Cast Off to Blast Off

The rocket stood in the morning light, gleaming silver against the South Texas sky. From the commercial pilot dock at Port Isabel, we looked across a few miles of coastal marsh, and there was SpaceX’s SN15 Starship on its launch pad at what Elon Musk had just renamed Starbase. Six captains crowded the rail of our schooner, all of us in blue NASA-style jumpsuits, and someone started cheering. Then everyone cheered.

We had sailed 1,200 miles from Wilmington, N.C., through a northerly gale, a blown foresail, and a stomach-turning downwind run under bare poles. We’d repaired the boat twice, rebuilt every spar from scratch, and painted her chrome silver. Now here we were: the Starship Schooner, tied up as close as an ocean-going vessel could get to the home of humanity’s next great leap.

Some voyages find their meaning before the anchor is weighed. This one found it along the way.

How a 1973 Atlantic Crossing Sparked a Lifetime Obsession

It began, as so many obsessions do, with a young man alone at sea.

In the fall of 1973, I was anchored off Cascais, Portugal, having just crossed the North Atlantic in my first homemade sailboat, a 26-foot Wharram catamaran, with Ivo Van Laacke, a buddy of Bernard Moitessier. I was 20 years old, staring at the horizon toward Morocco, the wind blowing too hard to cross. To summon the nerve, I started writing: about how a sailor is a spaceman, flying between the stars above and the stars reflected below, free to sail into infinity. It was the first time I connected the two ideas.

I had been sailing since 1971, and nothing else seemed to matter. Every voyage was practice for a longer one. In 1974, anchored off Bequia in the Grenadines, I watched the big gaff schooner Friendship Rose sail in and out of the harbor each day. She looked like she could just keep going. I thought: If I had a boat like that, I could go to sea and keep going.

With help from family and friends back in North Carolina, I built exactly that: a heavy-weather gaff schooner, full-bodied, long-keeled, low-tech enough to repair anywhere in the world. I named her Anne. In 1986, I sailed her across the Pacific toward Antarctica, already dreaming of what came next. When President George H.W. Bush called for a crewed mission to Mars, I read the description—eight people, multinational, isolated in a life-or-death environment, living aboard a moving vessel for three years—and recognized it immediately. That was the sea.

I spent a decade preparing. I studied long-duration space psychology. I spoke at space conferences, arguing that the psychological profile of an experienced offshore sailor matched what a Mars mission would demand far better than a jet-fighter pilot’s profile ever could. I published an article in Ad Astra, the National Space Society magazine, titled “Seafarers of Today Provide a Role Model for Spacefarers of Tomorrow.” I called my planned voyage the Mars Ocean Odyssey.

No sponsor ever materialized. Most people thought I was crazy. I kept going anyway.

In April 2007, my partner Soanya Ahmad and I set off from New York City on Anne. Soanya sailed 306 consecutive days—longer than any woman in recorded history—before being transferred at sea off Perth, Australia, to a vessel skippered by circumnavigator Jon Sanders. She was pregnant with our son, Darshen. I kept sailing. I went 846 days without seeing land or another person, and when I finally returned to New York, Anne‘s systems were intact and I was ready to spend another year offshore. Total time at sea: 1,152 days. The longest nonstop, unsupported sea voyage in history.

From a Rotted Mainmast to a Starship

Years passed. Life ashore reasserted itself: a jungle expedition up the rivers of Guyana, then home to North Carolina to care for aging parents. The schooner sat on the Cape Fear River, tended by a young river-tour captain named John Wolfe. A rotted mainmast eventually fell to the deck. I got the call and gave the only answer that made sense: “Don’t worry, Captain John. We’re going to build new masts out of steel.”

The trigger had been a podcast. Elon Musk, talking about Mars, had said: “A voyage to space is like a long sea voyage. If you forget one thing, it’s all over.” Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, was more direct when I reached him: “Why don’t you take analog astronauts to sea and train them on your boat?”

The program had a name before it had a boat that could float: the Mars Ocean Analog.

From October through December 2020, Captains John Wolfe, Andrew West, Eric Goss, and Oliver Parody worked through their spare hours to resurrect Anne. We felled trees and cleared swamp to get a crane in, then welded two new steel masts and rebuilt the bowsprit and pulpits. Five rotted booms and gaffs became laminated lumber bolted to salvaged spars. Andek Paint Co. donated chrome silver paint and varnish, and the old black schooner became, undeniably, the Starship Schooner.

It was while she was drying that we learned Musk had renamed his Boca Chica launch facility. We’d been planning to sail to Boca Chica. Now we were sailing to Starbase.

Atila Mezaros, assistant director of the Mars Desert Research Station, joined us as a crew member. He’d spent 18 months in isolated land-based Mars habitats with international crews. We stocked the schooner with three months of provisions and dressed in our MOA flight suits for a send-off story in the Wilmington Star. On New Year’s Day 2021, we cast off.

