Earthbound Mars Explorers live like pioneers

The NASA rover Curiosity survived its famed “seven minutes of terror” and has touched down on the surface of Mars, and the world cheered.

Getting people to the Red Planet hasn’t been a success story, however.

“Landing humans on Mars has been 20 or 30 years away for the last 40 years or so,” the rover driver Scott Maxwell at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine this month.

He acknowledged that there has not been the “political will” to take on such an expensive and risky project.

But, he added, “All I know for sure is, if they’d put me on a rocket, I’d go.”

The entrepreneur Elon Musk of SpaceX, whose NASA-supported private company launched the Dragon spacecraft in May that successfully docked with the International Space Station, has said that his real goal is to send people to Mars in 15 or 20 years.

Until any of that happens, we poor humans have to sit here and wait for our chance. A group of would-be explorers at the Mars Society has decided not to wait for rockets to get them to the Red Planet.

The society, founded by Robert Zubrin, an advocate of planetary exploration, has created field research stations in difficult Earth environments that the group says create conditions like those found on Mars.

One is in the Utah desert, another in the Arctic reaches of northern Canada.

The teams travel to the sites — known within the society as “habs,” for habitations — for weeks or months at a time, to serve as “an effective testbed for field operations studies in preparation for human missions to Mars.”

They see themselves as testing the design features of the habitat, use of tools and technologies in hostile environments, and even work out the human factors that might affect people over a long mission with no way to get away from one another.

Nadav Neuhaus, an Israeli-born photographer who lives in Jersey City, has spent time with teams at both of those sites.

When he first heard about the Mars Society and its attempt to simulate living on Mars, “I said, ‘Wow, this is strange,’ ” he recalled.

As he got to know people who embarked upon the arduous, isolated missions — some for months on end — he found them “super, super serious” about paving the way for future explorers, as one man in his 80s put it. “I will never step on Mars, but I did this first, small step.’