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NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew
globaljustin writes "Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA concluded, "Small women haven't been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there's no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it's brain power you want," says Drysdale. "The logical thing to do is to fly small women." Kate Greene, who wrote the linked article, took part in the first HI-SEAS experiment in Martian-style living, and has some compelling reasons for an all-women crew, energy efficiency chief among them: Week in and week out, the three female crew members expended less than half the calories of the three male crew members. Less than half! We were all exercising roughly the same amount—at least 45 minutes a day for five consecutive days a week—but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways. During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000. ...
The calorie requirements of an astronaut matter significantly when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch.
Yeah, that's great and all, but the right way to post this is that the ideal astronaut has a low calorie requirements and leave unsaid that the people who can fill that role is women. No need to drag sexism into the fight when there are perfectly logical rationals for crew selection.
And this comparison is useful to point out because.... ?
However I'd argue in a truly remote environment where no external help is to be had, that the raw strength a few very fit males could provide could be useful in an emergency.
Power tools. Everything from screwdrivers to come-alongs to chain blocks to robotic arms.
And of course the added benefit of not having crews making babies at the worst possible time. On a one-way mission (say to Mars) there's no reason the all-female crew couldn't just bring along frozen sperm and produce the first generation of Martians.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Send amputees missing their legs. Legs are dead weight in space. You can maneuver in zero G with just your arms.
Of course, that's just the false pragamatism. In the old just post jim crow days, they did this with race, too. This article reeks of pro-feminist propaganda. What if they said that the crew should be all white because they scored higher on some test, or better yet, separate-but-equal missions, but the non white mission received half the funds? Seriously, in any other configuration, the statements made by this article would be considered bigoted, but since it's pro woman who cares, right? For great social justice?
The only people deserving of hate here are the hypocrites who come up with this bullshit and try to pass it off as moral.
I love the fact that Mars is the only planet known to man that is solely inhabited by robots
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
Or, put differently, a diversity of skills and abilities is what you want to deal with the unknown. NASA knows this, of course. But it's not just a variety of PhDs that you want, it's a variety of physical capacities and problem-solving approaches.
Historically, NASA has expected any improvisation to happen on the ground, where teams could experiment and relay the best, tested idea back to the guy in space. That becomes less practical the further you get form Earth. Diversity beyond "diversity of PhDs" will be valuable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.