Slashdot Mirror
Breakdown Forces New Look At Mars Mission Sexuality
FloatsomNJetsom writes "Popular Mechanics has up an interesting story, discussing what the long-term implications of the Lisa Nowak incident could mean for Mars Mission crew decisions: With a 30-month roundtrip, that isn't the sort of thing you'd want to happen in space. Scientists have been warning about the problems of sex on long-term spaceflight, and experts are divided as to whether you want a crew of older married couples, or asexual unitard-wearing eunuchs. The point the article makes specifically is that NASA's current archetype of highly-driven, task-oriented people might be precisely the wrong type for a Mars expedition. In addition scientists may use genomics or even functional MRI in screening astronauts, in addition to facial-recognition computers to monitor mental health during the mission." Maybe observers could just deploy the brain scanner to keep track of them?
a-sexual unitard-wearing eunuchs
I think scenario has much better movie possibilities.
Let's have Slashdot solve a problem revolving around human sexual relationships. I can't think of three words more "anti-slashdot" than that ;)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...just maybe Lisa was somewhat unstable to BEGIN with? Maybe this is an isolated incident, but psychological profiles should be taken with greater care before extended missions IMNSHO.
They only need to look as far as the crew on a submarine to see what makeup can last a year. AFIK they are all male crew.
No, what we want is pansexual swingers in a nonstop orgy . People who will have sex without conflating it with love, possession, jealousy, status or other issues. To prevent inferiority conflicts with mission rank, sexual performance should be evaluated along with other mission skills.
All of it on camera, especially the long seasons spent in zero-g. The syndication rights could fund the entire mission, and the subsequent colonization.
--
make install -not war
Recruit the astronauts from among the slashdot readers. They won't have a problem going a couple of years without sex. You can't miss what you don't know!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Why not just hire swingers as your astronauts?
Just because your crew makeup is all married couples doesn't mean you won't have jealousy and love triangles, possibly fatal ones.
Source: "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Why was I not informed of this earlier? Suddenly I feel the need to go and preach to the heathen martians.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Hasn't anyone looked at using well trained midgets? You could reduce supplies and ship sizes by a third, that's billions of dollars! My guess, rampant hieght-ism at NASA.
This is an interesting one. In centuries past when boat crews of men would find themself at sea for many months without female company many strange behaviours emerged. Homosexual acts between otherwise "heterosexual" red-bloodeed Jack Tars became quite normal.
Can even science effectively moderate and control the human sexual urge? The Royal Navy of days gone by turned a blind eye to most of it, so I gather from unreliable sources I may have read. I believe the words in my subject here are attributed to the answer Winston Churchill gave when asked what made the Royal Navy of old so strong.
Jeez, I can't imagine finding many of my colleagues alluring even after spending 6 months trapped in a submarine with them!
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Ok, first off, this could make recruiting a bit dicey for the NASA astronaught program
Secondly, why are the eunuchs required to wear unitards?....Is this a sci-fi novel reference?....do we need to point the brain scanner at you?
I'm confused
Perhaps you're just referring to an a-sexual voice for the Unix based ship computer?
See how rumors get started?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I especially enjoyed the Hal Cartoon : Cagel Cartoons. Scroll down to the middle of the page.
Tom Toles addressed this yesterday...
Sending a crew of swingers? Therefore when someone sleeps around, nobody cares!
I think too much is being made of her mental breakdown. Its not uncommon for women to all be affected by jealousy and astronauts are known to get god complexes. They should have seen this coming. What really irks me is that she is being tried in the public and the only crime she truly committed was assault with pepper spray. They're trying to prosecute her based on intent when they have no idea whether she really intended to do anything but scare the other woman.
They (the media) should just let this drop. She had a mental breakdown and probably needs to take a break from the NASA stuff for a while. It shouldn't mean the end to her career, but it should mean the end to her space shuttle rides.
In colonial times, people would spend up to 9 months at sea on board naval vessels. In those days it was deemed bad luck to have a woman on board, and was avoided as much as possible (except for passenger ships). The reasons behind it are obvious: 200 drunk pirates at sea for 9 months + 1 woman on board = deep trouble. Exploring space isn't that much different to what our forefathers faced a few hundred years ago. Unfortunately it's hard to state the obvious in an age of women's liberation. The answer is simple, although not a P.C one - send an all male, heterosexual crew.
"highly-driven, task-oriented people might be precisely the wrong type for a Mars expedition."
1. slackers in space
2. "the 'dro"
Just pile some PC's onboard preloaded with WOW. This will 100% ensure that no sex will take place. Other side effects include 0 mission objectives accomplished though. They would land at their destination and never get out of the ship. =)
Put us nerds up there.
Rejected on earth and now in space....
This raises the question...has anyone actually ever had sex in space? http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_214.html
Just send repulsively ugly ones and save the tax-payer's dollar$ on pointless research
Nothing witty
We don't all wear just unitards!
i fail to see why sex is being made out as a bad thing, humans have sex. sex=life. its a normal biological function. trying to detur it may cause more problems then prevent. my vote it on married couple temas to mars. that way sex is not the responsibility of NASA but instead an issue tht a marrried couple deals with. while all men crews in a submarine has been debated for a long time, how ever NASA is a scientific organization not a war organization. in fact i think sex should be mandatory for scientific puroses. finding new possitions, the reactions fluids have in 0-g, and even perhaps eggs development in extreme conditions.
Seriously, astronaut train a few good pornstars, and they could help finance the mars-trip by having pay per view webcams in the spaceship.
Why should we be so frigging afraid of one of the most basic drive of all (or at least most) humans?
The worst that could happen would be that they got some sort of weird Mars-STD, but then we could study them and develop intergalactic medications for that STD and become rich on alien-dollars.
Sam has one liberty, which he sacrifices for one security. Can you tell me what Sam has now?
Send married people since they are used to high stress and no sex.
They should treat it like Big Brother (is that shown in the USA? It's a "reality" show) and deliberately choose people who they know are going to have problems, then put a camera in there and broadcast it live. They would make a fortune. And voting for who is going to get "thrown out" would be even more fun as the consequences of that would be rather dramatic. Sounds like great TV to me!
Just send a ship full of slashdotters and sex won't be a problem
Female Astronaut : Oh god I am so hot, I need it right now
Male Astronaut : Oh yeah baby
Female Astronaut : Come here and rip my nappy off with your teeth!
