Life Lessons I Learned While Working On A Mission To Mars Simulation Project

Ideas for anyone to use in their life

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

One time I worked on a Mission to Mars group simulation project. This was many years ago in the Bay Area and it only lasted a single week. I sure learned a lot and I think there were some valuable life lessons that came about from my time on the project.

All of us came about in the project the same way. There was an advertisement and those that had availability for the full schedule were hired, and hired solely for the project. We were not becoming employees of this entity or any other government agency. We were just temporary contractors and that was fine with us because we wanted to get back to our normal lives.

There were multiple shifts and I was assigned the group in Room B. I assumed that all the different groups received similar assignments, but I didn’t know for sure.

There were five of us in my group. We introduced ourselves to each other and exchanged pleasantries. The supervisor said, “Do we have a volunteer to be there group leader for your team?” Soon a lady, I’ll call her Diane for the sake of this story, volunteered and she was selected.

The research center staff explained what we would be doing, how each day we would have about twenty skin and body electrical process attached to different parts of our body that would measure things like heart rate, perspiration, and other measures of stress or bodily reaction. If you have ever participated in biofeedback sessions, you have a general idea what is going on.

“What will we be doing?" asked Diane.

“Each of you will be in a separate room and will have a headset and video monitor. What you will experience is very similar to an astronaut on a mission to Mars, and you will be remotely operating a virtual rover that is simulating moving on the planet’s surface.”

It sounded fun so far and even more so because we were all going to get paid for our time every day.

“Just a reminder,” said our supervisor. “If, for any reason, you decide not to continue with the study, you will still be compensated for your time.”