After spending 378 days inside a 1,700-square-foot facility living and working in Mars-like conditions, the four crew members of NASA's CHAPEA mission were welcomed back to Earth by their families on Saturday.
Four volunteer crew members — commander Ross Elder, medical officer Ellen Ellis, science officer Matthew Montgomery, and flight engineer James Spicer — had been living in a 1,700-square-foot, 3D-printed, Mars-like facility inside a hangar at the Johnson Space Center since Oct. 19, 2025. On Saturday, friends and family cheered them on with a celebration.
"For more than a year, they have lived in an isolated environment, conducting critical research and helping us better understand what it will take to send humans to Mars," Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center, said. "Inside just 1,700 square feet, they managed to live with limited resources; they maintained their habitat, they grew crops, and they carried out simulated Mars operations."
The Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) missions are designed to emulate what life would look like for NASA on the surface of the Red Planet. The Earth-based mission, NASA says, will provide "foundational data to inform human exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond."
"For Mars, the risks are great," Elder said in his first remarks since stepping out of the space, "but through seeking understanding, strong vision and leadership, creativity, fortitude, hard work, and an incredible foundation, the goal of putting humans on Mars is not only achievable, but rather inevitable."
Life on Mars?
In reality, Mars has a radius of 2,106 miles, according to NASA, making it about half the size of Earth. The CHAPEA crew occupied a space roughly the size of a three-bedroom house.
Inside the 3D-printed habitat, the four crew members tested robotics, habitat maintenance, physical exercise, and crop cultivation, simulating what working on Mars could look like.
In doing so, NASA strove for as close of an emulation as possible. And since Mars is 140 million miles away from Earth, the Mars simulation had communication delays between 26 and 44 minutes, according to Wyche. Every message would take up to 44 minutes to send to the CHAPEA mission, and every reply would take as much as another 44 minutes. That included emails sent to and from their families and friends, which was the crew's only way to communicate with them.
At one point in the mission, the crew went a full two weeks without communicating with the outside world, simulating a real-life potential blackout if the sun were to be between Earth and Mars, according to Suzanne Bell, one of the co-investigators on CHAPEA.
"One of the important things is a sensory deprivation experience," she said. "So, think of the fact of never going outside for 378 days, never seeing anyone else besides those other three crew members you’re with."
Though the crew received much more limited information from the outside world — Elder jokes that the crew's "current events knowledge might have been a bit time-delayed over the past year" — their friends and family apprised them of life on the Blue Planet. Spicer said he had received more than 4,000 emails over the course of the mission.
Crews went up to the International Space Station and came back to Earth in the 378 days CHAPEA's team was kept away in the hangar. The Artemis II astronauts traveled further than humans had ever gone in April in that time, as well. In August, President Donald Trump visited the Johnson Space Center — and the CHAPEA crew was still inside the hangar, less than a mile away.
"These miraculous achievements lay the foundation for long-duration deep space exploration," Elder said. "Missions like CHAPEA help place another brick or two of that foundation, with a heavy focus on the human element and the countermeasures needed to survive the unforgiving Red Planet.”
What's next for CHAPEA
After reconnecting with their families at the Johnson Space Center, the crew will begin two weeks of post-mission evaluations with NASA scientists, giving insight and recommendations for future exploration.
"The next two weeks are [a] critical data collection period for us," Bell said. "We have been collecting continuous data during the mission, but it’s on that communication delay. This will be the first time we get to sit down and talk with them, debrief extensively, collect baseline data now that they’re back and finished with a mission like this."
As for future CHAPEA missions, NASA plans to transition the program into a more all-encompassing Moon and Mars Exploration Analog, or MMEA, with an emphasis placed on preparation for the NASA Moon Base, permanent infrastructure on the lunar surface NASA is preparing to develop as soon as later this year.
NASA estimates MMEA could begin its simulated mission as soon as August 2027, with crew members once again inside the Johnson Space Center for a year. It's possible that by their exit, NASA will have embarked on the Artemis IV mission, returning humans to the Moon.
"We have a narrowing window of opportunity to maintain U.S. preeminence in space," Ellis said. "That strategic [advantage] will only be preserved through deliberate action — NASA’s Moon Base, the National Space Academy, they create opportunity. Let’s seize the initiative, lead with science that will benefit our economy, and ensure our legacy in space for our children’s children."
Copyright 2026 Houston Public Media News 88.7