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Six Men Endure 105-Day Mars Flight Simulator
drunken_boxer777 writes with this excerpt from an AP report:
"Six men emerged from a metal hatch after 105 days of isolation in a mock spacecraft, still smiling after testing the stresses that space travelers may face on the journey to Mars. They had no television or Internet and their only link to the outside world was communications with the experiment's controllers — who also monitored them via TV cameras — and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the outside world had 20-minute delays to imitate a real space flight."
Yeah yeah Mars...anyone can do that. 105 days with no TV or internet?
I, for one, welcome our godlike astronaut overlords.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
"STOP. FARTING."
Wow, I get to see this in my lifetime. The building blocks of a conspiracy theory.
If they ever do manage to land on Mars the conspiracy theorists will now point to this and say "see they SAY they built it as a simulator but REALLY that's where they faked the entire Mars landing! Why else would they need to build such a simulator!" Very much like the lunar surface simulator they built out in the desert, or the landing simulator MIT built for the moon landings. Oh well...
So, what we should do is put people in a "mock spacecraft" for a "test" and launch them towards Mars. At the end of the 105 days they open the hatch and... surprise!
Unless of course the astronauts don't like video games...
The astronauts are made up of our parents?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Try for the fake moon colony first. I think NASA has some film sets they could lend you.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
How do you think the Mars landers communicate with Earth?
I think they waited approximately fifteen minutes for the signal to travel each direction. Would you want your HTTP requests to take fifteen minutes? You'd lose your stiff every time you clicked to the next porn image.
Mars Journal Day 4:
Turned on XB360 and got the RROD... f***k
to: Commander Bob
fr: Commander Tom
subj: Your leg
Hi Bob, could you move your leg? It's blocking my mouth.
Thanks, Tom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Note, by the way, that some of the crews of Mir spent six months on Mir, which is smaller than a Mars craft is likely to be.
Yeah, but those were Russians. The Mir was probably a lot nicer and roomier than their apartments back home.
It's a cool story. Probably would have been cooler if you hadn't read this...
I dunno. I like Asimov, and I may read this story at some point, and I have to admit I'll be a little disappointed if the denouement doesn't include the phrase "but the mission controllers forgot or were asleep or something."
The enemies of Democracy are
So the key is to send people who aren't very bright and don't even have a basic scientific education.
You want to send managers etc to mars? Hmmm not a bad idea,we could call it a "B" Ark. (-: