Six wannabe Martians are are taking life on Mars for a test drive here on Earth. In a small cylindrical building in the Utah desert, the would-be space explorers live every moment as if they were the first human outpost on the red planet.

The group is sponsored by the privately-funded Mars Society, a nonprofit whose main goal is to send humans to Mars as soon as possible. NASA is still figuring out when and how the first Martian envoys will get there — Obama’s latest vision would get humans into Mars orbit around 2035, relying on private aerospace companies to do the heavy lifting.

But the Mars society doesn’t want to wait that long. The organization runs two Mars Analog Research Stations, one in the Canadian Arctic and one in Utah, and has plans for a third in Iceland.

The Utah desert, with its barren expanses of rust-colored dirt, looks like it could well be an alien planet. The station is manned by six Mars enthusiasts (some scientists, some not) who live as close to the way they would on Mars as they can: gearing up in spacesuits whenever they venture outside, eating dehydrated food, and worrying about shower and toilet water.

There are some obvious holes. Pancakes probably flip differently in Martian gravity, and the town of Hanksville is a mere 20-minute drive away — Henry David Thoreau was more isolated at Walden Pond. But the participants take it seriously, and hope to build support for the idea of human life on Mars.

Credit: Motherboard.TV

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