Aspiring Martians

This month on Inside the Habitat, we step inside one of Europe’s most respected analog research facilities: LunAres Research Station in Poland.
Founded in 2017 and located inside a former post-military airport hangar, LunAres has become a globally recognized platform for human spaceflight research. The station runs 10–12 analog missions per year, hosts crews of four to eight participants, and has supported more than 65 scientific experiments across over 40 missions. Its work spans space medicine, psychology, biotechnology, robotics, human factors, and sustainable living systems. It also serves as a mirror platform for ESA-funded research connected to Poland’s upcoming IGNIS mission to the International Space Station.
But LunAres doesn’t rely on natural deserts or volcanic terrain. Instead, it specializes in something arguably more difficult: controlled isolation.
Inside a reinforced concrete hangar with no windows, crews simulate lunar and Martian missions under tightly managed environmental conditions. Communication delays mimic Mars. Artificial day-night cycles shift for lunar darkness or Martian drift. Water is strictly rationed. Gray water from showers flushes toilets. Bedrooms are capsule-sized. Hydroponic plants double as morale boosters. EVA operations take place on a 250-square-meter basalt-and-sand terrain accessed through a functional airlock.
In this episode, Dr. Leszek Orzechowski shares how LunAres was born out of an ESA design competition, the steep early learning curve of running analog missions, how nearly 300 participants have navigated isolation inside the habitat, and what it means to simulate Moon and Mars missions in an urban yet sealed environment.
We discuss crew selection, mission control oversight, communication delays, lunar versus Martian simulation differences, participation in the World’s Biggest Analog initiative, ESA-linked neuro studies, collaboration with aerospace agencies, and the surprising psychological power of growing plants in confinement.
If we’re serious about settling other worlds, places like LunAres are where we learn how humans actually behave when the hatch closes.

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A huge thank you to Leszek for joining me today and sharing his time and perspective, to Nick Thorburn for the stellar theme music, to Ceci Giglio for the incredible graphics, to Jero Squartini for the amazing animations, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for admining the Facebook group, and to my family for supporting this project even when space trivia finds its way into everyday life.

In this special Everyday Mars episode commemorating Mars Love Month, returning guest Dr. Simon Dubé joins Joe to explore one of the most surprising frontiers of space settlement: artificial companions. If Mars is going to be home — not just a research outpost — we’ll need more than life-support systems and radiation shielding. We’ll need emotional infrastructure.
Simon is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of love, sexuality, psychology, and emerging technology. Listeners may remember him from our conversation last year on Sex and Love on Mars. This time, we take things further, asking what role AI-driven companions, robotic intimacy, and emotionally responsive systems might play in long-duration missions.
We discuss whether artificial partners are substitutes or supplements, how isolation changes human bonding, what happens to attachment in confined habitats, the ethics of emotional AI, and why the goal on Mars may not be to pass the Turing Test — but to pass the loneliness test.
If we’re serious about building a civilization on Mars, we have to design for the heart as much as the body.

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A huge thank you as well to Simon for joining me again and sharing his time and perspective, to Nick Thorburn for the stellar theme music, to Ceci Giglio for the incredible graphics, to Jero Squartini for the amazing animations, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for adminning the Facebook group, and to my family for supporting this project—even when space history gets unexpectedly sweet.

The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places
Clifford Nass & Byron Reeves
1996
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/media-equation/98C3C6F9F7E3B1C3B7C0A5A9C7A1E0B3

Living with Seal Robots—Its Sociopsychological and Physiological Influences on the Elderly at a Care House
Kazuhiro Wada & Takanori Shibata
2007
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4200858

The Effect of a Fully Automated Conversational Agent on Reducing Symptoms of Depression: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Kathleen K. Fitzpatrick, Alison Darcy & Molly Vierhile
2017
https://mental.jmir.org/2017/2/e19/

Use of Social Robots in Mental Health and Well-Being Research: Systematic Review
Jiska A. S. Broekens, et al.
2019
https://www.jmir.org/2019/7/e13322/

Building Long-Term Human–Robot Relationships: Examining Disclosure, Perception and Well-Being Across Time
Guy Laban, Arvid Kappas, Val Morrison & Emily S. Cross
2023
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-023-01076-z