Male Astronaut : er, em is that the asteroid impact alarm? I better go check.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
NASA has one incident like this in its nearly 50 years of history and they think they need to change their screening policy? I'd say they had a great run, and that this incident was a fluke.
Also, it seems that this particular astronaut had lots of stress related to being a single parent. I can't help but feel that NASA would not send parents (single or otherwise) of small children on very long missions. Maybe I'm wrong, but it I'd think that this is just begging for psychological issues to bubble up over time.
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I don't get the "crazy" reference. Are you crazy because you're pissed off at someone? Geez, I should be locked up, then, half the time. Because she drove 900 miles in a diaper? That seems pretty shrewd to me; why risk unnecessary exposure just to pee? Because she wanted to throttle someone? It's extreme, but not totally unnatural to want to cause serious violent harm on someone else. So how is she crazy? And I was going to suggest free-love, too, but someone above beat me to it and said it better. Maybe they should _encourage_ the dalliances, rather than, following our Puritan ethos, shun sex. Of course, being married, and a Slashdot reader, I've only heard about sex.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
I don't know about you, but I'm signing up to go to Mars so I can get laid.
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Stress screening (not physical, but situational or emotional) might help. After all, this was not a case of normal behavior. Understandable, but not normal. There had to be signs of her possessive tendency. I'm no expert on the space program, but I think it shows a lopsidedness of the training.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
I find the difference in treatment by the media and the executive of this incident (vs. others I can think of) very perculiar: not that they're not all over her, but because she's an astronaut, papers respectfully note that the family has asked us to 'withhold judgement'. NASA keeps her 'in seclusion'. The judge granted bail. If driving 1000 miles with equipment to kidnap and kill had happened to any other person in any other profession, they would have locked her up and throw away the key - but not here. She's part of a sacred league after all.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Maybe observers could just deploy the brain scanner to keep track of them?
HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could read your brainwaves.
...why not just recommend that existing personnel take a course of anti-depressants or other libido-lowering pharmaceuticals for the duration of the mission?
There are some ethical issues to be worked out, sure, but it's my understanding that astronauts already submit to a fair amount of tinkering with their minds and bodies.
They mention specifically that they are going to use a facial recognition computer to monitor mental health, but what do they intend to do in the event someone snaps. Even if they decided to "turn the ship around", they probably couldn't do anything before the person snapped.
Personally, I would think the best people would be a mixture of task-oriented and more lax individuals. I mean, no group can survive in a vaccum,
This stupid situation doesn't apply to all astronauts, just female astronauts that happen to be in the crazed state of womanhood (post-womanhood?) known as menopause. Believe no doctor would allow an Astronaut to leave Earth's orbit in that state, nor would any woman feel comfortable doing so! So female astronauts wouldn't be going to Mars at that age, and it is really tragic that anyone would look at this as anything more than it is... A woman going through menopause, which takes a hell of a toll on mental stability. As for not trusting Astronauts handling 30 months without sex, that is absolutely absurd and the Lisa Nowak situation doesn't change that a bit. If we find that won't be going to Mars anytime soon it is solely because we wasted all of our money, other's, and some that we won't have for years, in Iraq. My embarrassment on behalf of this country grows daily, but this transcends American politics, it's that painfully obvious.
They've had mixed crews on the ISS, and there's one right now. Maybe those are test cases?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
"...have to be crazy to think that NASA doesn't do a psychological screening..."
Strange, that's exactly what Lisa said when she was arrested...that, and something about not being able to convert yards to meters.
(does it smell like someone needs to have their di-di's changed...REAL soon?_
NASA's problem is that they're stuck in the old model of "we want to find the VERY BEST candidate" and a "process of elimination." Many corporations long ago realized that you look for good people you can refine to be the best and you keep them. NASA's like an employer that shows a brilliant stock trader the door after an interview because he's a horrendous dresser, instead of hiring him and his supervisor taking him to a tailor some evening.
Guess what? We're all full of faults, and even after decades of refining their screening technique, they didn't detect that this woman could have serious mental issues.
Would You Seek Help If It Meant You'd Never Fly On the Shuttle covers the matter better than I could, but basically: NASA's reaction to this is more intense screening, when it should be to recognize the commitment made on both sides and help them resolve their personal problems.
My employer has an entire department dedicated to helping employees with "life" problems. It's anonymous; your supervisor or coworkers never find out you even talked to them. Why? Because it's better to have someone for you to talk to and try and help you with little problems, before they become problems that interfere with your work. Had NASA had a similar program, chances are the astronaut in question would have received the mental help/counselling she needed.
Instead, NASA lost a great astronaut and her life has been destroyed.
Please help metamoderate.
Send sexually open folks with their tubes tied.
That way they can sex up whenever, nobody is left out, and no babies come back to earth being the first offworlders.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This has all of the makings of several classic sci-fi movies
Just because you monitor them does not give you the capability to fix things if things go bad on Mars.
Of course, you can send groups of people on long journeys. Just take a look at the classic journeys of exploration, where people were at sea, out of site of land, often for many months at a time.
But they had a solution to certain problems that you can't have in a space ship. You can't put discontents on an island in the fashion of Robinson Cruscoe, or set them adrift in a boat like Captain Bligh was.
You need to have a practical body of techniques as a solution to resolving human issues that does not require much in terms of medications. You can run out of medications. You need to be able to debug the mind.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think way too much is being made of this. Assuming she did what she is being accused of (something that I don't necesarily accept at face value anyway), it just goes to show that the woman is, like all the rest of the astronauts, just as human as the rest of us. There have been close to 500 people who have been in space, slightly more than half are American. The national average for imprisonment is something close to 10% in the states, so well, they are shooting way below the average.
It is reported that NASA is going to change their psych evals in response to this. Rather than trying to hammer out the humanity from people, perhaps we all need to just accept that they are people. That sooner or later something bad is going to happen because of that, and be ready to deal with it as it happens and then move on. No need for a world to stand in shock. It happens, we wish it didn't happen, we work to make it so it happens as little as possible, but it does so we just deal with it.
The point is, we need to improve and grow and become better as a people and as a society before we can expect that any segment of that society is going to be perfect.
* a NASA lady
* dressing in disguise and
* trying to revenge upon a NASA love rival
is pure B-Rate Drama worthy of Dan Brown
So if that slap-dash story can actually happen, how can any plan counter one of the many *serious* long term Fictional problems??
