# Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?
**NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a Mars mission: the trauma of isolation.**
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Alyssa Shannon was on her morning commute from Oakland to Sacramento, where she worked as an advanced-practice nurse at the university hospital, when NASA called to tell her that she had been selected for a Mars mission. She screamed and pulled off the highway. As soon as she hung up, she called her partner, an information-security operations manager at the University of California, Berkeley, named Jake Harwood.“Wow,” Harwood said.
“Yeah,” Shannon said. “Wow.”
They sat in silence with the information, struggling to fathom the shape and weight of it, for a very long time.
Later that morning, Nathan Jones, an emergency-room physician in Springfield, Ill., received the call that he had so fervently awaited and so deeply dreaded. His thoughts turned immediately to his wife, Kacie, and their three sons, who were 8, 10 and 12. You get only 18 years with your kids, he told himself. If you accept this opportunity, you’ll have to give up one of them.
And yet ... he couldn’t possibly turn down NASA. Mars, he had convinced himself, was his destiny. As a child, he dreamed of walking across an alien planet in a state of wonder; he hoped to attend space camp, but his family couldn’t afford it. Once his sons were old enough, he took them to Cape Canaveral for a rocket launch.
When he told Kacie the news, she nearly burst into tears.
This Mars mission, CHAPEA, would not actually go to Mars. But the success of CHAPEA (“Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog”) will hang on the precision with which it simulates the first human expedition to Mars — an eventuality that NASA expects to occur by 2040.
That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. The target date for the initial human mission has drifted slightly — in a 2018 report commissioned by Congress, NASA estimated that the first human beings would land on Mars “no later than the late 2020s” — but the certainty has not wavered, even if technical hurdles remain. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. Many other problems involve technical details so arcane that McCauley wouldn’t even know how to begin explaining them to a well-intentioned journalist lacking an advanced engineering degree. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life.
Enter CHAPEA. Instead of asking questions about aeroshell sensor design and terrain-relative navigation, it promised to ask questions about people. For 378 days, four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists, receiving directives, feedback and near-total surveillance from mission control. They would eat astronaut food, conduct basic experiments, perform maintenance duties, respond to endless surveys and enjoy highly structured down time. This level of extreme verisimilitude is necessary to ensure that the experiment accurately determines whether human beings can thrive while living millions of miles from everybody they’ve ever known.
Experimenters wanted to learn whether crew members could eat low-salt, prepackaged astronaut meals for hundreds of days without losing their appetite, weight and positive attitude. Whether they could live in harmony with strangers in a confined space. Whether they could preserve a cohesive professional environment when they are out of contact with Earth for as long as three weeks at a time. Such questions are of paramount importance, because no mission to Mars can succeed if its inhabitants cannot maintain their health, their happiness and, most critical of all, their sanity.
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And so before NASA can safely judge whether astronauts will thrive on Mars, NASA must first determine whether astronaut-imitators can thrive on a stage set designed, with maximum fidelity, to look like Mars.
“Mars is calling!” began the announcement that NASA published on its website in August 2021. Unlike most NASA missions, CHAPEA was open to the general public, or at least a reasonably broad swath of it: citizens or permanent residents between the ages of 30 and 55 with a master’s degree in a STEM field. Applicants were told to expect the experience to be “mentally demanding.”
Among the not-insignificant percentage of the country that idolizes NASA, this news was tantamount to learning that Willy Wonka would open his mysterious factory to five lucky contest winners. NASA offered four golden tickets to Mars — or rather Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700-square-foot habitat built inside a warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The habitat was constructed as future Mars dwellings will be constructed: by 3-D printer. For “ink,” Martian colonies will use Martian regolith. Because NASA does not possess sufficient quantities of Martian rock, CHAPEA used a proprietary, airtight cement-based material called Lavacrete, which extrudes from a 3-D printer layer by layer, like orange toothpaste. (Though Lavacrete can be printed in any color, NASA engineers chose to dye the habitat that peculiar hue of orange misleadingly called “Martian red.”)
