Barry wrote: Instead of the crazy stuff the Mars Society is pulling with its canvas clad spacemen in the Utah desert, they should engage in real Mars science by pooling their resources and sending additional life sciences experiments to Mars.

Chris writes: Hum, you don't read do you... I and others in the Mars Society paid money for experiments on Beagle II and members of the British branch of the Mars Society worked on Beagle II.

Tell me when Marie Curie in her bare feet was refining radium in an old shack that wasn't science was it?

You are fixated on the apparel worn. Not why we wear it or what we do while wearing it... I've tried to explain to you, but you don't get it. I've given you links to papers and documents related to the activities. But, you don't seem to read them or are unable to comprehend them.

From the same article you quote from come this talking about Utah and the Hab, etc...

***That outer-spacey look has already lured American, German and British television news crews to Hanksville, and more are on the way. The six scientists now aboard the research station said that perhaps their most important duty was to be nice and photogenic. That is the most cost-effective way, they agreed, to create a groundswell of support for sending human beings to Mars.

They also agreed that, at the moment, no such groundswell exists.

"Kids these days, they have never seen a moon walk," said Nell Beadle, 36, the second-in-command aboard the station and a marine geologist who works for a Seattle company that maps the ocean floor. "It is kind of sad. They don't even see manned interplanetary travel in the realm of possibility.

"Like her colleagues in the station, Ms. Beadle cannot remember a time when she was not a space geek who desperately wanted to go to Mars.

Ms. Beadle bought her first telescope at age 9, taught herself celestial navigation when she was 10 and completed a science fair project on Mars geology at 14. Sybil Sharvelle, a University of Colorado water-resource engineer who specializes in space station water supply systems, was in fifth grade when she bought NASA's Shuttle Operators Manual. Even now, at the age of 26, she has a habit of beginning dinner-party stories by saying, "When I was at space camp. . . ."***

http://shockandawe.us/archives/Science/020323a.htm

Oh, and here are some images of some other guys "play acting" in the same desert areas a few years earlier...