What kind of person do we actually need to send to Mars?

Someone technically brilliant, certainly. But future Martian crews will also need people capable of communicating through frustration, relinquishing control when someone else knows better, remaining calm during emergencies, living without privacy, managing relationships across millions of miles, and somehow still volunteering to clean the toilet.

This week, Joe speaks with Dr. Anika Mehlis, a German microbiologist, environmental engineer, public-health scientist, systemic counselor, psychotherapist, author, lecturer, and analog astronaut with the Austrian Space Forum.

Anika describes her career as a mosaic, with each seemingly unrelated chapter adding another piece. Her work has taken her from microbiology and environmental engineering into public health, infectious-disease prevention, organizational health literacy, counseling, psychology, and ultimately analog spaceflight. And rather beautifully, a counselor once jokingly suggested that the only career capable of accommodating all of Anika’s contradictory interests might be becoming an astronaut.

Years later, that joke became remarkably accurate.

Anika was selected for the Austrian Space Forum’s analog astronaut program and later participated in AMADEE-20 in Israel’s Negev Desert before commanding AMADEE-24 in Armenia, where unexpected conditions forced her to confront what leadership actually looks like when plans fail and decisions suddenly matter. 

In this conversation, we explore imposter syndrome, quitting secure jobs without knowing what comes next, why parenting may secretly be excellent astronaut training, how analog crews are psychologically tested, and what Anika discovered about herself when her Mars habitat had to be evacuated.

We also dive deep into the psychology of future Mars expeditions: what communication delays could do to the relationship between astronauts and Mission Control, how quickly an “us versus them” mentality can develop, why being isolated from Earth is very different from actually being alone, and what happens when several highly capable humans are forced to occupy the same confined environment for years.

Perhaps most fascinatingly, Anika asks a question that often gets ignored when imagining the first Mars missions: what happens after they come home?

How does someone return to ordinary life after experiencing something no one else on Earth can fully understand? How do astronauts reconnect with families and communities that continued changing while they were gone? And how do we prepare people not merely to survive Mars, but to psychologically survive returning from it?

It’s a conversation about space exploration, but underneath it all it’s really about systems, relationships, identity, resilience, and what humans need from one another when everything familiar falls away.

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• Learn more about Anika! https://anika-mehlis-beratung.com/en/start-english/
• Her book ”Wo die Zukunft der Raumfahrt beginnt”: https://shop.autorenwelt.de/products/wo-die-zukunft-der-raumfahrt-beginnt-von-anika-mehlis

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A huge thank you to Anika for taking the time to join me today and for sharing her incredible journey, curiosity, and perspective. And of course, thank you to Nick Thorburn for the stellar theme music, Ceci Giglio for the incredible graphics, Jero Squartini for the amazing animations, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for admining the Facebook group, and to my family for supporting this project—even when I start explaining why Mars only looks like it’s going backward.