The Minds Behind the Mission to Mars

Process Post

John Duval and Robert Gray

When we began the studio, we only knew that it would have to do with uprooting. On the first and second day, we were challenged with making a small one minute radio piece. This taught us how to edit, and gather audio out in the world. For this project, we focused on how the winter last year affected the T. We went around Central square and collected audio which was edited when we got back. Audacity was a little bit hard to learn at first, but after some practice, we got the hang of it. Our first piece turned out pretty well, especially for only one day to work on it.

The next day we were asked to start thinking about our final piece. -At first we had no idea which direction we wanted to take this in. Since it was open ended, Robert and I began talking about things we were interested in. After a long conversation, we arrived on the topic of space travel, to mars in particular. Soon after Robert and I made the decision, we began brainstorming who we wanted to interview and what we wanted to ask them. After creating a google doc, we wrote questions for the interviewees and also started placing links to relevant people and webpages. We began emailing people on the third day of the studio and didn’t hear back until the next afternoon. In that time, we finalized our list of questions and the recording booth got set up. The first person we heard back from was Rachel Kraft at NASA. She is in an administrative position and although we didn’t really get an interview from her, she gave us confidence in NASA and their quick responses. We also heard back from Laurel Kaye on wednesday. She is one of the candidates for Mars One. One of the visiting educators from Florida, Lori Bradner, put us in contact with people at NASA including Robert Cabana, the director of the Kennedy Space Center. It took a few days to hear a response, but in the end it was extremely worth it. Ms. Bradner was also personal friends with Janet Ivey, another one of our interviewees. Our final interview was Dan Carey, another Mars One Candidate. All of the interviews summed up to around an hour of audio. We had to trim this down to around 3 and a half minutes. As you can imagine, it took a lot of work to cut down more than 50 minutes.

    The final step was the editing stage. This included voiceover and other narrations for our project. We started by arranging all of the clips to a manageable length. Our first draft was around 5 minutes. This was more of a proof of concept, and less of a draft persay. We whittled the time down as much as we could, down to about 3 minutes. But we talked to the coaches and we decided that we had too much good material for us to cut it down any more. Hasit gave us a recommendation for a song that would play in the beginning and end. The song is “Life on Mars” by David Bowe. It is a very good piece of music that goes well with our radio package. The rest of editing was pretty tedious, having draft after draft and small edit after small edit. But eventually we arrived at where we are now, with a finished radio package.

    

Final Post

John Duval and Robert Gray

The Minds Behind the Mission to Mars illustrates that future for our planet is interplanetary space travel. We talked to numerous people with knowledge and experience in space exploration, planetary science, astronomy education, as well as general interest in space itself. Throughout our piece, there are many topics covered about how space affects humans. Both NASA and Mars One plan to send people to mars and into deep space. However, Mars One is sending four people at a time in waves on a one way trip. NASA plans to bring the astronauts there and back. This will be the first time that people have ever traveled into deep space, and out of Earth's orbit.