Journalist's Report
11/20/14
Anastasiya Stepanova
It is a beautiful day to show to the whole world the future Martian colonists. A French documentary team from Arte arrived to the MDRS by the time four crew members were on EVA. From one of the hab windows it was like watching the first contact of humans (TV crew) with Martian (Paul Knightly). At that moment comes realization that you are no longer aware of what is the reality now. It is strange that no one experienced sharp transition from daily earth life to space isolation in the middle of desert. Feels like we have been living this way for a long time, when it is just our sixth day at the station. Everything seems right, everyone put their contribution to the mission. All of a sudden the room was filled in with 5 strangers. They looked at us with question face and we looked back with a surprise. If we could read their mind, we would definitely get: “This is crazy”. One of the journalists put on space suit to experience a few hours of our simulation. He saw another perspective through the glass helmet and maybe started to understand us better. They started to film our usual activities. Paul K and Paul S. headed far East to get more diverse samples of soil and plants. Ian and Alexandre were examining the hab with special 40X microscope for cracks and corrosion. Thanks to Paul K. and Alexandre the world will now know more about geology, engineering and space straight from the horse’s mouth. Me and Claude-Michel stayed at the hab cleaning and preparing for the lunch. Alexandre came up with the idea of presenting to the TV crew our picture with signatures. Who knows maybe in 10 years this would be the picture of first Martian colonist. While we have been eating nice chicken cream soup, journalist asked his last question: “Why we are doing this?” We might look as hopeless dreamers, but without thirst of discoveries and dreams we would still remain a Neanderthals.