The Nevada Nuclear Test site is scarred and poisoned by decades of atomic bomb tests. ‘Useful’ damage. After 9/11, the American government begins training nuclear response counterterrorism personnel on site because of the heightened radiation present in the soil. Useful, once again- this time for rehearsal.

My proposal explicates the relationship of the radioactive ground with the past and present testing institutions at the Nevada Test Site by introducing a new one– an observation and training apparatus for an interplanetary security regime. The American military imperative for expansion continues offworld to Mars. The extremely unique, otherworldly conditions of the Nevada Test site make it ideal for simulating the environmental radiation levels found on Mars’s surface. To examine the effects of radiation exposure in the human body, 12 participants live, work, eat, sleep, and shit inside the closely controlled and infinitely surveilled habitat. Produce grown directly in the soil of the site, irrigated and irradiated, acts as the interface between the body and the damage of the site. A section of the site is pulled away from the existing regime of counterterrorist training to act as an ‘Earth-away-from-Earth’ in the context of the test.

Earth, on Mars, in Nevada.