NASA Is Creating a Virtual Reality Mission To Mars (roadtovr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Mars 2030 Experience' is part of NASA's ongoing efforts to build public support in a real manned mission to the Red Planet. Partnering with FUSION to produce the experience, NASA wants the mission to simulate life as one of the first astronauts on Mars. Incorporating research directly from NASA and MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics PhD candidate Sydney Do, the VR experience will take users on an 'extravehicular activity' and put them in the Z-2 spacesuit, a real prototype currently in development at NASA. There are also plans to add multiplayer functionality to the game and launch with support for the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard in 2016.

Comments

Re:Human space flight is mainly about television

[Kjella]

If you don't see any value in sending people except as means to an end, then no they won't be cost effective. But I'd argue that putting a man on the moon had more non-scientific value than merely putting a science probe on the moon. It's a bit like the first guy to climb Mount Everest, that hundreds if not thousands of people do it is just to stroke their ego. But the first time was proving that we could. There's a lot of armchair quarterbacks saying that we could, because we put a man on the moon. But we know it's harder and we haven't actually tried. Proving that it is within the realm of technological progress to put a man on Mars is actually important.