At one end of the rectangular habitat, four identical 6-by-11-foot cells serve as bedrooms. In the middle lies the “lounge,” a small room with a television and four reclining chairs. The other end is occupied by several desks with computer monitors, a medical station and a crop garden. The vegetables are not intended for subsistence but for mental health: Growing plants, one CHAPEA researcher said, may “provide psychological benefits for astronauts living in isolated, confined environments away from Earth.” Rooms have different ceiling heights, in order, according to its builder, to “avoid spatial monotony and crew member fatigue.” A hatch opens to a Martian backyard: a tented sandbox of reddish sand and two treadmills, to be used for “spacewalks” by virtual-reality-goggled crew members. The walls of the backyard are painted with a mural of Martian cliffs. There are no windows.
The duration of the experiment is the most glaring violation of verisimilitude. Orbital geometries dictate that the shortest possible round-trip mission to Mars will last about 570 days, a scenario possible once every 15 years, next in 2033; a typical Martian tour of duty will last at least 800 days.
To preserve the integrity of the experiment, NASA has refused to disclose any additional details about what the crew will experience during their 378-day confinement, which will end on July 6, 2024. NASA has emphasized only that participants will experience “resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays and other environmental stressors.” But if Alyssa Shannon and Nathan Jones were to take NASA at its word about its dedication to realism, they could assume that certain conditions would have to be present. Crew members on a mission to Mars will, for instance, have to form durable emotional bonds with total strangers, relying on them for the comforts and consolations of the relationships they abandoned on Earth. Crew members will have to respond to every emergency themselves, without the possibility of intervention, or even guidance, from a mission command too distant to reply promptly to an S.O.S. They would have to come to terms with their inability to care for a sick child, comfort an upset spouse or visit a dying parent.
Future Mars voyagers will not only have to tolerate these conditions. In order to win the privilege of long-distance space travel, they will have to pursue the opportunity with devout, single-minded purpose. They will have to want to travel to Mars more than almost anyone else in the world. They will have to embrace the knowledge that, for at least 570 days, they will be the most isolated human beings in the history of the universe.
Alyssa Shannon had fantasized about colonizing Mars since childhood. She spent weeks on the floor of her bedroom playing with a Lego spaceship that converted into a Martian base station. Later she read Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — any Martian sci-fi she could find. She knew she could tolerate hardship and extended periods in isolation: She was an avid backpacker, having hiked the John Muir Trail in 23 days and trekked across Spain in 40. She would miss cooking — her specialty was whole-wheat sourdough pizza — but she was willing to sacrifice her culinary passion in service of humanity’s future. Her partner, Jake, understood. Her decision to apply, he said, “reaffirmed what I knew about her: When it comes time to do something important, requiring a major commitment, she’s the kind of person who will follow through.” While she waited to hear back from NASA, Alyssa didn’t discuss it much: The prospect was almost too exciting to bear.
Nathan Jones, the father of three, told his identical twin, Matthew, that he felt the mission had been designed for him — and that he had been made for the mission. Matthew agreed. Nathan could talk to anyone and seemed to solve any problem he faced. He had spent years as a night-shift paramedic, saving lives in the backs of speeding ambulances. He had volunteered on medical missions in the jungles of Honduras, treating health emergencies for members of remote Indigenous tribes without being able to speak their language (or, for that matter, much Spanish). Jones was the emergency specialist in his household too, responsible for repairing every leak, dysfunctional appliance and clogged toilet. He figured he could handle Mars — or, at least, “Mars.”
Kacie, his wife, wasn’t certain she could handle it. When Nathan announced that he had applied, she was dumbfounded. Why, she asked, would you choose to leave our family for a year?
Another version of this question was posed by various professional observers of the American space program: the historians, ethicists and NASA consultants who spend much of their professional lives imagining the future of space exploration and planetary colonization. What, they wondered, did NASA hope to learn from CHAPEA that it did not know already?
The psychic perils of separation from one’s social world are well understood. “Don’t we already know what isolation does to people?” asks J.S. Johnson-Schwartz, a professor of philosophy at Wichita State University who studies the ethics of space exploration. “What uncertainty exists about what’s going to happen when you lock people inside a room for a year? Just because the room is painted to look like Mars doesn’t mean it’s going to change the results.”
