Author Archives: wilsonzak
Mission to Mars
Spent yesterday massacring marshmallow peeps and hanging out with a thousand 5th graders building Mars habitats. The public schools here do a district-wide Mission to Mars project. I visited a handful of schools beforehand to talk about HI-SEAS, Mars and STEM. They gave me a table at the convention center to set up a […]
Update on 3D Printing on “Mars”
The Habitat 3D printer was featured in a video for the New York Times that the crew recently filmed. The Daily 360 – Life on Mars: Get to Know the Crew HI-SEAS crew V has had fairly steady requests for new 3D printed designs for me to send them. The most recent was cookie cutters […]
New 3D Printer, New Project and New Mission
HI-SEAS mission V begins tomorrow (best of luck to the crew!) and I’ll be running a study on it. I’ll be continuing my work on 3D printing but I’ll be acting as remote support, doing the modeling and prototyping before sending the completed part files to the crew to be printed. This better represents the […]
Lockheed Martin Mars Experience
I spent two mornings this week volunteering at the Lockheed Martin Mars Experience. This is a traveling STEM outreach program that visits schools and museums across the country. The highlight of this is the virtual reality bus/Mars rover; the windows have been replaced with computer monitors and display a moving Mars landscape. It’s pretty slick. I […]
Utility of Additive Manufacturing on Martian Analogs and Manned Mars Missions
Here is the paper I presented at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara Mexico – Utility of Additive Manufacturing on Martian Analogs and Manned Mars Missions. I’m currently exploring ways to continue this work.
Presenting at the International Astronautical Congress
I’m presenting a paper based on the 3D printing work I did at HI-SEAS at the International Astronautical Congress next week in Guadalajara, Mexico. My paper is titled “Utility of Additive Manufacturing on Martian Analogs and Manned Mars Missions” (I’ll probably post it up here at some point). My presentation is in the “Human Exploration of […]
StarShipSofa Interview
Interview I did with Tony Smith of the Hugo award winning podcast StarShipSofa about my experience living on “Mars” – http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2016/02/24/starshipsofa-no-424-vaughn-stanger/ Realized this week that I’ve been back on Earth longer than I was on “Mars,” a bit of a strange realization.
Happy Marsaversary
One year ago today was our first day in the dome. Today I spent the day with a couple of my crew mates wandering the Las Vegas strip and going to see The Martian (which in general we thought was great despite a few complaints about differences from the book and scientific/engineering inaccuracies). Yesterday we […]
Video of our exit day
Just saw this and wanted to share this very well filmed and edited video from our exit day by ‘Ena Media Hawaii.
Reflections on a week on Earth
8 months is apparently long enough to get pretty much totally used to living with 5 people in a dome on the side of a volcano. It no longer seemed weird. Being out seems weird. The whole experience is hard to explain. Seeing other people, interacting with other people, eating normal food, shopping, driving are […]
Almost Mars 