Sydney Dolan

The posting for a Mars analog mission appeared on my Instagram very late one night. They were searching for participants to complete a week-long research study at the Mars Desert Research Station; a mock-up Mars base located in rural Utah. Caught up in a moment of mania, I prolonged my bedtime further to complete the application. After I submitted the application, I fell asleep, drifting away to the fantasy of a scenic get-away to a far-off planet with established mealtimes, set sleeping hours, gorgeous sunrises, and well-defined tasks. 

Beyond the promise of a more humane schedule, I didn’t put much more thought into the study or what my participation would entail. As I passed through the next few rounds of interviews, the prospect of the study remained hazy and far-off. The excitement of finally being selected was muted against the mental demand of my workdays. Flitting from task to task, I was too focused on staying above water in my day-to-day life to think about the selection more deeply.  

When I arrived at the Mars Desert Research Station facility to complete the required pre-study training, I felt like the personification of one of those jokes about lying on your resume to get a job. I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. Importantly, I also didn’t know if that was intentional or because of my past negligence to read very fundamental documentation thoroughly. As my crewmates asked questions about the habitat and schedule, I had the sinking realization that I had a lot of catching up to do. 

The first day of training was a lot. The caretaker for the facility listed off endless details about the habitat, which was my job to maintain as the crew engineer. Nodding along blankly, I had no clue what he was referring to the majority of the time. I figured there would be some sort of manual I could consult later that would clarify anything I should have been doing. Once facilities had been covered, the remainder of training was dedicated to learning how to suit up properly for extra vehicular activities (EVAs).

I was first to don the spacesuit and perform an extra-vehicular activity. My crewmates eyed me closely, probably out of genuine enthusiasm and intrigue, but the attention made me squirm. Their scrutiny made me feel as though humiliation was inevitable.  

The full spacesuit sensing gear involved a radio headset, two microphone speakers and a GoPro. Once the spacesuit helmet was placed on, I could not clearly hear anyone on the outside, as a loud fan was blowing directly in our face to prevent the spacesuit visor from fogging up. This meant that I had to formally radio to talk with anyone, even those standing a few feet away from me. Radioing over to mission control, trying to emulate formal radio protocols but lacking the fundamental memory or practice to really replicate the real thing felt a bit foolish. 

The radio headset would blare in my ear with updates. Move left or right, or worse, the loud garbling noisy scratchy sound when a radio transmission was unclear. Microphone speaker puffs pushed up against my face, recording any noise I made to aid in post-EVA analysis of my decision-making. A GoPro strapped to my forehead monitored where I was looking. My head swam in a fishbowl of sensors floating around my face.

Suited up and stumbling out of the airlock with my EVA partner, the process of reporting my activities began.  Each EVA featured a navigation task, requiring us to interpret readings using a tricorder, map, and a compass. I gave verbal reports of my directional heading and certainty every minute and formalized radio broadcasts of my plan every 5 minutes. On top of that, we needed to coordinate our plan with a partner, so there was coordination with another human being to mentally keep track of. As the fan blew cool air in my face, comments from my EVA partner echoed into my head, the mission control team watching my movements, I was focused on trying to not make a complete fool of myself. Memories of hanging around Mission Control when I interned in Houston surfaced. Mission Control made fun of an astronaut for weeks because he incorrectly assembled a GoPro tripod. People normally tell you when you’re anxious that you need to get out of your head and that nobody is watching your actions that closely. But the problem when you choose a job like this is that they are. You are being monitored and people will have opinions about it. 

Time on EVAs went by fast. The mental load of decision-making and reporting so much information was overwhelming. Doffing the spacesuit, the gloves, the sensors, and finally schlepping off the spacesuit backpack was huge source of relief.

Immediately after every EVA we completed surveys that asked us how successful the mission was, and what factors we weighed as we were completing the mission. The research team asked us questions about how much we relied on our partner, and how much we relied on mission control, and how we relied on various EVA tools. I didn’t think about a lot of this too closely, I was mostly focused on how I could improve my communication with my partner and skill on each EVA. In my mind, completing the EVA’s was a chance for me to optimize how good of an astronaut I could be in different conditions. 

