All actually-real Mars dilemmas lie very far in the future, of course. But Easter thinks we should start preparing for the medical realities of the Red Planet. In the past, space agencies took extremely healthy people and sent them to space for a little while. “The chance that they have a serious medical event is relatively small,” says Easter. “Most of the risk of human spaceflight is in launch and landing and hardware problems.” That’s not true on a Mars trip, which would have plenty of radiation, psychological unknowns, spacesuit-ripping rocks, leg-breaking descents, regular stuff like cardiac arrest, and no practical way for Earth to intervene.

When Easter first approached the Wilderness Medical Society to pitch this course, the society kind of shrugged. “They felt that the type of people who were really interested in spending time outdoors would not sign up to live in a tin can for a week,” says Easter. But they convinced the organization to post a notice on the website anyway. If no one signed up, no one signed up.

It was full in 24 hours (turns out, people who like hard things do so indiscriminately). Each day of the course features Mars-applicable lectures about topics like radiation, hyperbaric medicine, contingency planning, and the psychological difficulties of isolation and confinement. Then, the crew receives a realistic task that requires them to slip on their spacesuits for extravehicular activity (EVA). While they’re stuffed into their oxygenated sausage casings, something (of course) goes wrong with someone’s body.

Emergency physician Alicia Tucker, who lives in Tasmania, took part in 2017. She’d worked as a physician on Antarctica-bound boats and in the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which provides care for people in the remote Australian Outback. She liked the challenge of remote medicine and the what-you’ve-got-is-what-you’ve-got-ness of it. PseudoMars seemed like the ultimate manifestation of that concept.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to human space flight

Since taking the course, Tucker has decided she probably won’t be going to Mars—humans have too much to figure out—but she can help make spaceflight, long or short, safe and accessible for the next generation, for her kids. She recently became an aviation medical examiner, a job that includes among its duties doing medical examinations of pilots, and she’s embarked on a diving and hyperbaric medicine fellowship, the kind of pressure-based knowledge needed for rocket-powered journeys. One day, she hopes to help out with the medical end of space tourism.

But after running the course for people like Tucker, Easter realized that he couldn’t just preach to the Hippocratic choir. A Mars mission will take all kinds, and everyone onboard, regardless of background, should probably know how to deal with decompression (etc.). Could you take a bunch of aerospace engineers, he wondered—used to hardware and software and not the wet messiness of humans—and teach them medicine on Mars?

To find out, he worked with Allison Anderson at the University of Colorado Boulder, a bioastronautics specialist and professor of aerospace engineering, to develop a course called Medicine in Space and Surface Environments. Last month, they took their first batch of 21 students to the Mars Desert Research Station. That’s too many for the Hab, so they camped in tents outside—lowering the fidelity but perhaps increasing the difficulty: It was often 40 degrees, often raining, unusual and unexpected for May in the Utah desert. Windstorms flattened their tents. (You’re engineers, Easter told them: Fix it.)

On the group’s first EVA, the professors sent the students on a mission behind a big canyon wall, where they lost communications with the Hab. So the second day, they set up a relay station: The Habbers could broadcast to a high point, the high point could relay the message down to those in the field below. Voila: Rock wall vanquished.