Four volunteers walked out of NASA’s simulated Mars habitat after 378 days sealed inside

Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthew Montgomery and James Spicer left NASA’s 3D-printed Mars habitat in Houston on Saturday, October 31, ending 378 days of isolation that began on October 19, 2025. Family and friends were waiting at Johnson Space Center, and NASA streamed the ceremony live. The exit closes the second of three planned one-year ground simulations under the CHAPEA program. Their next two weeks belong to scientists, not reporters, and the selection that put them inside was itself a long haul.

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Who came out of the 1,700-square-foot habitat

Elder served as commander, Ellis as medical officer, Montgomery as science officer and Spicer as flight engineer, according to NASA’s crew podcast episode on the crew. Elder is a U.S. Air Force major and experimental test pilot, Ellis a U.S. Space Force colonel, Montgomery a hardware engineering consultant who co-owns a film production company, and Spicer a technical director in aerospace and defense. NASA lists Elder as a test pilot with more than 1,800 flying hours from Williamstown, West Virginia, Ellis as a North Kingstown, Rhode Island, native who works with the National Reconnaissance Office, and Montgomery as a Los Angeles resident who co-owns Floating Lava Studios.

They lived in a 1,700-square-foot facility that NASA describes in its crew-completion media advisory as 3D-printed. Inside, the volunteers ran simulated spacewalks, exercised, maintained the habitat and grew plants, all under resource limits and communication delays. The advisory says the purpose is to simulate Mars mission operations and test countermeasures for spaceflight risks that Artemis and Moon Base crews will face.

NASA’s page marking the one-year point says delays reached up to 45 minutes each way and that the crew kept in touch with relatives only by email. The report on the exit gives message times of 26 to 44 minutes, in line with the long end of that range.

Mission 2 followed a selection process that the podcast page puts at about 19 months: applications opened in March 2024, the crew learned of selection in April 2025, training began in mid-September and entry came roughly five weeks later. The first crew, led by Kelly Haston, spent the same 378 days inside from June 2023 to July 2024, and CBS News reported at the time that none of those volunteers were trained astronauts. Quarterly Mars Audio Log episodes carried recorded crew logs rather than live conversation.

What NASA officials said at the exit ceremony

Johnson Center Director Vanessa Wyche and astronaut Jack Hathaway were scheduled to speak ahead of the crew, with the ceremony streamed from 3 p.m. EDT. Reporters who wanted to attend or request virtual interviews with the crew in the days afterward had to contact the Johnson newsroom by 2 p.m. on Friday, October 30, and a subject matter expert was set to take questions on site. A report on the event quotes Wyche saying that inside just 1,700 square feet, the crew managed to live with limited resources. It credits Elder with the line that these “miraculous achievements lay the foundation for long-duration deep space exploration.”

Spicer, per the same report, received more than 4,000 emails over the year, and the crew went through a two-week stretch with no outside communication and little access to news. That blackout is one of the stressors the mission was built to introduce, alongside equipment failure simulations, resource limits, and isolation and confinement, according to NASA’s crew page.

Grace Douglas, the CHAPEA principal investigator, said in NASA’s one-year update that the agency is “extremely proud of the crew for their commitment and achievements.” Michael Stenger, chief scientist for NASA’s Human Research Program, said the knowledge from the experience will help the agency carry its work over to Moon Base and beyond.

Two weeks of debriefs and the data still being processed

Walking out does not end the experiment. Co-investigator Suzanne Bell described the coming two weeks of post-mission evaluations as a critical data collection period, as the same report relays. NASA’s science teams are still processing the health and performance measurements gathered across the year. The data pair physiological, psychological and performance measures collected in a controlled setting, and the findings are meant to inform medical and psychological care planning for year-long missions.

The agency says the findings should help shape food system design, how crew time is used, Deep Space Network bandwidth and medical and behavioral support for long missions. Researchers also want to know how limited food and exercise systems could constrain mission goals such as Mars surface spacewalks, and whether the data can feed autonomy and decision-support tools for crews facing delays.

NASA has set no date for publishing results, a gap noted by BigGo Finance’s account of the exit. The same account says the program is handing off to the Moon and Mars Exploration Analog, announced July 1, 2026, which merges the HERA and CHAPEA habitats, is accepting applications and starts no earlier than August 2027.

A separate Leo.space summary of the exit lists the same four crew members and the same speakers. What the public still lacks is any measured result from the 378 days, which will not arrive until the debriefs finish and the analysis is published.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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