, and so I think there’s a lot of research and testing that’s either going on now or should be going on now or soon, really trying to understand what it’s like to condense and consolidate a lot of that current mission control structure.
And to put that burden, ultimately, it’s going to have to go on the crew, probably, or systems that the crew is interfacing with if we have really smart technologies and integrated data and these kinds of things. Yeah, I think we’ve hopefully highlighted a number of kind of the knowledge gaps that we’re talking about and we’re concerned with for going to and living on Mars and conducting EVAs from there, ultimately, the CHAPEA data will provide really cool insights towards conducting autonomous EVAs, kind of crew central at a higher operational tempo than we’ve done a lot of historically, other than the few examples from Apollo and even some shuttle EVAs.
Additionally, the data, because this is such an incredible integrated mission and simulation, we’ll be able to really look at all of the elements across that integrated mission and understand, you know, if the impact of restrictions on resources or the food system, or maybe even some of the exercise content might promote and protect crew health and performance or alter, you know, the outcomes when they’re conducting EVAs. So really cool, really powerful data set.
Well, I mean, especially at Johnson, there is a lot of different VR efforts, and it’s really fun just to kind of watch it throughout the years, because there’s some really interesting work that’s being done with virtual reality, where, typically, I mean, we do a lot of space suit and EVA research, which can be very expensive, and trying to just set up some of these tests are, it takes a lot and a big integrated team to do that. So virtual reality has really kind of helped open the door to sort of this, like higher cadence, lower overhead testing, and so we can start to test a lot of these EVAs day after day.
And what that looks like, that cost is on the human. So specifically within our lab, we’ve created a VR test environment we call APACHE, which is the Assessments of Physiology And Cognition in Hybrid-reality Environments, another big acronym. APACHE is our Human Health and Performance sort of VR test bed that we use to test a variety of different research goals. So some of them have been looking at different levels of carbon dioxide exposure.
So putting someone into the VR environment, having them go through a simulated emergency return to lander, so a long one kilometer traverse, walk back to the lander, but then we are giving them different levels of CO2 exposure and seeing how that impacts their performance. Are they able to get back to the lander? Is there a certain exposure level that is too much to handle for the humans. So that’s just one example.
We have a lot of other research where using the VR to sort of maybe develop some of these support systems. So we have another project called PersEIDs, which is the Personalized EVA and Informatics Decision Support system. Another. Big acronym, but again, trying to look at a support system and autonomous sort of AI system that you can provide different recommendations to the crew.
Here’s how we can maybe do this EVA better. Maybe timeline is shifting, and it’s helping provide a lot of that decision support that is typically done in Houston Mission Control. But we’re starting to look at a lot of these tools and how we can develop them for Mars in these VR and tests, test environments in APACHE. So that’s just one example.
I’ll go on one more because I think they do some really cool research. But it’s, it’s really the virtual reality lab here at Johnson, so they do a lot of the astronaut training, and then their Prototype Immersive Technologies the PIT lab. They’ve been doing a lot of cool work with the Artemis flight controllers and trying to figure out how to navigate on the surface.
So they’ve recreated a couple of the different Artemis potential landing sites, and then they’re able to sort of simulate some of these space walks in VR and then how we would navigate, how we would provide some of that operational support to the crew, as they’re sort of traversing this foreign environment that we really can’t recreate here on Earth. So a lot of the lighting conditions on the South Pole, the craters, the very barren landscape, is very challenging to traverse and navigate in.
So virtual reality is a exceptional tool to sort of recreate these, these barren landscapes, the harsh lighting, and then start to figure out, how are we going to get from point A to point B, and what support do we need in the back room to carry that out? And so you had mentioned these CHAPEA VR EVA simulations, kind of supporting other efforts too, and helping to build other simulation efforts around the agency.
Patrick, can you tell us more about that? Yeah, absolutely. I think Alex started to hit on it, but the VR simulation bed that we used and built a lot of CHAPEA concepts on have really been the foundational element for building capabilities for other testing and other measures looking at CO2 exposure, cognitive workload and demand, etc. So there’s kind of that piece on the flip side.
When we look at some of the other measures and tasks and those kinds of elements outside of VR, we’re doing some of those same measures and other simulations and analogs as well. So we can really compare this environment to that environment, to that environment, or subject to subject, or mission to mission, or whatever it may be, and understand and really start to disentangle some of those unique applications and limitations to each of these different environments.
So because EVA research is so limited, as Alex highlighted, we really have to be smart and tactical and kind of do the best we can with the limited data that we get. So being able to do the same things in different places help us really put that picture together and holistically understand what’s going on at the human level when doing exploration EVAs.
CHAPEA, specifically, it was also one of the first cases, at least since I’ve been here, where we started looking at doing multiple EVAs in a short time frame. And so really trying to understand what that looks like, again, kind of at the human level.
And so some of the measures and design inspiration kind of laid the groundwork for a study that I’m co leading with Dr Nicole Strock called the High Tempo EVA Study, where we’re going to go off and look at and understand the human health and performance implications of conducting up to 24 hours of EVA for subjects in a single week. And so one facet of that study, that’s a very direct overlap and tie will be looking at how the exploration food system and nutrition, again, might support and supplement crew health and performance when conducting EVAs at that cadence.
Thank you both so much. This was such a cool conversation. I feel like I have 100 more questions, but that is all the time that I think we have for today. Thank you.
All right, it was great to hear from the CHAPEA Mission 2 crew today. And I’m looking forward to our next check in with the crew in a couple of months! Our producer is Dane Turner. Audio Engineers are Will Flato and Daniel Tohill.
And our Social Media is managed by Leah Cheshier and Kelcie Howren. Houston We Have a Podcast was created and is supervised by Gary Jordan. Special thanks to Kelsey Spivey for helping us plan and set up these interviews. And of course, thanks again to Patrick Estep, Alex Baughman, Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthew Montgomery, and James Spicer, for taking the time to come on the show.
Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of our podcast.
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