* Alien, Crimson Tide - Superuser has too much power
* Stark - Everyone hates it and commits suicide
* Celebrity Big Brother - One group starts picking on another
* Robocop 2 - First prototype mission works, but subsequent missions/models cannot *recreate the magic* ?
If things go wrong, will they stop the daily messages back from the deranged crew??
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
"With a 30-month roundtrip, that isn't the sort of thing you'd want to happen in space."
Isn't this how "Stranger in a Strange Land" started out? A trip to mars with infidelity and murder?
But mars is the god of war, not of peace, so hippies won't work.
how about as an opposite of highly-driven, task-oriented people:
through-the-dirt-crawling trigger-happy soldiers?
Was turn a man (Roger Torroway) into a cyborg, remove his dinkle and pump him with estrogen. and send up mental health doctors.
Contrary to popular belief, humans have yet to make it to the Moon. It's silly to talk about Mars if we can't make it past the Van Allen belt.
"In addition scientists may use genomics or even functional MRI in screening astronauts, in addition to facial-recognition computers to monitor mental health during the mission."
What if the astronaut masturbates and he makes weird faces. I would not want to get thrown out of a shaft in space because people thought i was going postal!!!!!
Just send some slashdotters - we don't have sex anyway :\
Maybe that explains the reason way all space aliens described by abductees resemble asexual unitard-wearing eunuchs! Maybe they're asexual unitard-wearing eunuchs from OUR OWN future! "Attention, devolved human from our past timeline: where may we find Mars?"
I don't think any program can weed this "craziness" out. I recently saw a BBC (I think) documentary on people who somehow became obsessed with a person they fell in love with. I don't think you can profile people and find candidates who cannot fall in love or be jelous. In this documentary there was one elderly man who had seen a a girl his age during WWII and had never stopped thinking about her. He spent years trying to find the person and eventually found her decades later. Another example was a "happily" married man who fell in love with a woman and eventually lost his family. I think he understood that he would never get the other woman, but he was just too obsessed to stop. One little old lady stalked her ex-husband out of jealousy and just couldn't help it until her friends got her to move out of the country. All of these people seemed ordinary and genuine. I think this can happen to almost anyone.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
We'd be unevolved compared to eunuchs from the future, not devolved.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
There was a Bio-Sphere test a while back which was going to include people as part of the bio-sphere. The experiment failed if I remembered correctly. The simplest way to test for a viable group is create the same living structure here first and lock them in together. If they can not last 30 months together here, then they sure won't make it 30 months just because they are in space. (reality show meets NASA)
I would guess that a common moral/religious belief relative to marriage would be a benefit.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
As anyone who has taken a long car trip with others will tell you, close quarters plus extended periods leads to trouble. On a space flight, I imagine it is hard to pull over for a beer and to stetch your legs.
The psych screening process should have catch such tendencies, but the last time the woman in this case was screened (I hope they do check-ups after the first screening) she may have been fine.
However, I wouldn't just get wound up because this case has a sex component (boy, Americans get wound up over sex)... a fight could breakout between two guys over say... da Bears or some other stupid thing like, "for a goddamned year Harv, I've watched your toenails float all over the bridge when you trim them... now you pay!"
They need to give some thought to recreation on long trips through space.
... Send up a crew of ./ers with enough copies of the Burning Crusade to go around. Should clear up all problems.
Nowak's breakdown surely wasn't the trigger for NASA to start thinking about the psychological problems of long-term space missions. Most of the Russian experiments in this area have been with all-male crews, though.
IOW this is more about PopMech finding an excuse to write snigger-worthy story than about NASA uncovering a new possible problem. Whoop-tee-doo.
Other side effects include 0 mission objectives accomplished though. They would land at their destination and never get out of the ship. =)
That's no problem, you just set up control of the science rovers as in-game elements - the ultimate instance.
Look, that last "rock monster" we attacked dropped a strata of living bacteria!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If Churchill ever said that, he was joking.
Pining for the fjords
Hire fugly astronauts. I'm talking "I'm so ugly, Howard Stern had me on his show" ugly.
bottom line: no method of birth control is foolproof and there's no way to equip the mission to handle pregnancies. only way to be sure: all-male or all-female crews...give me an all-female crew and add me to the list of posters who advocate financing the mission through porn-cam rights...
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
It's all in there. Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, particularly the first book, is a pretty accurate portrait of the human nature of a crew on their way to mars. I especially enjoy the part where the ones that are picked to go after all the stress tests and whatever are precisely those who can lie better, and how the masks they put on for to get selected go out the minute they know they're set on their way. And how the most driven personalities are the most psychotic, too. eh.
shana
I'm sure the crew can get all their sexual tensions out via the liberal use of the holodeck or occasional encounters with strangely biologically compatible aliens.
Life needs more saving throws.
Right, like there is no possibility that two male astronauts might decide to get naught during a long space trip...
Three Squirrels
Lisa's only hope is to give in to her new bizzare celebrity status -- a pictorial in Hustler, a web site and a couple of scenes with Ron Jeremy.
"NASA's current archetype of highly-driven, task-oriented people might be precisely the wrong type for a Mars expedition"
NASA's current astronaut office is viewed by many as wrong for just about every mission.
First off their are way to many astronauts. There are over 100, they spend their lives in pursuit of this one goal, and even if they get in to the office they may never fly, or if they do, most fly once. The approaching end of life of the Shuttle is further aggravating a bad situation. Unless you are already scheduled for one of the remaining missions chances are your space faring career is over, unless you are young enough to last the decade until the Moon ramps up if it ever does.
Today's astronauts come across as a politically correct bunch of over achievers with some screws loose in general. These people have to be somewhat nuts to jump through all the hoops they have to jump through, to spend the prime of their lives chasing a one week flight on the Shuttle, and spend years trapped in the horrible NASA bureaucracy as the price they pay.
The best solution we could get is to make space flight really routine, and relagate the current astronaut corp to pilots where they belong. Everyone else should be specialists and experts in the fields you need to colonize the Moon or Mars, with a heavy emphasis on handymen who can repair stuff when it breaks with limited resources, green thumbs who can keep people fed, geologists who can find and tap raw materials, etc.
It would be nice if people could routinely travel in space without being a fracking Astronaut/Cosmonaut in the first place.
As for dealing with the sex issue.... good luck. Its nearly impossible to prevent people losing it one way or another over sex. It is one of those areas where our primal instincts still exist, and are nearly impossible to completely suppress or control.
@de_machina
... the Space Cowboy...
