Episode 4: She Likes to Camp Alone in the Finnish Winter

April 18, 2018·31 min·2 clips

When Cyprian described crewmate Christiana as someone who 'likes to camp alone in the Finnish winter,' the narrator immediately stopped the tape and rewound it.

The episode opens with Carmel and Tristan doing armpit farts — a moment of levity after weeks of Carmel sounding exhausted and worn down in her audio diaries. As mission commander, Carmel carries extra administrative weight, and her inability to get physical exercise in the dome has left her mentally drained but physically restless. Around mission day 161, Tristan begins appearing in Carmel's recordings, and her mood visibly shifts. They cook together, eat together, share family stories, debate English grammar, and speculate whether Kobe Bryant has eaten Kobe beef. The narrator begins wondering whether the two are a couple. The narrator then examines NASA's historical silence on space sex: the agency claims no astronaut has ever been sexually active in space, even married couple Jan Davis and Mark Lee — who secretly wed before their 1992 shuttle mission and NASA discovered too late. The narrator describes the photo of the upside-down, glowing newlyweds and notes that a three-year Mars mission would make romance difficult to avoid entirely. Experimental psychologist Pete Roma explains the complexity of romantic dyads in a six-person crew, ranging from a simple couple to everyone 'passing each other around' and activating jealousy and pain — the human squishy stuff robots don't have. When asked directly, Carmel and Tristan both emphatically deny being a couple. The narrator realizes their dynamic sounds less like romance and more like siblings — they fart on each other, sit on each other, and fill the role of the sibling neither can reach from Mars. Attention then shifts to Cyprian, who is asked to describe his crewmates. His description of Christiana — her toughness, her glacier fieldwork, her purple hair, her liking to camp alone in the Finnish winter — prompts the narrator to stop and rewind. She plays it for editors Caitlin and Jorge, who immediately hear what she hears. Additional clues mount: Christiana pops in and out of Cyprian's recordings, and she is spending her free time learning French — Cyprian's language. The episode ends with the narrator describing a storm-night recording in which, late at night, she hears footsteps and Cyprian whispering 'let's go back to bed.'

As heard by us

A funny, uneasy look at how confinement turns exercise, flirtation, and exhaustion into daily pressure.

This episode takes a goofy armpit-fart bit and lets it settle into something harsher: what a year-long mission does to a body and a mind. Carmel, the mission commander, keeps taking on more work, loses the exercise she needs, and sounds more worn down in each recording.

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Why you'd press play

You want space reporting that starts with a joke and lands on real pressure.

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