Reid Stowe, the artist/mariner and the Schooner Anne

An image of the Scooner

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST November 20, 2024

I have written here before about Reid Stowe, the artist/mariner, Schooner Anne, the boat he built 48 years ago on a coastal waterway in Carolina, and how he sailed her alone, out of sight of land from New York to Australia, then back to New York, a journey of 1,151 days, from 2007 to 2010, the longest known human voyage ever. Also that he followed up with further voyages, such as a knife-edge one to Antarctica.

    Stowe now became fully focused upon another journey: The NASA project of taking people to Mars. It was clear to him that space travel will in many ways replicate his own voyaging – the cramped quarters, the risk, the duration – and feeling that his experience gave him something to offer, hopefully a role aboard, he became a presence at Mars conferences. There he found supporters, such as Dennis Chamberland, a retired NASA engineer, who observed that “if anybody really want to know what it will be like to isolate themselves for more than three years, all they have to do is ask Reid”. The title of one of Chamberland’s books is Departing Earth Forever.

Reid and analogs aboard.
 

    Reid Stowe and Maxine Hoover were taking groups of analog astronauts out on short trips to evaluate the experience. Last Sunday I boarded Schooner Anne at its anchorage in Jersey City, New Jersey, while Stowe was preparing for a two week trip into the North Atlantic with a crew of five analog astronauts. Two of them were already aboard, Fred Sullivan and Luke Ribeiro, an activist entrepreneur, based in Jersey City, who was testing cameras and pieces of equipment.

   It was very clear this is an artist-built boat. In 1978 Reid had landed on Dominica, an island between Guadaloupe and Martinique, finding it strewn with trees felled by a hurricane. The upshot: Sculpted mahogany panels that have been hand-carved by Reid from those trees wall the boat from stem to stern. Painted images are also on surfaces everywhere. He had painted non-stop on the long voyage and many subsequent ones and upon this coming trip he and Maxine Hoover will both be making art.

   Hoover hadn’t yet arrived when I left though. Stowe told me why in a subsequent call. And it was an eye-opener. “Maxine’s back. She just did a meeting with the world’s biggest analog,” he said. “It’s a union of all the analog astronaut training centers in the world. They are all doing an analog at the same time, separately, but communicating”. The iconic rockets were not the only tech involved, but also the satellite networks known as Starlink, and an impressive list of countries is involved, from India to Mongolia.

Reid and Maxine in a real mars space suit
 

    Do all these countries have their own rocketships?

  “No. Not all of them, not at all,” Stowe said. “India and China have some. And the European space agencies have some. But Elon Musk is so much better than all the rest that most of the countries around the world pay to have him send their satellites up. He sends up all the satellites for Starlink and he sends up the satellites for many of the countries around the world.”

   Dubai was also a player, Stowe said. They had been connected with Dubai by Matt Harasymczuk, the leader of the Polish analog. ”They are second in the world as having trained the most analog astronauts” Stowe says. Harasymczuk had admired Hoover’s paintings of chakras, the seven energy centers in the body that are part of the belief systems of Buddhists and Hindus, indeed had been so impressed that he talked of making chakra sessions part of their astronaut program.

  “They contacted Maxine”, Stowe says. “And she went to Dubai to discuss their training long range astronauts and being part of the plan for colonizing Mars”. Which is what this is all about. “Every country wants to be part of the push into space,” Stowe say. “Because everybody knows that’s where the future is, that’s where the high technology is and that’s where the big money is.”

Maxine's Chakra painting.
 

  Hence Stowe’s optimism about the future of their analog astronaut trips. “We’re working with a big group from Switzerland,” he said. “And those people all want to have analog astronauts being trained by us. Everybody is experimenting with that to learn about this new field in the human endeavor.”

  But just what is an analog astronaut? Well, primarily it is somebody who has volunteered to undergo the range of tests that will be administered to the actual crew. What had led Fred Sullivan to becoming an analog?

  “When I was a kid I followed Apollo religiously, I thought it was the greatest thing,” he said.

   Would he fly to Mars himself?

 “If  there was a reasonable opportunity I would go“ he said.

   I asked Reid Stowe just what are the people who have joined worldwide space analogs actually signing up for?

   “They want to go to Mars,” he said. “I’ve met them. They are all dreaming of going to Mars.”

   The analogs in Europe, India, everywhere?

  “Yeah, everywhere.”

   As astronauts? Or to live there?

   “Both. Some of them think they may take a one way trip there.”

    How many Analog Astronauts are there currently?

   “Thousands. It’s a serious community,” Reid Stowe said. At half past eleven on Sunday morning Stowe, Maxine Hoover and the crew of Analogs departed from New Jersey in Schooner Anne. In twelve days they plan to be back. WM