Gale, Broken Spars, and a Crew That Wouldn’t Quit

The sea reminded us immediately that it owes no one a gentle passage.

Once offshore, a northerly gale hit before we could mend a torn foresail. Running downwind under staysail alone, the schooner rolled rail to rail and put most of the crew on their knees. The 43-year-old interior bolts let go; locker doors and cabin trim clattered to the sole. Boom after boom cracked where the repairs hadn’t reached. None of it stopped the crew. Seasick or not, they came on deck and fixed what broke. At night, we sat in the cockpit and played songs and rapped terrible rhymes that sent laughter arching over the waves. When we finally anchored in Palm Beach, the whole crew stood together on the bow and held on to each other.

We weren’t on a pleasure cruise. Mars stayed on our minds every watch. We talked crew dynamics, isolation psychology, resource management, the strange compression of time at sea. Every sail change, every repair made in the dark, was a data point. When Mezaros headed back to his duties at MDRS, he told us we were the best analog crew he’d worked with—not because we had the fanciest gear, but because we actually had to work together to survive.

In Palm Beach we rebuilt the boat again, properly. We laminated a 35-foot main boom, which the crew named “Gertha.” We recut and hand-sewed a new mainsail from an old sail and glassed and faired the topsides. When the paint dried, the Starship Schooner looked the part.

Two schooner captains from the neighboring megayacht, Gwen Whitney and Kate Wicks, had watched all of it—the work, the music, the conch-shell calls to meals—and wanted in. They joined the crew. We were now six captains, all roughly 30 years old.

We waited in Lake Worth for a north wind strong enough to push us south against the Gulf Stream, then ran hard: double-reefed main, staysail, 30 knots on the beam. By the time the breeze clocked east, we were rounding Key West and raising sail for the open Gulf. It looked surprisingly like an ocean.

Why the Sea Is the Best Simulator for a Mars Mission

There is a quality to an offshore passage that no simulator can replicate. You lose the shore. You lose the option. The boat becomes the entire world, and the crew becomes its entire population. Whatever tensions exist aboard tighten; whatever bonds exist strengthen. This is exactly why the sea is the right place to train people who will spend three years sealed in an aluminum cylinder 140 million miles from home.

Our Gulf crossing was easy by comparison with the Atlantic run: warm, blue, long trade-wind swells. I gave the crew a rest from the work schedule and let the passage do what passages do. We stood watches, scanned horizons, picked out stars after dark. We talked about Mars the way sailors have always talked about the next landfall, with reverence and a little fear.

Our SpaceX contact had finally written back: “This is exciting news. We are glad to see you are making progress.” He also advised us to monitor Cameron County beach-closure notices. Rocket test explosions were frequent enough to rate their own notification system, and we’d all seen the videos of boosters detonating in enormous orange fireballs. None of us were eager to be commando-landing a Boston Whaler through the surf when that happened.

Then the chart plotter flagged a notice somewhere in the Gulf. One of the captains read it aloud: Falling rocket debris in these areas.

We had entered the Space Age of sailing.

Landfall at Starbase

The night before our planned beach landing at Boca Chica, friends ashore called with news: the beach was closed for four days due to a firing test. We altered course for the commercial pilot dock at Port Isabel instead. Nobody was crushed. The surf running outside the inlet was heavy, and the Boston Whaler’s odds through it were not as good as we’d have liked.

We tied up, changed into our flight suits, and looked across the marsh.

There it was. SN15, silver and enormous.

The cheering started before anyone thought to start it.

Local TV news and the newspaper came to the dock. We told our story, then loaded the Boston Whaler and crossed the shallow bay toward the facility. Getting closer, I called out: “Look! There are boats pulled up near the launch site.” We landed, crossed the dunes, and marched up the public road to the open gates. What we’d mistaken for boats was exploded rocket debris.

We stopped a few hundred feet from SN15. The guards were polite. They stopped us short of the rocket but didn’t seem troubled by a group of flight-suited mariners with a banner. We stood under the prototype that would carry humans to Mars and took our photos, all of us looking up, all of us quiet for a moment.

I don’t know whether the great wizard behind the curtain knew we were there.

On the morning of departure, the crew gathered in a circle in the pilothouse. We chanted a long, low “Om” together, then broke.

Anne has always needed more attention than any reasonable person would give her. That is also why she completed the longest sea voyage in history. The sea rewards those who won’t quit.

Within weeks of our arrival at Starbase, we had a crew of international analog astronauts from Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico booked for our third MOA mission. Alyssa Carson, who has been preparing to walk on Mars since she was 5 years old, was in conversation about leading an all-female crew that June.

The sea has always been where we go to become something more than we were on land. That is what draws the voyager. That is what forges the crew. And it turns out, that’s exactly what the next generation of spacefarers needs.

You have to cast off to blast off.

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