The original plan was to piece together the dozen 800-pound (363-kilogram) side panels with the help of a steel crane. But the crane -- along with all the panels that were to be the module's floors -- was destroyed when a parachute cargo drop failed on July 8. Also destroyed in the last of five cargo drops was a trailer that the assembly crew needed to move the panels to the construction site from where they had landed.

Not only was crucial equipment destroyed, but the crash left a 15,000-pound heap of debris that took days to clean up. Seeing no way to continue, the original crew that was to assemble the module "split," Zubrin said, after a tense meeting that he described as a "council of war." Those workers, including the project manager, Kurt Micheels, recommended that the best solution was to postpone the work until next summer when a new crane could be flown in, Zubrin said.

Others who were on the island paint a different picture of the situation. Micheels (who is also the module's architect and had guided the design and construction from its inception) and the original crew should be given credit for the amount of work they did do, especially for the large cleanup job they did, said the Mars Society's Marc Boucher.

Those workers struggled through wind, snow and freezing rain to clean up the site of the shattered cargo pallet. That effort is what made it possible to think about continuing, said Pascal Lee, a Mars Society member and the project scientist of NASA's Haughton Mars Project, which is being conducted independently of the Mars Society's project. Lee headed the Mars Arctic Research Station task force, which guided the development of the station from its conception.

Trouble simulating Mars

To Zubrin, postponing another year was not acceptable. He had been working on the project for a year and had already sold for $200,000 the exclusive rights to film the interior of the module when "astronauts" entered. He also said that in trying to simulate a Mars mission, teams have to be ready to work with whatever obstacles conditions throw up.

"Here's the thing: This is the Arctic. You can't count on plans working. If it hadn't been the crane lost, it would have been something else," Zubrin said. "If we were going to quit at that point there'd be no reason to believe that we'd do any better next year."

The key to ambitious projects, like practicing for space missions, is the ability to improvise, to find new solutions to overcome obstacles, Zubrin said. "What this all proves is why you have to send humans to mars. Because in a human mars mission, the crew is going to be the strongest link in the chain."

But the improvised solution is not something that could have been conducted on Mars, said John Kunz, vice president of Infracomp, the Denver fabrication firm that built the habitation module. A specialist in composite materials, Koonz was on Devon Island as the expert in fitting the module together.

"There was some great leeway given to some safety considerations," Kunz said. "The one thing that we did, and the way that we had to build it in the end, was to stay clear if anything fell. And some things did."

As an analog to assembly of a base on Mars, the Arctic process would be out of the question, Kunz said. "I think in this particular case you could survive because you didn't have to worry about ripping a hole in a spacesuit. You were more mobile . . . and you had a lot more stuff around to use -- lumber and things like that to build ramps and pry things.

"Obviously, a real assembly on Mars would be a very carefully orchestrated process like we had originally planned it, the way Kurt [Micheels] had originally planned it, to be very much an analog of what would have to happen on the surface of Mars," Kunz said.

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Zubrin put and recruited a handful of young men from the nearest town, Resolute Bay, to work on the project. Resolute is a hamlet with a population of 198, about an hour by plane from the site on Devon Island. The new team was also able to secure lumber and limited construction materials from Resolute and enlist the help of journalists who were on the island to cover the Mars Society's efforts.

The first success was pivotal for morale, which had hit bottom, Zubrin said.

"We used our imaginations. We got parts of a wrecked baggage cart from Resolute Airport and we rigged it together with a bunch of two-by-fours to create a new trailer. And with that we managed to transport all of the parts of the habitat that had landed far away over to the work site."

The trailor was nicknamed the Kunz Mobile, after Infracomp's John Kunz, who fashioned the vehicle in a day and a half at the Resolute airport.

'It was rocket science at its grungiest'

That was the success that re-moraleized [sic] the group, Zubrin said, and during the next several days the crew was able to erect the module one panel at a time, using only a small scaffold and some pulleys instead of the crane. They built the floor out of wood and, in a tricky maneuver, lifted all the dome-shaped roof panels through the module to the top of the structure.

"It was rocket science at its grungiest," said Frank Schubert, who flew in from Colorado to guide the construction job once the original panels, and assembly plan were in shambles. Schubert owns a Denver-based design and construction firm called Large Art that specializes in "odd-ball construction jobs."

Schubert's considerable construction experience and creative, can-do attitude did much to turn the project around, Zubrin said.

Although difficult, the job would never have been successful if the habitation module hadn't been designed and built so well to begin with, Schubert said.

"It was designed and built with a lot more precision than we actually put it together with, and it was lucky for us because it made it easy to put it together," he said. "There were several hundred bolts in the thing and they all lined up perfectly."

A material challenge

The toughest part about the project was the inability to get materials, said Matt Smola, who came to Devon from Denver to work with Schubert on the module. "There's no Home Depot or anything right around the corner," he said.

But neither is there on Mars, which is the ultimate destination for a future generation of the structure.

"I leave in a little bit of awe," Smola said. "We've done something that is going to last well past our lifetimes and I think that structure up there is going to be there for the next couple hundred years... It's that solid of a structure. I basically believe that one day maybe one of my ancestors will see it in a museum as one of the precursors to habitation of another planet."

Despite the futuristic appearance of its exterior and the extraterrestrial aspirations of its builders, the inside of the module looks like any new-home construction site. Bare wood beams, plywood and sawdust fill the interior. But that doesn't bother Zubrin.

Although he and the rest of his group will not meet their original goal of having a six-member crew live for two weeks aboard the module in a spacecraft-like setting this summer, work will continue next year. The Mars Society plans to spend $1.3 million during the first five years to operate the Mars Arctic Research Station each summer to develop the techniques and know-how that humans will need to send astronauts to Mars.