Martian Communication

How do you stay connected when you’re millions of miles from Earth and every message takes 20 minutes to arrive? In this episode of Aspiring Martians, we close out Women’s History Month with Dr. Kelly Haston, the commander of NASA’s CHAPEA 1 mission—a full year inside a Mars simulation habitat. Alongside her crew of three, Kelly helped test the realities of long-term Martian living, including one of the most overlooked challenges: communication.

Kelly shares her journey from growing up in Canada to earning her Ph.D. in biomedical sciences, and what it was like to step into a year of isolation with a small crew, cut off from the immediacy of Earth-bound contact. We dive into what it’s like to maintain emotional connections with loved ones when messages are text based, asynchronous, or even infrequent—and how even instructions from mission control can feel sometimes feel disconnected.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground! Applying to a Mars sim from your couch, garage salamanders, cat picture of the week, taking smells for granted, NASA needlepoint, whether partners belong on Mars missions, and why a good support system makes all the difference. It’s a funny, thoughtful, and deeply human look at what it really means to stay connected—across planets.

Huge thank you to Dr. Kelly Haston for taking the time to talk to me for this episode. Also a big thanks to Nick Thorburn for the out of this world theme music, to Elina Cecilia Giglio for the stellar graphics, and to my family for supporting all of this day in and day out.