Latewire
Specifically the topic of 'what type of person would you need for sex in space?'
It's an old C S Lewis short story which I have. If anyone mods this 3 or higher I'll look it up and give you a reference.
In it he (pretty accurately) predicts exactly the issue which is being covered here - that of the authorities concern for the sex life of an all-male group on a long-term moon expedition.
What NASA does is send prostitutes out on the supply ships. I leave you to guess what the rest of the story is like!
This issue has of course been fully dealt with here.
Dude, I would NOT want to be in that capsule. Do you have any idea what the personal hygiene habits of hippies are like? Let's just say that they make computer nerds look like OCD cases with a cleaning fetish.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Its a very important question. Place men and women together without proper birth-control (Or even with them refusing it) You might get the situation of the first child born in space, and by the time they got back they'd have grown up in a zero gravity situation. Furthermore, there's a lot that can go wrong with Pregnancy, even among healthy people- and we're certainly not ready for zero-gravity conception, pregnancy and birth. As far as we know there have been no such experiences with humans. Furthermore, what about the relationship dynamic. Stuck with a single man or woman, are you sure those people would really get along. Would they begin to dislike each other? Can you really expect adults to not have sex for over two years? A lot more questions, it seems, are going to need to be answered before we can assure the emotional and mental health of our astronauts.
Personally, I'd have modded that one as insightful -- seems like a perfect solution!
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
We have a boner...
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Just kidding. I'm sure the microscopic life forms on Mars will welcome their new Human Overlords.
The diaper-wearing long-haul killer was unbelievably selfish and self-centered...to the point of being infantile. Someone with that kind of psychopathic personality should have never made it into the NASA manned spaceflight program, where people have to depend on each other. Someone who would drive 900 miles in diapers to kill someone to satisfy some selfish itch is not going to make any sacrifices for the good of the mission or her fellow space travelers.
Hi,
from the article:
"Many people on short-term missions are highly motivated individuals, very achievement-seeking. Sometimes these people can get very frustrated when their goals aren't accomplished right away," he says. For longer missions, astronauts - or, in Palinkas's research, members of polar missions - need to be prepared for changes of plan, contingencies, and the possibility that goals won't be achieved."
High tolerance to frustration? Being used to changes of plans, and goals that aren't achieved in time?
Well... with these requirements, it's clear which people are perfect for the job: SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
Shouldn't be hard to find some who are used to not having sex for 30 months, too.
bye,
Till
You know that sex isn't the problem... at least not as I see it. There are plenty of well-adjusted people out there who can deal with close quarters with the opposite sex without pandering to physical urges. And if they do, so what? There are also plenty of people out there who can separate the act of sex from the emotion of love and can deal with this sort of thing in a very well adjusted fashion. I like to think I'm one of them, but I doubt sincerely I'm going to be selected for a space mission :)
:) ) who told me that every mission he flew there was pretty much work to be done from wakeup to sleep time and very little time for even socializing with the other members of the crew. There were women on his flights also, and he had also said that by the time they actually flew they had spent so much time together in confined quarters during training and mission prep that having sex with them would've been almost like having sex with his sister. Lisa Nowak is an exception in the space program, not a rule.
:D
Basically in this regard, better screening is probably in-order for a long-haul space mission than for LEO science missions.
Of course, the problem can be combated in part. Part of the reason that sexual tension is less of a problem on ISS and on the science missions the Shuttle performs is because there's such an insane amount of work to do that the astronauts rarely have time to worry about sex. Seriously. I have a friend who's an ex astronaut (was on more than one shuttle mission... won't mention his name because he doesn't know I'm writing this
So in reality, given the extended training and prep sessions that would be required for a mission of this magnitude, I'd imagine most of the sexual tension would either have been visited on the ground, or at least dealt with. Plus, the key is to keep the astronauts busy during the mission doing science work so they have less time to worry about the close proximity with the opposite sex. Now, the logistics of providing enough supplies on the mission to perform science so many hours a day is a matter for someone else to work out... but I really believe that keeping them busy enough is a great way to (a) deal with the isolation and (b) a great way to keep personal conflicts and sexual tension down.
Of course, there's no way that NASA is going to be able to absolutely prevent this unless they have an all male or all female crew. Even then, I doubt that there wouldn't be a liaison of another type if this did happen. Libido-reducing pharmaceuticals are one possible way, but most of them have side effects that would reduce the effectiveness of the crew during the mission and possibly jeopardize the entire mission.
I also think married couples are a bad idea on a long space flight. In the event the worst happens, losing a married couple is a PR nightmare. Having said that, I think if any of the astronauts on that flight are married back on Earth it would have to be an extremely understanding couple who realize the risks. I know, we should send swingers!
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NASA screens relentlesssly for compatibility and skill overlap.
Regardless of their precautions, at the end of the mission one of the astronauts turns out to be pregnant and the ensuing jealous murder and schism among crew leaves her the only survior after they crash-land on the desert plains of Mars. She dies shortly after delivering the child, who is raised by transcendental Martians.
When another Mars mission returns the now-grown boy to Earth, he is endangered because a series of legal loopholes involving ancient seafaring salvage laws make him the sole owner of the planet Mars.
Once he escapes from the hospital with the aid of a sexy nurse and a journalist...Hey, this would make a great book!
Some of you old-timers, or those of you who read lots of classic science fiction, may remember the opening chapter of Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land. The (slightly far-fetched) premise was that the first manned mission to Mars was crewed with three (four?) married couples (one of which was a "marriage of convenience" between a Lunar exploration hero and an older female engineering genius), who had been picked for a high "psycho-compatibility index". In the end, an adulterous relationship on-board resulted in the birth of Michael Valentine Smith, the "Man from Mars", and the murder and suicide of two sides of the love triangle. The rest of the humans died off from various causes, M.V. Smith was raised by the Martian natives, and World War III intervened to prevent mankind from sending another expedition until Smith was a young adult (with vast mental powers resulting from speaking Martian as his native tongue).
"You may be right, I may be crazy, But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for" - Billy Joel
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I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
How many of you would pay good money to see "Cat Fight in Space"?
Introducing an AI that can read if you're stressed by facial expressions is just asking for space genocide:
"Dave. You seem a bit peaked. You should sit down."
"You know Hal, I had my doubts about you in specs, but you're right. I am feeling a bit off. I think I will have a seat."
"Not there, Dave. I believe you'd be more comfortable by the airlock door..."
