Astronauts will not be sent by the US to the Moon or Mars for at least a decade, but they can still get an idea of what it would be like by living 65ft underwater.
On Monday, a crew of six, including two veteran astronauts, descended to Aquarius, an undersea laboratory next to a coral reef about three miles off Key Largo, Florida.
This is the 14th mission in a nine-year-old program known as Nasa Extreme Environment Mission Operations — Neemo for short. During their two weeks in the lab, the aquanauts will go on simulated spacewalks, operate a crane and perform other tasks of the sort astronauts would face in setting up a habitat on another planet.
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"The primary objectives are based on engineering and testing and operations design for planetary exploration," said William Todd, the project manager for the Neemo 14 mission.
Parts of the mission seem quaintly out of date. One of the mock-ups is of the SUV-size Lunar Electric Rover, which may never be built because the Obama administration has proposed scuttling Nasa's Constellation program to send astronauts back to the moon.
But Todd said the tasks were more important than the details of the mock-ups. For example, crew members will test procedures for transferring an injured colleague into and out of the rover. "We're going to have a lander and a rover and ways to get off those landers and ways to deal with incapacitated crewmen regardless of the destination," Todd said.
By adjusting the buoyancy of the diving suits, aquanauts can feel as if they are walking in the one-sixth gravity of the Moon or the three-eighths gravity of Mars.