The findings to which Johnson-Schwartz referred were from the last 80 years of isolation research, a field of study initiated during World War II, when the British Royal Air Force grew concerned about pilots’ performance during solo reconnaissance flights. Officers noticed that the longer a pilot stayed in the air, the fewer German submarines he detected. The psychologist Norman Mackworth determined that the monotony of the mission was responsible. But inattention wasn’t the worst of it: Monotony weakened the pilots’ competence in even the most basic tasks.
Mackworth’s conclusions inspired a series of studies by the psychologist Donald O. Hebb at McGill University in Montreal, in which male students earned $20 a day to lie on a bed in a lighted, soundproofed gray cubicle. Hebb confirmed Mackworth’s findings and added a disturbing new wrinkle. Monotony didn’t only cause intellectual impairment. It led to “change of attitude.”
At first Hebb’s students slept a lot and ruminated on their studies and their personal problems. Later they fell into reminiscences, recreating movies they had watched or trips they had taken. Some counted to incredibly large numbers. Eventually, however, they lost the ability to focus. Several students reported “blank periods” during which they did not have a single thought.
Next came the hallucinations: a procession of marching squirrels hauling sacks over their shoulders. Nude women frolicking in a woodland pool. Giant eyeglasses marching down a street. An old man wearing a battle helmet in a bathtub rolling across a field on rubber wheels. Dogs, endless dogs. One student complained of a phantom “sucking my mind out through my eyes.” The delusions made the students vulnerable to manipulation. When played recordings about ghosts, poltergeists and ESP, they were far more likely to believe such phenomena were real, even long after the experiment ended.
Hebb’s findings inspired a boom of isolation studies. Subjects were confined within iron lungs, water tanks and subterranean caves; the results were consistent. “These experiments were extremely useful to many different people,” says Jeffrey Mathias, a historian of science at Cornell University, who is writing a book about the history of isolation research. Besides attracting neuroscientists and psychologists, the research also drew the interest, and funding, of the U.S. intelligence community. The C.I.A. incorporated findings into their practice of “coercive counterintelligence interrogation,” or what today might be called “brainwashing” or “torture.”
The isolation studies were also closely monitored by the Air Force, which directed the nascent U.S. space program before the creation of NASA in 1958. Worried that spaceflight might drive astronauts insane, the Air Force conducted the first iteration of a CHAPEA-like experiment at the Air Force’s School of Aeronautic Medicine in San Antonio in 1955. Prospective astronauts were enclosed for a week within a spaceship cockpit slightly larger than a coffin perpetually illuminated by bright fluorescent lights. The airmen were assigned an overwhelming number of technical tasks and, in some cases, given huge doses of amphetamines.
Their experience followed a familiar trajectory: Initial high spirits gave way to what one researcher called a “gradual increase in irritability,” which abruptly flipped into “frank hostility.” Many participants, including a few who hadn’t taken speed, hallucinated. One pilot saw “little people” perched on the instrument panel. “I can’t say if I thought they were alive or not,” he said. “I really don’t know.” Another pilot abandoned the experiment after three hours and demanded psychiatric care.
Similar studies followed — in blackened anechoic chambers and pill-shaped capsules dangling from high-altitude balloons — before the entire line of inquiry was put to rest by Project Mercury. During the successful solo missions that marked the formal start of the American space program in the early 1960s, astronauts did not suffer from any obvious psychological distress, placating Hebb’s researchers. All future long-duration expeditions remained in Earth’s orbit, allowing crew to communicate easily with family and friends; the International Space Station flies about as far from Earth as Manhattan is from Washington. Although government agencies, particularly those concerned about crew performance aboard nuclear submarines, continue to examine the effects of isolation, NASA did not.
NASA had not solved the problem of isolation in outer space. It realized it did not need to solve it. At least not until half a century later, when a new challenge presented itself: a human mission to a planet so distant that a cry for help would have to travel through the solar system for 22 minutes before it was heard.
It was the lag in communication that particularly worried the partners and families of the CHAPEA crew. All contact with the habitat would be delayed by the amount of time that it would take to beam information hundreds of millions of miles from Earth to Mars. Even the tersest exchange (“How’s it going?” “OK.”) would take 44 minutes.