Why not toss the problem out the airlock, so to speak, and send a ship full of swingers and perverts?
You could probably fund the entire mission with a webcam feed.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Didn't Heinlein raise pretty much this issue (romantic entanglements endangering the entire crew) in _Stranger in a Strange Land_? I mean, it wasn't the central theme of the book, but love affairs gone bad is what did in the first mission to Mars in the book. This is hardly a new concern.
The test is simple: all applicants must first winter over at either Amundsen-Scott or Vostok, not physically attack anyone, and come back sane with mostly good things to say about the other people they had to work with.
The duration of this test wouldn't be as long as the actual mission, but the antarctic winter is long enough to weed out anyone very edgy, I think.
Note that stations with the ability to get people in and out during the winter, such as McMurdo, should not qualify.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Now that surely is enough carrot to at least get them to Mars.
Hesiod described this human condition in 7th C BCE (give or take):
This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and poet of poet.And so is astronaut jealous of astronaut, and Airforce captain is jealous of Airforce captain. This tells us something about our human nature.
This is an apt quote from the movie. Why is this rated zero?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Well....there goes my karma....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
You're missing out on the potential for NASA funding. Set up cameras on-board like a reality tv-show, let human nature run rampant for 3 years, and sell it all pay-per-view. Even if the people all kill each other or have rampant orgies, the PPV-funding will keep NASA aloft for decades without needing additional government funding.
You might even throw a few extras into the capsule for kicks: a known psycopath, a porn-star, etc.
Think of the options for PPV: selling different camera views (shower-cam only $19.99 a month more!), time-slots (how many hours a day would you like?), and viewing types (we offer direct, unedited streaming, or the edited-for-primetime options).
The new fall line-up on FOX.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
1. Make sure all the astronauts on the mission like each other. 2. Legalize polygamy and other multi-marriage possibilities. 3. Marry the whole crew into one group. 4. Launch the mission.
Several astronauts with autism would make a great "team." Physically separate them so there'd be no violence, and they'd just be unaware of the lack of social interaction. They might even be quite happy.
Prisoners might also do a good job. They're used to living in tight quarters with a bunch of guys.
Seriously though, sexual suppression drugs would work wonders.
Am i the only one who is wondering where all the bodily fluids go after you pull out in zero-g?
I'm the perfect candidate for the Mars mission, I don't even remember the last time I got laid, I'm perfectly happy with a stack of porno & I've always wanted to try it in zero gravity anyway.
I haven't been outside in about a week, I've been outside a total of about an hour in the last month.
I love to sit on the computer all day long processing information.
Sure there's the danger of killing the rest of the crew with a single fart, but you're NASA for cryin out loud, you guys make pills for that right ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
You also don't want old married couples because they are less likely to carry out the best decision in a crisis situation, according to The Andromeda Strain. An unmarried male is going to be the most dispassionate because he doesn't have as many emotional attachments which can cloud judgment.
I'm not bitter, I'm just unsweetened.
Some solutions to inflight, mixed crew issues on long (Mars) flights:
1- Every Friday is Fight Club Night. Clear out the Node and the crew wrestles/UFCs to their heart's content. Structured, limited physical violence will greatly limit abuse and competition issues outside "the Octagon".
2- Swingers. I love this idea even if it's not my own style. Everyone on the crew is lovers to some extent. Jealousy is heavily limited because everybody is forced to share and step outside their normal boundaries. Three Dolphin Club and all that.
3- Chemical castration. Truly awful in a technocratic, puritannical manner. Everyone on the crew is given drugs to heavily limit sexual desire. Warning - this kind of approach likely has problems with making the crew into listless zombies as well.
4- Send nuclear families. Mom, Dad and the (grown) kids perform the mission. Better for settlement missions than NASA-style exploration.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
You can't screw if you can't get it up.
;)
Posting a/c for obvious reasons
C'mon, Popular Mechanics, we covered this on Slashdot days ago.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He was wearing the "V" on his Navy Commendation Medal. He got it serving off the coast of Vietnam during that war and his excuse was that he thought he was authorized being in an official combat zone. The "V" device is only authorized if you receive it for actual combat operations, however. Since he was the first Chief of Naval Operations who started out as an enlisted man, he was already under a lot of pressure from the Naval Establishment who resented him and the controversy was probably the straw that broke the camel's back.
The last chapter of the book "Lost in the Cosmos" describes this problem of what combination of men and women to send to Mars. The author figures the best combination is one man and three women.
1. Send an all-male heterosexual crew,
2. Enable hi-speed data links to the crews' pr0n of choice
3. Allow them some private time/place...
Another possibility: Include one female crew member trained as a new type of "mission specialist" ;) The same solution could apply to an all female hetero crew. I'll bet there would be no shortage of volunteers to be the male "morale officer"! (Make sure he has plenty of stamina and as much viagra as the ship will carry!)
I've long held that NASA really needs to capitalize on being one of the few organizations that can offer a zero-G sexual experience. This whole sexual issues debate can be resolved by using porn-stars for the mars mission - no sexual tension, everyone just fucks everyone, almost all the time, and it's in zero-G and there are webcams all over the frickin' shuttle and you can subscribe to watch for a modest fee online. This will also kick-start the sexual space tourism industry which is bound to be a billion dollar venture that I will surely see not a penny of despite my philosophical contribution.
ôó
Mars mission being financed by "the same company(ies) that brought you" Jerry Springer, Judge Judy and Big Brother.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
How about Hollywood's archetype of highly-driven, task-oriented nymphomaniacs?
If they decide to go this route, I'm ready to sign up.
Dont filter out sexy astronauts! Take it as an opportunity to make some zero g freefall space porn! Those money shots can hit thier mark from all the way across the spaceship! In fact, let me be the first to offer my services as the first inter-planitary porn stud!
In a culture where sex can't be talked about, sex will be a problem.
NASA would best address the issue, bring in experts, and make a plan (if you fail to plan you plan to fail sort of thing).
Conceivably (excuse the pun), NASA won't be able to do so, since historically it's been an issue they downplay or ignore.
"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," --Suw Charman, Open Rights Grp
Quoth the Straight Dope's Cecil: "My idea: send up couples with small children. They're already used to the celibate life."
Hmmm....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
...Lisa Nowak's blown the chance of Valentine Michael Smith ever coming back to Earth.
"socially adept introverts" and "high toleration for lack of achievement" ....
