An engineer who spent 378 days inside a simulated Mars habitat has finished the mission and is now sharing what the isolation was like. Matthew Montgomery served as the NASA science officer on the crew, which lived in a mock Mars base for the full duration of the stay.
The exercise was not actual spaceflight. Crew members remained on Earth in a controlled habitat, cut off from outside contact for the length of the mission. One of the most demanding stretches came during a communications blackout of roughly two weeks, when the crew had no contact with the outside world at all.
In an interview with Nature, Montgomery describes that blackout and the day-to-day strain of living in close quarters with a small team, far from ordinary routines. His account centers on the personal side of the mission rather than its scientific output, offering a firsthand look at what a long Mars-style stay asks of the people who take part in it.
The interview was published by Nature on 9 November 2026. Such analog missions are used by space agencies to study how people cope with confinement, delayed or lost communication and the psychological pressure of a journey to Mars, all of which would affect any future crewed expedition to the Red Planet.
Credit. Based on reporting by Kaia Glickman for Nature. Is this your work? Write to us.
33
