Six university students spent 10 days living underground in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo in Vilonia, Arkansas, breathing recycled air, eating freeze-dried food, and pretending they were on Mars. The mission, called SEA 1 - Thalassa, began August 7 and wrapped up Tuesday, run entirely by students rather than a government space agency or private contractor.
The crew includes commanders from Rice University and Georgia Tech, a medical officer from UCLA, a scientist from Arizona State University, and engineers from MIT and Georgia Tech, according to Southeast Analog, the nonprofit behind the mission. As reported by Fox 5 Atlanta, the six-member crew lives roughly 500 to 600 miles from Georgia Tech's Atlanta campus at Titan Ranch, a former Titan II ICBM launch complex, and the crew underwent six months of training before the mission began.
A Silo Built for Doomsday, Repurposed for Discovery
Titan Ranch occupies Titan II ICBM Launch Complex 373-9, which served as an active nuclear missile launch station from November 1963 until it was decommissioned in February 1986, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 2020. Air Force veteran G.T. Hill bought the flooded, decommissioned complex for $90,000 in 2010 and spent $800,000 over the following decade excavating 25 feet of debris and groundwater to turn its 3,500-square-foot launch control center into a livable underground habitat, per Arkansas Money & Politics.
During the Cold War, central Arkansas held 18 Titan II missile silos spread across three counties, each capable of housing a 103-foot-long intercontinental missile carrying a warhead 30 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the same outlet notes. Fox 5 Atlanta reports the crew endures a 20-minute communication delay with mission control in Atlanta, mimicking the lag astronauts would experience actually reaching Mars.
From Food Pantries to Founding a Space Program
Southeast Analog founder Vic Paulson, a Georgia Tech aerospace engineering doctoral student, conceived the mission and, per Fox 5 Atlanta, has said an analog astronaut mission simulates an actual space mission on Earth. According to Georgia Tech's own student center, Paulson relied on campus food pantries and crisis housing during her undergraduate years before later paying out of pocket to join an analog astronaut mission in Switzerland — an experience that helped spur her to build a more accessible, U.S.-based alternative. Fox 5 Atlanta reports Paulson was inspired by a zero-gravity flight and says the mission aims to mirror astronauts' mental state on Mars.
Paulson and her team engineered and built all of the mission's equipment — including the space suits, suit hardware, command center communication system, mission control architecture, and onboard research program — in about ten months, according to the station's report. Students also built the flight rules governing the mission. Southeast Analog describes itself as the first entirely student-run analog astronaut mission organization in the United States, and the group now includes students from more than 30 universities.
Mission Control Runs Around the Clock
Back in Atlanta, a 24/7 Mission Control Center on Georgia Tech's campus is staffed by 31 student flight controllers managing round-the-clock operations and communication logs, according to Southeast Analog. The crew inside the silo exercises one and a half to two hours each day and follows a research schedule built around nine student projects spanning space biology and robotics — including teleoperating a commercial rover deployed in Bolivia's Uyuni Salt Flat, a common stand-in for the Martian surface, from inside the Arkansas habitat.
In December 2025, the Southeast Analog Initiative was selected as an inaugural seed grant recipient by Georgia Tech's Space Research Institute, which is backing efforts to build a repeatable, low-cost space simulation platform in the Southeastern U.S. The approach echoes established NASA analog programs like the CHAPEA facility in Houston and HI-SEAS in Hawaii, which study crew psychology, isolation dynamics, and technical procedures ahead of eventual multi-year Mars missions, per Georgia Tech.
What Comes Next
Incoming Southeast Analog president Gabriel Buggi, who is set to take over leadership from Paulson, told Fox 5 Atlanta the training is invaluable and said he plans to run a second mission next year in a more advanced pressurized facility. It remains unclear how the group will fund and staff that transition, though Southeast Analog has leaned on grants and university backing to get this far.
Paulson has said sending humans to Mars will require resources, funding, and public passion, and that she hopes the team's work will support efforts to eventually send real astronauts there. She has also said she believes putting a human on Mars in the next few years is technologically feasible. Southeast Analog streamed portions of the mission publicly on YouTube from August 8 through Tuesday, letting viewers watch real-time mission control operations and crew interactions from the silo.