What about US submarine crews? As a former member of the Sub service, I can tell you 6 months under water at a stretch is do-able. Months of sheer boredom punctuated by seconds of ball-wrenching terror is pretty much the norm.
Perhaps NASA needs to get away from the current crop of 'flyboys' (since computers fly the shuttle anyways) and move towards a group of people that are already used to working for extended periods of time in close, desolate quarters?
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
I for one welcome our new asexual unitard-wearing eunuch overlords.
Then you'd just be left with non-sexual personality problems.
Software patents delenda est.
I suggest you check *your* sources. The Royal Navy has always been run by professionals, albeit aristocratic ones, since Henry 8.0 if not earlier, unlike the British Army (just compare the Duke of Wellington's problems with incompetent aristocratic officers to Nelson's 'Band of Brothers'). Voyages were NOT short - sail power is slow and unpredictable meaning they would last years. Nelson had blockaded Spain for 3 years before Trafalgar - 3 years at sea. Compare that with the tiny 3 month voyages of submarines today.
It may not be a coincidence that the 'English Gentleman' was not expected to be attracted to women [or men] but to be completely focussed on his duty.
If 'close blockade' was close enough to exchange women, it would've been close enough to exchange cannon, and the port town, with limitless ammunition, would always win.
People are still little more than hairless (or in Ron Jeremy's case, not-so-hairless) apes where it comes to their sexuality, feelings, etc.
There's a pretty bloody good reason that for centuries sailors considered women 'bad luck' aboard ship. When the crew is mostly men, the presence of a female is CORROSIVE if not explosive. Blah, blah, blah all you want about feminism, how it's unfair to women, 21st century...whatever. In fact, it's not the women, it's the men.
FWIW they are probably better off sending a crew of 100% women. AFAIK women can be downright catty and cruel to each other, but a closed population, kept in close quarters for years - I imagine women could tolerate it better than men, generally.
For that matter, how do nuclear missile submarine crews solve this issue - don't they go to sea for a year at a time? I presume they are co-ed crews in 2007?
-Styopa
1. Send only men and line the shuttle's inner hull with Playboy, Hustler, and Bodacious TaTas magazines. Each person gets 30 minutes of "private time" in the cargo bay a day.
2. Send only women, and web cams all over the place. Whether they "get along" or cat-fight the whole time, NASA would be able to fund the entire mission in Pay-Per-View revenue.
3. Just get three random astronauts. Also with web cams everywhere. Sell it to MTV as "The Real World: Mars". -- "This is the true story, of three strangers, picked to live in a space shuttle, work together and have their lives taped, to find out what happens, when people stop being polite, and start getting real. The Real World."
First is the most obvious difference between a sub crew and a mars space mission crew. Size. Even small subs have several dozen crew members. This makes for totally different group dynamics then a group of half a dozen people.
Then there is the size of the vessel itself. Subs are HUGE by comparison. I am sure how you could possibly call a boomer cramped. Yes space is at a premium BUT you could go for a run. A short one but it is possible. Space is far more cramped.
Then there is intelligence. While I only know people in the surface navy I can honestly say that they do not strike me as rocket scientists. On the other hand I presume that NASA would prefer to put people on mars with an IQ above room temperature. Lets face it, there is a big difference between the needs of a mars explorer and even the most demanding position on a submarine. This is again due to size. A submarine could carry a doctor with almost no other duties. In space, your would need a doctor who can be a pilot and an engineer all at once. And would have to be a pilot of extra-ordinary capability landing a bleeding edge ship on an unknown planet and an engineer working with cutting edge equipment. A bit different then maintaining a navy sub.
Distance. While subs MAY submerge for months they do not have to. How long does it take a sub to surface from its greatest depth? A sub that stays submerged for 3 months is NOT away from civilations for that amount of time. The distance from the rest of humanity is ONLY the time it takes to surface. The only thing that gets close are those missions were the sub sails under the ice sheets and the ice is too thick to break through.
Simply put, if a crew member gets injured or goes berserk he can be taken of the sub at a moments notice. In space, 3 months would just be the start of the journey. If someone breaks then you cannot even return yet until you arrived at mars and go through the procedure for the return trip.
It is not that submarine crews are bad, but just as the article mentioned, that current space space shuttle crews are perhaps not best suited for long duration exploration.
I recall a story of one astronaut in the days of the moon race who broke something just before he was supposed to be launched playing football. Yeah, very manly and studly. But do you think such a person who does something as stupid as that is suited to sitting cooped up for two years? if he had broken something in space being stupid he would have been a few days away from rescue but more importantly, only a few days worth of effort would have been lost if the mission had failed because of it.
If something goes wrong at the end of the first year of a mars mission that is an entire year down the drain.
Back to your submarine crew, be honest here, how many of them have gotten themselves sick/injured demanding that someone else replace them, they had to be taken off or could not go on a tour?
In space, there is no med-evac.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
....to realise something that writers of fiction foresaw long ago?
Examples that come to mind are Larry Niven (short stories dealing with tensions arising from homosexuality on an all male Mars mission) and CS Lewis (one of the stories in the Dark Tower collection).
The NASA brass need to read "Stranger in a Strange Land"
They're using their grammar skills there.
You can't prevent the problem by throwing work at them. This may be effective initially, but eventually they'll screw actual work and focus on other items.
You don't need to be an astronaut to understand this - everybody gets tired if they do their homework all day, or if they type a book all day long, etc. Even doing nothing all day long can also have consequences.
I think you put too much emphasis on the 'let them work' approach. Besides, some missions will last more than several years, so your friend's experience does not apply to this. My conclusion is that it needs to be solved by looking at the problem from another point of view; we don't need workarounds, we need solutions.
The saddest poem
Just make it a spaceship of lesbians; far more pairings possible there. You can have a 24/7 "big brother" (or would that be "big sister"?) style feed to earth to finance the mission.
Alternatively, maybe Donald Trump would bankroll the mission if it's him and half a dozen female "assistants".
Hmm... This is not reliable, because some may choose to 'forget' to take the pills one day, which will bring disbalance into the crew. Perhaps a better approach is to have this drug mixed with every food item on the space-ship, so taking it is not an option... and it's not even "taking it" - it becomes a part of the 'environment'.
The saddest poem
There's a great science fiction series about the colonization of Mars - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.
In it, the author talks about this very problem. The way in which it's solved is very practical. They isolate the group of mission candidates on Antarctica for long periods of time, and thus weed out/break those who can't hack it. (This is after all the other screening, of course).
