NASA Is Already Studying What Sort of Person Is Best Suited For Mars (blastingnews.com)

MarkWhittington writes: The first crew to set forth to Mars are likely in Middle School or High School, but NASA is already delving into what criteria it should use to select the interplanetary explorers. That they should be physically fit and experts in their fields are a given. But the space agency is keen that the people who will set forth to Mars in 20 years or so should be of a particular psychological type. NASA has granted Johns Hopkins money to conduct a study into the problem.

Comments

Re:Gonna go out on a limb here

[TWX]

I'm betting that those that are good for the Navy's Submarine Service would also have a good chance. Being locked in one metal tube for months on-end versus being locked in another metal tube for months on-end, plus having an elevated amount of responsibility and the ever-present risk that an otherwise-small problem having drastic consequences.

Re:It's pretty simple. really

[Kjella]

The people that are best suited to go to mars are those who either explicitly have a death wish or else those who are simply too naive to realize that going there at the technology that we have right now is suicide. Heck, do you know how many people died just trying to sail halfway around the world to the Americas from Europe only a few centuries ago? And that was on a planet with a hospitable atmosphere!

We fairly reliably sent people to the moon with 1960s tech 6/7 times and saved Apollo 13, some 133/135 Shuttle missions were a success, we've operated a space station for 18 years, we got rovers on Mars operating over a decade... okay so space is not exactly like flying from London to New York yet, but we've certainly tamed it quite a bit. Sure, the mission is longer but most things that are critical happen during the launch/landing phase, we have a decade of on-site weather data and the Martian was a movie. And we're likely to have robots making a dry run testing the landing and establishing the habitat first, still considering the complexity I'd give it maybe 90-95% chance of success.

Certainly nothing to sneeze at but nine of out ten times you get an experience only one in a billion will have and the tenth time, well you'd likely be really dead really quick. To be honest, the risk of being in a parachuting or mountain climbing accident and ending up as a cripple is scarier than becoming a fireball, besides I'm not an adrenaline junkie. Going to Mars though, I'd sign up for that. Of course it helps that I don't have any commitments, I wouldn't do it if I had a wife and kids but there's plenty of us around. And shit, 70-75 years ago tens of millions were dying for war. Even if the mission is a wipe, that's like ten deaths for exploration and science? The horror.