Advertisement
More than a decade after setting a record for the longest nonstop sea voyage, artist Reid Stowe has set his sights on boldly going where no man has gone before: Mars!
A former NASA engineer has offered to fit Reid with a custom spacesuit, a rendering of which adorns his studio. Photo: Herb McCormick
Artist and long-distance sailor Reid Stowe has spent his adventurous life planning and then executing one outrageous oceanic quest after another. Now he wants to harness all the experience, knowledge, and wisdom he’s gleaned from his many marathon voyages to fulfill what he reckons is his ultimate calling and destiny: to serve as captain for the first manned spaceship to Mars.
“At sea, you’re constantly looking up at the stars, which are also reflected in the water below,” Stowe says. “The sensation is almost exactly like a spaceman venturing through the stars. For humanity to evolve off this planet to become a multiplanetary species, this is such an important moment in history. Elon Musk is developing the rocket that will take humans to Mars. We’ll be living among the stars. If we’re going to do it, we’ll need the right people.”
Stowe acknowledges that trained astronauts possess the technical nuts-and-bolts skills to achieve such an endeavor. He doesn’t have those. But he does understand true isolation more than pretty much anyone you’ll ever meet. To succeed in any multiyear expedition to Mars, he reckons, will require a commander who knows precisely what to expect, far from everyday earthly connections and conveniences.
The son of a peripatetic career Air Force officer, Stowe spent summers at a family beach cottage off the coast of North Carolina and got his first taste of hands-on nautical pursuits shaping surfboards. He enrolled in college to study art, but on a surfing trip to Hawaii signed on as crew for a voyage to New Zealand, which permanently sidetracked his formal education. He’d fallen hard and passionately for the sea.
After returning to the Carolinas in his early 20s, he crafted the first of two seaworthy vessels, the first a light 27-foot catamaran aboard which he conducted a pair of transatlantic voyages. Then, with a group of like-minded acolytes, he constructed his masterpiece, a very personal vessel adorned with his sculpture and artworks: a 70-foot gaff-rigged schooner named for his mother.
Reid and his team of fellow “argonauts” sailed to Texas for the launch of a SpaceX rocket.
Aboard Anne, Stowe undertook a series of intrepid adventures, each one riskier than the next. First, in 1986, he set out on a five-month voyage to the Shetland Islands and Antarctica. A decade later, he completed a 200-day journey that was part voyage, part performance art called “The Voyage of the Sea Turtle” after the image of a giant reptile he’d “carved” in the seas with his wake via the GPS track of the trip. It was on that earlier jaunt to Antarctica that he envisioned his grandest scheme of all, a 1,000-day marathon at sea with an even grander name: “The Mars Ocean Odyssey.”
Why Mars? Reid surmised that a three-year, unsupported, nonstop “space analogous” voyage would take as long as a flight to Mars and pose similar psychological challenges. Between 2007 and 2010 he did just that, spending an extraordinary 1,152 days at sea – the longest nonstop ocean voyage in recorded history.
A funny thing happened in the decade that followed. Musk launched his Space Exploration Technologies Corporation venture – aka SpaceX – and openly spoke of his goal to one day send a manned rocket ship to Mars. With Stowe’s unique background as a captain who’s endured literally years of isolation, he put one and one together and decided he should be a major part of Musk’s plan.
(Left) A rendering of Reid’s schooner, Anne, with full sails on a space station symbolizes Reid’s hopes and dreams. (Right) Reid presented his case to command a Mars spaceship at a meeting of the Mars Society.
Today Stowe is 73, living and painting in his studio on the West Side of Manhattan. Anne is anchored across the Hudson River in a quiet backwater in Jersey City, New Jersey. He’s eager to have a meeting with Musk and pitch his services; so far, Musk hasn’t returned the call. Before returning to New York, Stowe even sailed Anne across the Gulf of Mexico (America) to the Texas coast with a crew of would-be astronaut trainees to catch a SpaceX satellite launch. He’s attracted the interest of the greater Mars space community – it’s broader than you’d think – and a former NASA engineer has volunteered to build him a Mars-ready spacesuit. A life-size rendering of it adorns Stowe’s studio wall.
In both his art and voyaging, Reid Stowe is an iconoclast, a visionary, a mystic, and one spacey dude – no pun intended. Some might even call him otherworldly, which is actually pretty appropriate because, as he gazes at the heavens, that’s precisely where he wishes to go.