I trained to be an astronaut on a mission to Mars at Space Camp. Here's what it's like.

Katharine Lackey USA TODAY

Published 7:30 AM EST Nov 14, 2018

"Houston, we have a problem."

Red warning lights flash on the console of our shuttle as we rocket into the atmosphere, our mission to the International Space Station now in jeopardy. Communicating with mission control, we determine a sensor simply malfunctioned. We clear the anomaly, breath a sigh of relief and speed ahead.

Once we dock, it's time for a space walk to complete a small structure. I step out of the spacecraft and then put my spacesuit on for the first time. If the order of that sounds like a horrible idea, it is – if I was actually in space.

Instead, I'm at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for Space Camp, which takes children and adults through what it would be like to go on missions to space.

I imagine floating around as I strap into the Five Degrees of Freedom Chair that hovers a half-inch off the floor and simulates microgravity. My task of screwing some poles into round steel pegs shouldn't be that hard, but I have gloves on, the chair tilts easily, and the little buggers are tricky. I break a sweat but the job gets done, even if I forget to close the hatch with the extra poles and some float away to become space debris. Oops.

I climb back into the shuttle, which has technically left without us. In fact, it's already halfway home. I pull my headset back on as we begin our final descent. We come in at a sharp angle and bounce off the runway, but somehow we survive even though our commander forgot to close the back hatch.

"The Eagle has landed," our pilot quips.

Straying farther from home than ever before

Ask a group of children what they want to be when they grow up and undoubtedly at least one will say: Astronaut.

At that age, it's foreign to think about the inherent dangers of space flight and the rigorous training needed to even get off the ground. And to say you need the "right stuff" to enter NASA's astronaut ranks is an understatement: Just a tiny fraction of a fraction of 1 percent of those who apply are accepted.

With a manned mission to Mars possible in the next few decades, the challenges of training will only increase as we prepare astronauts for a trip that sends mankind 34 million miles away from home for the first time.

"It's very different than being on the moon where you can get back in three days," said Mae Jemison, a former NASA astronaut and the first black woman to travel to space. "It's a completely different ballgame."

I didn't get to experience living in a very confined space with an environment outside that will kill me instantaneously without a spacesuit. That's what astronauts who travel to the International Space Station today already face, but the time it takes to complete just a one-way trip to Mars – nine to 11 months, give or take – will exponentially increase the psychological challenges, and how we train people for them.

"With Mars, you've got to really have your stuff together because it's a three-year trip," said Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut.

"I don't know if you need to put someone in a bat cave for three years or not to simulate that, but just long-duration exposure to working with a very small group of people is one way to do that," he said.

You can't train for every contingency, Jemison said, so it will come down to picking the right people who can adapt to the challenges of the Red Planet, called that because of its reddish appearance visible to the naked eye here on Earth.

"With Mars there's going to be much more reliance on the skillset that people bring in," Jemison said.

"It's not necessarily something that you're going to be able to train people in like two weeks and say, 'Hey, now you're trained in how to be resilient.' They're going to have to figure out ways to test and see that beforehand," she said.

And the training won't only involve the astronauts – but the family and friends they leave behind as well, said Lowell Zoller, former NASA project manager and emeritus docent at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

"If you're going to Mars or something goes wrong you cannot just say, 'let's turn around and go back'. It’s not a matter of let's go home," he said. "We're going to have to condition the families and people here on Earth as much as we condition the astronauts because this is the first time we were sending people far enough away that they can't see home."

So why even go to Mars with all the costs, risks and time required to complete a single trip? Because, if you take the really long view, we simply have to, says Stephen Petranek, author of "How We’ll Live on Mars," upon which National Geographic's series "MARS" is based. The half-documentary, half-scripted drama TV show jumps back and forth between present day Earth – where it shows how we currently are preparing to get to Mars and talks about issues that will develop once we get there – and a future where human beings live on and, eventually, industrialize the planet.

"Humans have been a nomadic species moving on from place to place on Earth for 95 percent of their existence," he said. "There's a survival mechanism built into our DNA which says you should move on to the next horizon and the next wilderness."

Eventually, the sun will heat up and expand, consuming all life on Earth and probably throwing the planet out of orbit, Petranek said. Mars will face the same fate, but traveling to the Red Planet will be the jumping off point for human beings to voyage even farther.

"We can't live on Earth forever," he said. "We have to become an interplanetary species."

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