Something like that would no doubt work well, but in the book it depended on a long list of people who were qualified and eager to go to Mars and make those sacrifices, as well as a public that was willing to fund and support such a venture.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
The name of the program in which they are testing for depression is called EEMO. Hmmm...
How about highly-motivated, task-oriented, week-driven, humanists/realists?
There's a time for work, and a time for play. I fail to see how the 2 need be separated.
Where can I sign up?
Walker Percy had alot of fun with these scenarios in his book "Lost in the Cosmos" - If I remember correctly, NASA decides that the best combination for a long trip is one man and three women - it doesn't work out that way in the end...
A friend of mine from college married a submariner. They ended up getting divorced a few years later. The long separations when he was on patrol certainly did not help their marriage, but they were not the main reason for the divorce. My friend's husband started to develop psychological problems due to the stress of living and working on board a submarine. After a couple of tours, he was just not the same person anymore and he started getting really paranoid and distrustful of the people around him.
When I first saw the story about Lisa Nowak, I figured it was only a matter of time before people started discussing who should be allowed to become astronauts and bringing the gender issue into it. Anyone, male or female, can develop psychological problems due to long-term exposure to a high-stress environment. Screenings can eliminate people who currently have emotional problems or have had them in the past, but they are not 100% accurate when it comes to trying to weed out individuals who might develop problems in the future.
In my humble opinion, people who think they are immune to psychological problems and are tough enough to handle anything are exactly the sort of people who are the most likely to develop emotional problems. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
A site full of supposedly enlightened "geeks," and when a story about how NASA wishes to prevent relationships on long flights in cramped quarters, and almost every (+5, Funny) comment is "easy, make the crew all men or all women."
There's this thing. It's called The Gay. Lots of people have it, and it's very serious.
It's not what you know but who you know that gets you ahead in NASA. That's always going to be the problem, no matter how many insanely great gadgets they import from China.
They can't perfectly know what's going on inside their astronaut's heads because that information is private. We're never going to know why Diaper Astronaut did it or what mental state she was in. We're never going to know the results of her post breakdown examination. We may someday know the contents of the love letter, but it's more likely the media is going to forget this story long before the love letter appears in court.
If it was 2 men who fought each other for the same heroine, there would be no mercy from the media, he would have gotten the death penalty, and NASA would have been sold to China.
That's the best argument I've ever heard for an all-female crew.
WHAT? Does this mean Zapp Brannigan can't come?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Come on they made for this type of job. Keen to experiment with something new. No problems sharing everything including partners. Can survive without outside support. Can live in conditions most of us wouldn't feel comfortable in. Survive for long periods breathing alternative forms of gases to oxygen. And don't mind being stranded far away from civilisation.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
6 year old children have the right stuff. They'll be there and back before puberty.
No, I think the grandparent poster's apostrophe use was Slashdot-compliant.
Besides, they're looking for asexual unitard-wearing types, not grammar kingpins.
Oh wait...
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Coming soon, to a HiDef near you!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Take a look at our past and we find many situations where large groups of people are stuck in a very small space for a long period of time. Trans-Atlantic sailing in the Age of Exploration took 3 months. Granted a Mars flight would be five times longer with not much to look forward to on the other end. If we want to get to Mars send a group that is determined to make it and risk their lives trying. NASA may not want to risk lives to go to Mars, they can't afford the bad publicity of a death in flight. Any exploration in the past has come at the cost of lives. I doubt we are past any technological point where we can continue exploration without losing a life along the way.
If the trip is anything less than suicide there will be a group willing to try it for the sole purpose of having their names go down in history. As private spaceflight develops those groups will have their chance. It is very likely that a private group will beat NASA or any other nation's space program to many of the next space milestones.
"Every time something good happens to me you say it's some kind of madness."
title says it all.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Of course it is, and I have the hardback on my shelf. An idiot typo, at least you were polite in correcting it.
Pining for the fjords
Why are those the only two options. What is so wrong with sex in space? There is the risk of a glob of cum floating around causing damage, but other than that really... Send up a bunch of swingers. It will also make the trip easier on them. Having sex is part of being human.
I have the impression that you don't actually know anything about the reality of sailing ships, if you think that Nelson was continuously at sea for three years before Trafalgar. Hints - whaling ships, which did make long voyages without touching, did not have to support a complement of guns, gunners and crew sufficient to operate sail even under combat conditions. Blockades were conducted by flotilla or even fleets. And, BTW, sail power is actually not that unpredictable in the Atlantic.
I suggest you try visiting a few of the ports than have been blockaded, from the sea, consider the state of land communications at the time, (often almost nonexistent) and consider how with, a naval blockade a town would get in sufficient artillery munitions. A little practical experience will quickly show you that under 18th century conditions, things were not nearly as simple as you think.
Pining for the fjords
Free loving hippies is what they need in space, space orgies! NASA would make enough money selling the videos of weightless cum shots to break even! Better yet, just send porn stars! First man on mars? RON JEREMY!
Back in the 80's, there were graphs showing percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere vs. year starting in the 1800's. They never said how they deduced the CO2 quantity and the graph was scaled between 2 rediculously small percentages. Now such graphs are nowhere to be seen. Google searches don't find them. The media doesn't show them. There are lots of references to CO2 levels but not a single graph of CO2 level vs. year.
"but they are also not likely to be inclined to get into a tin can with no weed"
But if you put a green house in their ship and overlook the seeds they have in their pocket when boarding....
Stoners might be very well suited for the very long and boring space flight as long they don't do something stupid while high and kill everyone. Not sure they would be so great when they get to Mars and have to do stuff though. They probably would excel at botany.
Wasn't that the whole premise of the movie Silent Running, with Bruce Dern as the space hippie on a crew entrusted to safeguard the Earth's last reserve of plant and tree life stored in their cargo ship orbiting Jupiter?
He certainly didn't fit in with his colleagues, to their eventual peril, but he did arguably have the right idea in the end when he disobeyed Earth orders to jettison the cargo.
wrong story
So you're saying we need space pirates?
As soon as we get enough people and technology up there, you can bet that we will have someone with an obnoxious independent streak who will hijack something and strike off on their own. So, sooner or later, we'll have pirates, or something like that.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
How about a matrix-like approach, where one can tame their desire by interacting with a virtual character?
The saddest poem
when you send chimps into space...
A better idea - don't send chimps into space, send Transhumans who don't have chimp brains.
