This is an IHeart podcast.

Hi, HART, Pardt, Pryce.

We're taking the week off.

Indeed. We'll be back with new episodes

starting September 10th. In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we wanted to share

an episode from earlier this year. This week, we're re-airing my conversation with Nathaniel Rich

from January 29th. He's a novelist, essayist, and writer at large for The New York Times Magazine.

We discuss a NASA experiment where civilians take a simulated trip to Mars and try to handle the isolation.

Hope you enjoy it, and thanks for listening.

NASA has a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first mission to Mars is launched.

Very few of them have to do with problems of human psychology, or really even of human survival,

which is the subject of this experiment that I wrote about called Chapia.

This particular experiment began with rather an intriguing announcement on the NASA website.

Yeah, it was a little bit like the Wonka factory, the golden tickets, that four civilians would be chosen to go to Mars.

Asterisk, not really Mars, but a habitat that was built on essentially a stage set to look exactly

like what they expect the first mission to Mars to look like.

And it generated an enormous excitement, and people from all over the country rushed to

apply.

They wanted the golden ticket to live out, in most cases, I think, a kind of childhood fantasy

of space exploration, to see if they could withstand psychologically the challenges of living

away from the rest of them, everyone else they've ever known or met.

Welcome. away from the rest of them, everyone else they've ever known or met. Welcome to Tech Stuff, The Story.

...