Volunteers Wanted For Simulated 520-Day Mars Trip

anglico writes 'Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission. ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.'

Comments

This is not new

[Ceiynt]

See: Biodome. The failed movie or the failed experiment.

Re:This is not new

[wizardforce]

An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.

Re:This is not new

[DerekLyons]

See: Biodome. The failed movie or the failed experiment.

 
Biosphere 2 was designed by ecological mystics with a minimum of engineering and scientific support to meet specific environmental, ecological, philosophical, and quasi-religious goals. This lead them to make many costly errors;

• They tried to leap from a laboratory bench experiment to a full scale operating facility, which lead to many problems.
• They were well along in construction before the discovered the windows wouldn't work - resulting a lengthy and expensive delay to develop new windows.
• Late in construction they discovered that they hadn't accounted for changes in atmospheric volume due to temperature changes - resulting in the (expensive) last minute addition of the 'lungs'.
• They never ran a small scale simulation with animals and insects, or a small scale simulation long enough to allow plants to spread - resulting in the discovery of multiple nasty interactions between the various ecological elements inside Biosphere.
• Because of the lengthy delays in construction and the lack of scientific and engineering rigor in the design of the 'experiment' they rushed to perform the first lockout mission - without properly testing and commissioning the facility.
• The 'Bionauts' were chosen on the basis of political and philosophical correctness and acceptability rather than being a properly selected and trained team.

Etc... etc... etc..
 
In short, Biosphere 2 isn't a valid standard to judge such experiments by. Sadly, it was such a highly visible flop and so few people are aware of the reasons why, they've poisoned the well for decades and rendered it difficult for actual scientists and engineers to gain funding and acceptance for such work. As shown by your comment...

Re:This is not new

[EdIII]

I would rather have rock pools and some place to pretend I was on earth.

Fuck pretending about Earth. I would rather have the masturbation pod. Some sort of self-sustaining lubricant producing plant, mood lighting, and all the latest porn transmitted from Earth. Give the women a Sybian or some equivalent shit too.

I guarantee you an hour a day in one of THOSE pods and I just might not mind looking at bunch of plastic walls and algae tanks. Or to put it another way... without the masturbation pods I guarantee you they will be sending up a 2nd mission to find out what went wrong with the 1st mission.

Let them play WOW

[Shivetya]

I figure it this way. They need to pass a lot of downtime. Let them play a MMORPG. Then if your really creative you can let them farm gold and pay for the trip by selling the gold and characters they create.

Well I am kind of serious about the first part. Its going to take something highly addictive to keep them occupied during the trip there and back. Certain types of games would do it just fine. If you could find a way of combining learning into them all the better, but in some ways mindless entertainment may be key.

Re:Let them play WOW

[icebrain]

It's kinda hard to play real-time interactive games when you're dealing with round-trip signal times of up to 40 minutes... I think that would knock out MMO games. Now something like split-screen Halo, on the other hand, doesn't require that, but is more likely to forment anger amongst the crew.

On the gripping hand, the old naval solution would probably work best. That is, keep the crew occupied with enough busywork that they don't have time to piss each other off. This was the standard practice on old sailing men of war; you needed large crews for combat/damage repair and for certain shipkeeping tasks, but otherwise they sat around with little to do. Hence, rituals of inspection, holystoning the deck, etc. This is also why modern crew-reduction initiatives on ships can backfire; smaller crews have a harder time performing damage control than larger ones.

Anyways, for a Mars mission you need a lot of crew for the surface exploration in order to get as much data as possible; the cruise phases (for the most part) have little for them to do. They'd likely be occoupied running different experiments and performing regular maintenance, and exercising (a lot) rather than just being couch kudzu.

Re:Let them play WOW

[CrimsonAvenger]

A lot of the social issues are well studied already, or at least should be. For example, submarine service in the various navies of the world.

Speaking from experience as a submariner, I must disagree.

Among other differences are the rather large size of the boat's crew (comparatively speaking) and the mission duration.

For a submarine, four months is a long voyage.

And there aren't enough ways to divvy up six guys so that you can rearrange things so that two guys getting on each other's nerves can be kept apart.

Been There, done that.

[blhack]

People act like sticking these people in an isolated chamber for a few hundred days is a new problem, it isn't. Sailors have been doing it for centuries.

If you want to study the effects further, give these people all a free 600 day cruise around the open sea. They're going to get horny, they're going to get angry, and they're going to get bored. That is what will happen.

Put a server on board with some quake and a few other video games. Give them all a bunch of contraceptives.

It will be fine. Trust me.