William Burroughs talked about this forty years ago - sending clean-cut, all-American macho test-pilot guys into space was "nothing to the purpose".
I'm not surprised some of them turned out to be weirdos (although it might be a bit surprising to see it was one of the females. OTOH, maybe her issue was too much testosterone?)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
and not a one mentions saltpeter.
Dog is my co-pilot.
No, it's not the future of humanity, but it's the nature of explorers. Humanity will follow in due course after they've blazed a trail.
because of the radiation issues. http://www.astrobio.net/news/article2122.html http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/17feb_radi ation.htm
Going crazy after being in confined quarters such as a spaceship has already been dealt with for centuries. If you've ever paid attention to the issues at hand when sailing across vast oceans, it becomes painfully obvious. To sailors, whether merchant or military, the problem now facing astronauts is nothing new. The fact that the astronaut that went nutters came from the Navy just makes this more hilarious. (Many sailors known to keep a cool head on duty, have done some really stupid and idiotic things once on leave/liberty. The only thing that makes this high-profile is that the person flipping out is an astronaut.)
Spaceships will deal with 'madness' it the same way ocean going ones do. Depending on the situation and type of infraction they will either be monitored and put on restriction, confined to quarters, or put in the brig. It might not be the pretty picture that space agencies want to paint for us, but it's the tried and true way of dealing with the problem.
Popular Mechanics has up an interesting story, discussing what the long-term implications of the Lisa Nowak incident could mean for Mars Mission crew decisions: With a 30-month roundtrip, that isn't the sort of thing you'd want to happen in space.
I wouldn't want a Lisa Nowak wigout on even a quick 30 minute jaunt into the stratosphere.
Hell, I wouldn't want it on a 3 minute bus trip!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If NASA wants to figure out what type of people would work best, maybe they should start up their own reality TV show. This could also be a great way to get uninterested people more interested in watching things about space.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
For situations where there are small numbers of poeple and tight spaces. Pair people off semi officially and require non paired off women to oblige all the single men without restriction on rotation. Everyone single alternates. Make it a needed and required service to be considered with everyone elses qualifications. It would be wasteful to actually have a dedicated sex worker onboard. For homosexuals I would pair them up with a required permanent partner for the entire trip since they are a minority. With sex and romance an out of thought concern, people might actually concentrate on their work. Were talking a group of 20 to 50 individuals. I would also favor a slightly greater number of women in general.
Because of this they will have to revamp their psycho-evaluation methods. From now on they will have to send a probe to Uranus.
Libertas in infinitum
because women are crazy
30 months without sex isn't that difficult. It shouldn't matter. Maybe they should hire those of the higest intelligence (highest EQ) who might be able to control themselves.
I find it somewhat ironic that she was released on condition that she will wear a GPS tracking device.
Answer, don't send Americans.
I can't see this being the same problem with a Canadian crew, or a Chinese one, or a Japanese one.
History would be a good guide here.
A trip to Mars would not be very different than, say, boarding one of three old wood ships to sail due west. We know that Columbus lied to his crew and faced some pretty serious consequences before stumbling onto the West Indies. We also now that a lot explorers just out and out FAILED, usually paying with their lives and the fortunes of those that had backed them.
None of the readers of these pages really expects NASA to get every planetary exploration right, do they? We've all read about the failures caused by human error - hell, we've mocked them with reckless abandon. If an organization cannot get everyone to agree to metric or english measurements, how can we expect them to get the crew component right every time?
As for all the comments about sub crews - does that give us an idea of how the entire operation should go? A large ship, capable of handling a large and diverse group of individuals. Give them enough room to have their cliches or swinger parties - whatever. It will be more expensive, but sometimes added cost is directly proportional to probability of success (Vista notwithstanding).
If you're interested in this topic, you might enjoy the book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley. The reviews on the Amazon page summarize it better than I could. Worth reading.
Why not? A reasonable sacrifize for being among the first to go to Mars and a nice way of showing your dedication. Well, I guess there are drugs resulting in the same state but later reversable?. Pick elderly men, women with broad interrests, good physics, good sense of humour, self-distance and family making behind them.
What if this happend in space? It has already happened. There was a psychotic mental break on Soyuz-21.
. htm
The Nowak episode was delusional. The "love letter" was unmailed in her car.
http://visionandpsychosis.net/Astronauts_Insanity
Just hire really ugly guys, and really ugly chicks.
Problem solved.
I checked Nelson's blockade - in Rodger's book, btw - and it turns out that the blockade was continuous for two years not three. The fact it went on for so long seems to be that St Vincent, as a master of the close blockade, was prepared to push the envelope. This suggests that the situation was not normal. Rodger says, carefully, that the squadron was based on an anchorage in the Maddalena Islands, and that the blockade was maintained without interruption for two years. He says that Nelson was continually at sea. Given the existence of the anchorage, however, this is a rather different position from a Mars mission where there is no anchorage - the mission cannot be diverted or park in space - and there is no possibility of resupply.
Pining for the fjords
Look, I an a geeky guy, no question about it.
Last week I had wonderful sex several times with a friend which I have been seeing for several weeks, prior to that I had a wonderful girlfriend, 6ft tall, red headed, lovely, deshinibited, and prior to that enough sexual partners to make me a happy man.
I am 5 ft 7in, fat, not really good lucking and wear thick glasses.
But guys, I do put an effort in being genuinely interesting: I speak several languages, travel, read (some Scifi only, who of you have read Norman Mailler, Jose Saramago or Elfriede Jelinek), inform myself about current affairs, know about food and wine, I take care of my personal higiene (goth is not cool boys and girls) and do no pierce my body like a pirate in a drunken rampage. Pierce yourself, tattoo yourself, and you will scare half of your prospective lovers, the other half will be pierced and tattoed as you are (yikes!)
Girls melt when you take them to a good restaurant and you can talk about many topics, including the ones close to their hearts, when you can choose the different wines to accompany your meal and when you known all the happenings in town that adjust to the likes of your prospective lover (opera? A rave? Jazz? Country? No problem).
But above all they like if you listen. But not listen in the "I couldn't care less" kind of way. You know, you have to learn to be genuinely interested about a person talking to you.
Now, for goodness sakes, do not tell me that all the people on this site are soo unsociable and sociopathic that can't do these simple things?
Those are to treat depression, they are not happy pills.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Joe Haldeman addressed the issue of sexual relations on spacecraft in his 1974 novel "The Forever War". However, I don't know if his solutions would be acceptable here...