Astronaut Mae Jemison on the ‘Adrenaline Rush’ of Space Travel
For season two of the drama-documentary Mars, the National Geographic Channel turned to physician and astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go to space, to help them make the on-screen drama as believable as possible.
For a preview of life on the Red Planet, season 2 of Mars begins tonight on the National Geographic Channel. Part drama, part documentary, the show explores what it would take to survive on another planet.
The drama is courtesy of producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who already gave us such a vivid picture of the space race with Apollo 13. At the heart of the fictional Mars is the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF), an organization formed by the world’s space agencies and private industry.
Season one took place in the year 2033 and depicted the first human mission to Mars with an Elon Musk-like character leading the effort. Season two tackles how the crew survives.
The real-life challenges that the fictional future faces are handled as flashbacks of our current efforts to send a mission to Mars: SpaceX landing the first reusable rocket, astronaut Scott Kelly living aboard the International Space Station for a year, and scientists in Antarctica developing a blueprint for Mars settlements. This footage is interspersed with talking head commentary from Elon Musk, Andy Weir, Robert Zubrin, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others who influence our thinking and planning of journeys to Mars.
Even when Mars turns toward fictional drama, it’s based in facts, like the extraordinary amount of radiation a crew to Mars would experience and the bone density they’ll lose before they even reach the planet. That’s thanks to experts like astronaut and physician Dr. Mae Jemison, who advised on the show.
Dr. Jemison, the first African-American woman to go to space, also shared her expertise on One Strange Rock, another Nat Geo production. On Mars, she got involved with educating the writers and guiding the actors. At an event celebrating the kick-off of season two, Jemison said she did not want those watching to be taken out of the action by anything that would read as unrealistic on screen, so she used her medical knowledge to make sure injury and illness on Mars took into account the forces of physics in space.
“Audiences internalize a lot of what they see and so [we wanted this to be] as educational as possible,” Dr. Jemison said.
The series is based on the book How We’ll Live on Mars by Stephen Petranek, who we also interviewed. While the book lays out the serious challenges a Mars colony would face — the size of the planet (half of our own), the unlivable temperature (-81° F), the unbreathable atmosphere (carbon dioxide), the difference in gravity (38 percent less than Earth’s) — it puts a lot of the responsibility for getting to the Red Planet on Elon Musk.
By contrast, Mars the TV show does a good job showing that actual Mars habitation will involve international cooperation and a reliance on decades of publicly funded research. Though we live in an increasingly fractured and fractious world, Dr. Jemison pointed to the International Space Station and international scientific conferences as proof that the world can work together.
To ensure that today’s astronauts get an opportunity to travel even farther than she did, Dr. Jemison heads 100 Year Starship, a DARPA and NASA effort that supports research into interstellar travel. One of her concerns is that the public is no longer galvanized to support the space program the way it was when John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon.”
“I should have been on Mars,” said Dr. Jemison.
Ultimately it’s how we act on Earth that will determine whether we get to Mars. “Humans need an adrenaline rush,” Dr. Jemison said. “The way people are trying to get adrenaline now is by frightening and war. But look at all the adrenaline that happens when you try something that you don’t know how to do. You don’t have to beat or abuse somebody else to get that same endorphin or adrenaline rush so let’s come up with new things, let’s see how we’re connected.”
Season 2 of Mars premieres Monday, November 12 at 9/8c on Nat Geo.
Read more: “NASA Experts Reflect on 60 Years of Space Exploration”
Originally published at www.pcmag.com.
