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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
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.
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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!
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.
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What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
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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. =)
This raises the question...has anyone actually ever had sex in space? http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_214.html
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 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.
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.
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"
"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?
... Send up a crew of ./ers with enough copies of the Burning Crusade to go around. Should clear up all problems.
If Churchill ever said that, he was joking.
Pining for the fjords
Or to send only girls..... and a webcam.
"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
1 in 136 is the percentage of people who are in jail at any one time. It's about ten times that for a lifetime average - ie, about 10% of the population will spend time in jail or prison in their life.
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.
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.
>Or to send only girls..... and a webcam.
I think you just solved NASA's chronic funding shortages! Brilllliant!
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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.
Well....there goes my karma....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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.
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.
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