But the purpose of the study wasn’t to evaluate how quickly a person learns to communicate with others, or how good they are at orienteering on Mars. It was to determine how different information sources inform decision making in isolated environments, particularly when different levels of trust are involved. This wasn’t said outright, but it could have been intuited over the week. There was a reason why they kept asking us how we felt about mission control, about the tools we were using, about the different Martian companies whose activities dictated the goals of our mission. There was a reason we had to complete surveys on how much we trusted our teammates and who we would choose to go on a 3-year mission with. But I didn’t register these cues at all. I was too in my head about my behavior and my decision making that it never crossed my mind whether the situations I was in were intentionally manipulated. 

As I reflect on this analog astronaut experience, I keep returning to the themes of utopia, performance, and surveillance. I see parallels to my experience on the analog mission with the movie The Truman Show. In the 1998 classic, Truman Burbank is the star of an eponymous reality TV show set on the island of Seahaven, a television studio completely cut off from the outside world. Truman is unaware he has been living on a colossal soundstage. Truman’s life is constrained to this small island, his day-to-day schedule micromanaged by the director who leverages different actors and actions to manipulate Truman’s responses and desires. Under heavy surveillance, Truman’s life and interactions are a carefully orchestrated performance, both from the TV director cues, and from the commodification of Truman himself, leading to boilerplate response from how objectified and predictable he became to the viewer. Throughout the movie, we see Truman begin to realize that his life is fabricated in several instances where the cast and the crew of the show mess up. For example, when a studio light falls from the sky, or when Truman’s car radio accidentally connects to the station that the crew is communicating on. As Truman becomes more suspicious of his surrounding environment, he eventually builds up the courage to escape the TV set in the final sequence of the movie.

To me at least, the parallels between Truman’s reality in Seahaven – a manicured, white 1950s American dream utopia – and a Mars mission situated within a simulated utopia of a billionaire-funded vision of interplanetary colonization are shockingly clear. The same utopia sold to the viewers of The Truman Show is the same fabricated utopia marketed to the public about Mars: an idea for a future that never existed. As Foucalt says, a utopia is defined by its absence of a real time or place, it is always ‘other’ a space that is imagined rather than lived. But utopias become persuasive precisely because they are positioned within a specific temporal narrative.  In Seahaven, the utopia promises a return to an idealized past; in the Mars case, it promises a speculative future.

Foucault also suggests that utopias function as instruments of power, shaping behavior and social expectation by defining what is desirable or possible. Both he constructed town of Seahaven, and the simulated Mars mission operate in this way: they are meticulously curated environments where participants are guided towards a certain way of thinking and acting. In other words, these utopias are not merely imaginary, they are mechanisms of control that manage both perception and experience.  

The surveillance state as a mechanism to enforce utopia is interesting to examine, both in The Truman Show and in the relationship between analog astronauts and mission control. As Truman begins to question his reality, he starts to reflect a dynamic theorized by Jeremy Bentham in 1785. Bentham’s model of surveillance describes an architectural system designed to control prisoners through constant visibility. In such a structure, inmates can never be certain whether they are being observed due to strategic positions of guards or observers in centralized or elevated positions. The effectiveness of this system lies not only in the actual observation, but in the prisoner’s awareness that they could be watched at any moment, coupled with an inability to know where that observation originates. With an observer or camera virtually everywhere, the concept of a truly private sphere disappears.  Thus, Bentham theorized, the prisoners would begin to self-regulate, producing a self-propelling machine of fear, paranoia and watched-ness. As Truman becomes suspicious, he also becomes aware that he cannot openly share his doubts. He begins to realize that those around him are complicit in maintaining an illusion. In this shift, Truman moves from being an unknowing performer to a knowing one, and his experience his experience starts to resemble the tension inherent in being a participant in a research study or an analog astronaut under mission control.

