Deep inside a Swiss mountain, a group of students spent some of the summer simulating what life might be like inside a lunar base. The BBC joined them before the “mission”.
What was your childhood dream? For some, it was the idea of becoming an astronaut. There are few dream jobs more challenging to achieve.
“I remember when I was first trying to figure out that I wanted to be an astronaut, thinking, ‘How do I do it?’,” says Katie Mulry, a 24-year-old American aerospace engineering master’s student at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (Isae-Supaero) in Toulouse, France. “I was looking up what university I could go to, what I could study. And really, there’s no clear path.”
Mulry is also a project leader at Asclepios, the world’s first and biggest international student-led space initiative which carries out yearly simulated space missions every year. She was part of the second Asclepios mission in 2021-22 as an “analogue astronaut”, carrying out a simulated mission deep inside a Swiss mountain. Since 2024, she helped organise Asclepios V, its fifth mission. It culminated in a “crew” of nine international students spending more than two weeks isolated deep inside the once top-secret Gotthard military fortress in Ticino, Switzerland from the end of July until August this year.
Mimicking a Moon base
In Greek mythology, Apollo is the god of the Sun, archery, knowledge, prophecy, poetry and music. Legend has it that he would fly across the skies in his horse-drawn golden chariot. This elegant vision inspired Abe Silverstein, director of space flight development at Nasa during the 1960s, to give the name Apollo to the manned space flight programme with the goal of reaching the Moon. “Asclepios is the son of Apollo,” Mulry says. “It’s kind of like following in the footsteps of the Apollo programme and going back to the Moon.”