BLAST
OFF!

I'm Going to Mars (Sort Of)

Okay, technically it's Utah. But don't tell my brain that, because as far as it's concerned, I'm packing a flight suit and heading to another planet.

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Here's the actual, real, not-made-up news: I've been selected to join Crew 327 of the Spaceward Bound program at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), running October 12 to 16. MDRS is a real research base outside Hanksville, Utah, built there because the desert looks and behaves enough like the Martian surface that scientists use it to practice living and working on Mars. Habitat, engineering bay, greenhouse, science lab, two observatories, pressure suits, rovers, the whole deal. It's basically a theme park for people who take space very seriously, and somehow they let me in.

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I'm one of a small handful of educators invited from outside Utah, and as far as I know, the only cartoonist. 

I leave in a few weeks, so consider this the official announcement, made with plenty of time to obsess over packing lists.

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What I'm actually doing while I'm there

The program has three pillars: science, simulation, and education. Crew 327 will spend the week studying the site as a Mars stand-in, digging into local geology, and running blocks of the week under full "we are astronauts now, act accordingly" simulation. There's also a side quest into biosignatures, tied to the broader search for life on Mars, which is a sentence I did not expect to type about my own week.

My job is to sneak art into all of it. A few examples of what that might look like:

• Geology fieldwork out on the terrain → turns into on-site sketching

• Time in the engineering bay → turns into character design

• The greenhouse → turns into speculative botany (what would a Martian houseplant even look like?)

• The observatory → turns into celestial creature study

• Evening debriefs → turn into comics journaling

The rule I'm setting for myself: every one of these has to work in a real K-12 classroom the following Monday, no special gear required. If it needs a pressure suit to run, it doesn't count.

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The part where I bring a sketchbook to a spacesuit fitting

I'll be documenting the whole week, and whatever I bring home, footage, sketches, terrible morning-of-EVA hair, is going straight into Season One, the teacher kits, and the socials. If BLAST OFF!'s whole premise is that your backyard has everything you need for space, consider this the field test. I'm about to find out if that's true, HOURS from the nearest Tims.

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Don't miss the actual mission updates

Social media will get you the highlights. If you want the real dispatches, the pre-departure panic, the on-site debriefs, whatever a Martian houseplant ends up looking like, sign up for my newsletter. It goes out twice a month, and this is exactly the kind of thing it's for.

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Transmission out, Crew!

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-Dan

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