Aspiring Martians

This week on Inside the Habitat, Aspiring Martians takes a closer look at SOLIS100, a European Space Agency isolation study conducted by the German Aerospace Center at its :envihab aerospace medicine research facility in Cologne.

SOLIS100, short for Study of Long-term Isolation, placed six carefully selected participants from six European countries into a closed, controlled environment for 100 days. The goal was not to recreate one ...

Who owns your house on Mars?

What happens if somebody steals your solar panels?

Which laws apply if astronauts from several different countries are living together? And what happens when the first child is actually born there?

This month on our special Everyday Mars episode, space lawyer Michelle Hanlon joins Aspiring Martians to explore one of the strangest and most important questions surrounding humanity's future beyond Earth: how ...

What kind of person do we actually need to send to Mars?

Someone technically brilliant, certainly. But future Martian crews will also need people capable of communicating through frustration, relinquishing control when someone else knows better, remaining calm during emergencies, living without privacy, managing relationships across millions of miles, and somehow still volunteering to clean the toilet.

This week, Joe speaks with Dr. ...

What can Antarctica teach us about Mars?

This week on Aspiring Martians, I sit down with biologist, data scientist, educator, and Mars analog astronaut Pacifica Sommers to explore how some of Earth’s most extreme environments are shaping the future of human space exploration.

Pacifica’s career has taken her from the blistering deserts of Arizona to the frozen Dry Valleys of Antarctica, studying everything from invasive gr...

In this month’s Inside the Habitat, I traveled to NASA’s Johnson Space Center to explore the agency’s human exploration analogs. From the year-long Mars missions of CHAPEA, to the behavioral research of HERA, and beyond to a look toward the future with the upcoming Moon and Mars Exploration Analog (MMEA).

First, I sit down with Dr. Grace Douglas, Principal Investigator for CHAPEA and NASA’s lead scientist for...

Human beings have created art for tens of thousands of years.

From prehistoric cave paintings to Renaissance masterpieces, photography, music, sculpture, and now even paintings created aboard the International Space Station, creativity has followed us everywhere we’ve gone.

So what happens when humanity reaches Mars?

This month on Everyday Mars, retired NASA astronaut, artist, engineer, and author Nicole Stott joins us to explor...

What does it look like to pursue multiple impossible dreams at the same time?

For Dr. Banu Cole, it means leading cutting-edge cancer research during the week, flying helicopters, editing one of the world’s first journals dedicated to analog astronaut research, and helping prepare humanity for future missions to Mars.

Banu earned her PhD in Cell Biology from Harvard before building a career leading preclinical drug discovery pr...

What happens when the traditional path to becoming an astronaut closes before you even get the chance to prove yourself?

For Dr. Dirk Raiser, it meant finding another way forward.

Dirk is a German experimental physicist, optical-instrumentation specialist, analog astronaut, commercial astronaut candidate, and founder of Razzor Tech, a startup developing spacesuits and mobility systems for astronaut training. In his scientific career,...

This month on Inside the Habitat, we’re traveling to northeastern Brazil to explore Habitat Marte, the Southern Hemisphere’s only continuously operating Mars analog station.

Founded by professor, researcher, and analog astronaut Julio Rezende, Habitat Marte has welcomed more than 1,000 participants from over 40 countries and conducted nearly 190 simulated space missions. Built in Brazil’s rugged semiarid landscape,...

Imagine we've landed on Mars, set up shop, and are absolutely thriving.

Now what?

It’s a question that rarely gets asked. We spend countless hours talking about rockets, habitats, food production, and surviving the journey to the Red Planet—but if humanity truly plans to build permanent settlements beyond Earth, another challenge inevitably awaits us: creating the next generation.

In this episode of Everyday Mars, returnin...

In this special bonus episode of Aspiring Martians, I caught up with NASA astronaut Dr. Anil Menon just weeks before his first journey to space aboard Soyuz MS-29, where he’ll spend roughly eight months aboard the International Space Station as part of Expeditions 74 and 75.

Although Anil has served as a NASA flight surgeon, SpaceX’s first medical director, an Air Force physician, engineer, pilot, and emergency medicine ...

Most people imagine a straight line into the space industry.

Mason Robbins’ story is anything but.

After beginning his career in international relations and conflict studies, Mason worked with organizations including the United Nations, Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, and innovation hubs across Europe before eventually finding his way back to his childhood passion for space exploration.

Today, he serves as CEO of Star Helix, contribu...

What does it take to pursue a dream that feels bigger than the world around you?

This week, Joe sits down with Hajar Azizi, a 20-year-old engineering student at École Centrale Casablanca and an active member of the Moroccan Association for Space Studies (MASS), to explore how curiosity, determination, and community can help turn seemingly impossible ambitions into tangible steps forward.

Hajar is part of a new generation of young Mor...

What does it take to build a space community where one barely exists?

This week, I sit down with Ismail El Omari, a Moroccan space architect, analog astronaut, educator, and founder of the Moroccan Association for Space Studies (MASS).

From his childhood fascination with space to participating in analog astronaut missions and becoming one of Morocco’s leading space advocates, Ismail shares how he’s helping inspire a new g...

For this month’s Inside the Habitat, we’re heading to the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii to explore one of the most iconic analog habitats on Earth: HI-SEAS.

For more than a decade, HI-SEAS has helped researchers study what it takes to keep future astronauts healthy, productive, and sane during long-duration missions to Mars. Crews have spent months, and even an entire year, living in isolation inside a dome surrounded by...

This month’s special Everyday Mars episode heads into the alternate-history universe of For All Mankind with former NASA astronaut, SpaceX engineer, and series technical advisor Garrett Reisman.

If you somehow haven’t started the show yet… first of all, what are you doing? And second: fair warning, this conversation contains spoilers for Seasons 1 through 4. At this point though, you’ve had years to catch up...

For the 50th aspiring Martian feature, Joe sits down with Hanna Harutyunyan: robotics and mechatronics engineering student, researcher, and analog astronaut widely recognized as Armenia’s first analog astronaut.

Hanna has participated in analog missions at the Analog Astronaut Training Center in Poland and LunAres Research Station, supported the Austrian Space Forum’s AMADEE-24 Mars simulation in Armenia, and worked with...

This week on Aspiring Martians, I’m joined by Arshleen Kaur Sahni, a space architect, researcher, analog astronaut trainee, and the founder of Arkasa.

As a child in India, Arshleen would spend hours staring at the Moon from her window, completely captivated by space. Years later, after discovering the field of space architecture almost by accident, she found a way to combine her love of space, human psychology, and design into...

What does it actually take to simulate life on the Moon… inside a Swiss mountain?

In this month’s Inside the Habitat, we go deep into the Asclepios Project, a student-led analog mission program designed to prepare the next generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists for the realities of space exploration.

Founded at EPFL, Asclepios brings together students from around the world to design, train for, and execute f...