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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.
If I got to go to Mars, I would drink my own pee if it came to that. No questions. I've seen much worse on Fear Factor and the like.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
Water recycling technology to do just this is being tested and used on the ISS now. That's the main mission for the ISS, to sort these logistical technologies out.
If you drink your own piss untreated, you're going to die. You excrete urine for a reason; it's poison in high concentrations.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
How sad to be that cynical about one of the greatest achievements in the history of humanity.
As for the practicality of humans in space... it really depends what your goals are. If it's to learn about the universe, human space flight is indeed rather silly, as it's vastly more difficult (and dangerous) to get a human into space than a machine. If your end-game is to get a permanent and self-sustainable human colony off world in the distance future, it's important that we as a species become comfortable living and working in space. Obviously, with your "real science" comment, you're interested in the former. Personally, I like to see us doing both.
The "television" aspect of space flight is because it's pretty exciting to watch in general, and I suppose because we also like to see how our investments are doing, considering most of the big stuff is still publicly financed. Getting people interested and excited about space is also a good idea to ensure the public (and hence, Congress) remains willing to fund all this science, which still takes a shitload of money to do.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Get your ass to mars!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.