Though rarely stated outright, there is a powerful incentive to look good to mission control. Everyone wants to prove that they are smart enough to belong there. Beneath this is an unspoken power imbalance: mission control determines the schedule, controls access to information and holds vastly more resources than the crew. Participation is conditional, being an astronaut is a once in a lifetime opportunity offered to very few.

Conflict with mission control contains tangible risks, including professional consequences, loss of future opportunities, or reduced access to the very few pieces of information or freedom in daily life. There’s an infamous story referred to by general media as the ‘Space Strike,’ though both NASA and the astronauts involved insist it wasn’t a strike. After six weeks of 16-hour workdays, the Skylab-4 crew forgot to turn their radios on for a day, missing the communication window with Mission Control. Following this break in communication, mission control revised the schedule to ensure that the astronauts had sufficient rest, and the second half of the trip, proceeded without incident.  These were important changes that improved the overall working dynamics between mission control and crew.  Yet despite the fact that this conflict produced better working conditions, none of the astronauts involved with that mission flew again (there are obviously many reasons about who gets to fly when, which I won’t go into here, but I want to note there are a lot of things that could explain why they didn’t fly). 

Regardless, stories like this become cautionary precedents, quietly reinforcing the idea that conflict with mission control is something to be avoided. During the research study, the research team would manipulate the quality of different sources of information. It never occurred to me that mission control could be a part of the experiment. Part of that was personal: I already knew Erin, who was both on the research team and mission control, and I trusted her. Part of it was also structural. Despite the feeling of being constantly watched and judged, I did genuinely believe mission control as an entity existed to support us. This sort of implicit trust that I had with mission control meant that I never thought to question anything they gave us as anything other than perfect. I was more focused on doing a good job.

Foucault argues that the most effective systems of discipline are those in which authority becomes invisible and unquestioned, allowing individuals to police themselves without the need for constant enforcement. My implicit trust in mission control meant that I never questioned the information or directives we were given; I accepted them as neutral, correct, and benevolent. Rather than scrutinizing the system itself, I focused on performing well within it, on being competent, cooperative, and reliable. In this way, the surveillance structure functioned exactly as Foucault describes: not through explicit coercion, but through the internalization of power, where obedience feels voluntary and skepticism never fully surfaces.

Viewed from this lens, my participation in the analog astronaut mission never fully moved beyond the state of unknowing performance described by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. I never entirely figured it out. At best, I began to shift my perspective on the final day, after an experience reminiscent of The Truman Show’s iconic moment of a stage light falling from the sky. But unlike Truman, I did not reach a decisive break. 

There was a lot I learned from participating in an analog astronaut mission, including a great deal of field-specific knowledge that I have not addressed here.  As I continue to process the experience, and my own responses to it, I find myself returning to the final scene of The Truman Show. Truman is a presented with a choice between two illusions: remaining in Seahaven, safe but controlled, or venturing into the real world, uncertain and dangerous.  When forced into a false binary of whether utopias do or do not exist, his exit from the constructed world is marked by a theatrical bow, represents a claim to authenticity. His act at the end is significant because he refuses to treat it as a binary choice and exits the framework entirely. By leaving the stage, he refuses participation in the spectacle altogether. He reclaims himself from a system that rendered him an unknowing performer and emerges as an autonomous subject rather than a curated character. His decision challenges the norms that structure his reality in a way I never did. 

From a Foucauldian perspective, this can be understood as a subtle but profound form of resistance. Power works best when people internalize it and regulate themselves. Truman’s exit demonstrates that true resistance can occur not by defying the rules openly; it can occur by removing oneself from the system of observation and expectation entirely, breaking the logic that structured his world.

I hope to cultivate a similar orientation: an awareness that the space of possibility is never fully closed. The task is not merely to choose correctly within a given system, but to recognize when resistance might take the form of nullification: questioning the framework itself and imagining modes of action that fall outside its prescribed options. For Truman, this represents an exciting and undefined possibility. For me, it is a reminder that the courage to act within, or beyond the constraints of any structure can transform to opportunities for authenticity.