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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."
If you want to know what 365 days in real isolation in a tin can feels like... At least we had: (1) plenty of things to do, (2) the pressure that if we failed bad we'd most likely die. They had: (1) nothing to do, (2) the possibility to open the can if things got bad...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story along those lines. I can't remember the title. Massive spoilers here, though you can probably guess what they are just from the context of this reply...
It's set in a space capsule on the way to the moon (it was written before the Apollo landings.) One of the men starts going kinda loopy during the long isolation, gets crazy ideas about Man's place in the universe, maybe it's all a big trick. When they finally reach the moon and start coming around to the dark side, which had never before been seen by human eyes, they see that the entire moon is just a gigantic stage prop with wooden struts and fabric stretched over it. The guy goes insane and tries to kill the others to keep the secret.
Turns out the entire trip was actually a simulation, conducted in a research facility on Earth, though the crew didn't know it. The image of the moon they saw from their viewport was actually generated using a scale model of the moon and a tracking camera. The simulation was supposed to end before the camera came around to the far side of the moon, but the mission controllers forgot or were asleep or something.
It's a cool story. Probably would have been cooler if you hadn't read this...