Kate Greene with "Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars"

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, trained laser physicist, poet, and essayist Kate Greene explores her time as a crew member for NASA’s Mars analog—a project called HI-SEAS—where her mission’s main goal was to test food systems as well as other social and psychological strains over the two-and-a-half-year journey. But it was not only food experiments that took place during four isolated months in 2013, where Kate called a dome on the Hawai’ian volcano of Mauna Loa, situated at 8,000 feet above sea level, home base. Kate and her fellow “astronauts” lived and breathed other research studies: assessing anti-microbial clothing; tracking sleep patterns; and documenting the way isolation affects stress, health, and social interactions.The essays in Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars are shaped by Kate’s relationships with the scientists who created HISEAS, her crewmates, her family, and friends back home. It’s informed by personal reflection as well as by literature, film, history, philosophy, and scientific research.

About the Author 

Kate Greene was the crew writer and second-in-command on a simulated Mars mission for the NASA-funded HI-SEAS project. She is a former laser physicist, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in Wired, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, Discover, Science News, and other publications. She has taught writing at Vanderbilt University, San Francisco State University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. She currently lives in New York City where she is a teaching fellow in the writing department at Columbia University.