We're a community that is working, studying, building, training, and aspiring to become Martians someday. But what does it actually mean to become Martian?
Not metaphorically. Biologically.
In this surprise Everyday Mars episode, I sit down with evolutionary biologist Dr. Scott Solomon to talk about his brand-new book Becoming Martian and what life on Mars could do to our bodies, our children, and the future of our species.
We talk radiation. Low gravity. Reproduction. Gene editing. Immune systems. Speciation. And the uncomfortable question: should we go at all?
If being an aspiring Martian means doing the work — physically, emotionally, psychologically — then this episode is required listening.

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A huge thank you to Scott for joining me today and sharing his time and perspective, to Nick Thorburn for the stellar theme music, to Ceci Giglio for the incredible graphics, to Jero Squartini for the amazing animations, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for adminning the Facebook group, and to my family for supporting this project—even when I start comparing interplanetary travel to reptile endurance.

After a brief detour into big philosophical questions — and the launch of our new Inside the Habitat series — Aspiring Martians returns to what it does best: real conversations with real people who are actively building their way toward Mars.
In this episode, Joe is joined by Thendral Kamal, an aeronautical and astronautical engineering student at Purdue University with a minor in political science, and a résumé that already spans aircraft structural engineering at Delta Air Lines, satellite sustainability work in Washington, D.C., undergraduate research in aerospace reliability and international relations, and published astrophysics research.
But this conversation goes far beyond credentials.
Joe and Thendral talk about her early love of planetariums and astronomy, the importance of family and community support, winning a high-school payload competition that helped crystallize her path toward space, and what it means to “create your own luck” through discipline, curiosity, and saying yes before you feel ready. They also explore how policy, engineering, and global cooperation intersect in space exploration — and why those intersections matter for future Martian settlements.
At its core, this episode is about preparation. About stacking skills. About believing that extraordinary futures are built through very ordinary, very intentional steps. And about Thendral’s long-term vision to one day become the first Indian woman to set foot on Mars.
This is what becoming an Aspiring Martian really looks like.

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A huge thank you to Thendral for joining metoday and sharing her story, to Nick Thorburn for the stellar theme music, to Ceci Giglio for the incredible graphics, to Jero Squartini for the amazing animations, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for admining the Facebook group, and to my family for supporting this project—even when I start thinking about what it means to be unreachable.

Inside the Habitat is a brand new series from Aspiring Martians that takes listeners behind the scenes of the analog simulations shaping humanity’s future on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. On the first Tuesday of every month, we will explore the many habitats scattered across deserts, cities, oceans, and even aircraft where we are testing the limits of human psychology, teamwork, and technology before attempting real off-world settlement.
To kick off the series, Joe starts big with the World’s Biggest Analog, a first-of-its-kind global simulation that connected 16 habitats across 16 countries in a shared Mars mission. Rather than isolating one crew in one location, this ambitious project explored what planetary-scale collaboration might look like for future settlements.
Joe is joined by Jas Purewal, Senior Scientist and the founder and Director of the World’s Biggest Analog, a role she somehow balances alongside her many others. Jas is also the co-founder and Director of the Analog Astronaut Community which brings together analog astronauts and researchers from around the world and will host its 5th Analog Astronaut Conference from April 30 to May 3, 2026, at Biosphere 2.
In this conversation, we explore how the World’s Biggest Analog came together, what it revealed about global cooperation, and why analog missions are critical rehearsals for humanity’s next giant leap.

Links:
https://www.worldsbiggestanalog.com/
https://www.analog-astronaut.com/

The opportunity to integrate the International Guidelinesand Standards for Analogs during the World’s Biggest Analog was made possible through the generous support of J Trent Adams.
A huge thank you as well to Jas Purewal for joining me today and sharing her time to talk about the World’s Biggest Analog, to Nick Thorburn for the stellar theme music, to Ceci Gigliofor the incredible graphics, to Jero Squartini for the amazing animations, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for admining the FB group, and to my family for even entertaining the idea that our daughters totally wouldn’t mind the 2 hourcommute to a Mars magnet school.