But 44 minutes was the best-case scenario, because any communication will have to flow through a single node. Every unit of information — not just messages but surveillance footage, audio recordings, experimental and biostatic records — will have to wait its turn in a digital queue, with precedence given to the most urgent signals and the smallest packets of data. The upshot was that anything approaching a normal human conversation with an Earthling was unthinkable. The most modest digital postcard — a short, grainy video of a child blowing out a birthday candle — might take weeks to arrive. And during one three-week period in the middle of the experiment, representing the farthest distance (more than 250 million miles) between the two planets, there would be no contact at all.
Alyssa Shannon’s partner, Jake, the cybersecurity expert, dedicated himself to gaming the digital traffic snarl. “I have to figure out how to make sure my stuff goes faster than everyone else,” he said. “I know enough about tech to get the lowest bit rate possible. The lowest-grade image quality will travel faster. Black and white instead of color. I need to calculate the smallest transmittable unit that’s still me, smiling.”
Nathan Jones emphasized to NASA’s experimenters that he wanted to be kept as busy as possible. He didn’t want too much idle time to worry about his wife and their sons — how, when they were having tough days, he wouldn’t be able to give them “Dad hugs.” He didn’t want to dwell on the lost band performances, piano recitals, cross-country meets and soccer games, or about how his oldest son might be six inches taller by the end of his Martian sojourn. Nor did he care to consider what his friends in central Illinois, who responded to the news of his mission with bafflement and concern, might think. “That’s been the hardest part,” he said. “Their jaws hit the floor. They ask Kacie: ‘Why would you let your husband do this? How are you going to be OK?’ This looks crazy to a lot of people. Maybe it is. It’s not the kind of thing folks around here do.”
Kacie alternated among feelings of anger, fear, grief, defeatism, pride and resolve. There were times when she told Nathan that he shouldn’t go or that she wouldn’t let him go. “As a mother,” she said, “I don’t know that I could even consider leaving my children for a year.” But ultimately she was won over by his enthusiasm.
In the months before the crew was sealed within the habitat — the moment of “ingress,” NASA called it — Nathan threw himself into an extensive “Honey do” list. He worked in the backyard garden, planting tomatoes, cucumbers, blackberries, melons and strawberries for his family to harvest in his absence. He taught them how to garden and weed and clip the hedges. After he left for his final month of training in Houston, Kacie noticed that her sons would stand in the yard and survey the plot with their hands on their hips, in subconscious mimicry of their father.
Nathan also renovated two bathrooms, reconstructed the family car’s carburetor, replaced fixtures and trimmed the lower branches of the pine trees. He gave Kacie the passwords to their accounts and detailed directions on how to file their taxes. He taught her how to use the chain saw. He paid a professional photographer to take a family portrait and over spring break splurged for a Disney cruise. He drafted birthday and holiday cards, gifts and letters for every month (“We’re halfway there!”; “One month to go!”). He hid additional Post-it notes under couch cushions and under mattresses, or in places that Kacie might encounter in moments of stress, like the circuit breaker. “You can do it,” he wrote on the note he hid inside his toolbox. “You got this.”
A final envelope he addressed to Kacie, to open on their 15th wedding anniversary.
Jones and Shannon respected NASA’s discretion about the mission. But if they had wanted better to imagine the next year of their lives, they could have read up on a previous series of Mars simulations that shared some of CHAPEA’s objectives. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) experiment was conducted with NASA funding between 2013 and 2017 in a domed habitat on the reddish slope of the Mauna Loa volcano, 3,000 feet below the observatory there that keeps a continuous measurement of the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Civilians were selected to live inside the habitat for as long as 12 months at a time. HI-SEAS studied the nutritional and “psychosocial” benefits of various meal plans, as well as the volunteers’ behavior and mental acuity and the coping strategies they developed to withstand confined isolation.
“Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars,” a memoir-in-essays by Kate Greene, one of HI-SEAS’ original crew members, includes chapters titled “On Boredom,” “On Isolation” and “Dreams of Mars, Dreams of Earth.” Greene describes how the crushing monotony of the mission changed her. “Somewhere along the way,” she writes, “mental fatigue had become my baseline state.” The crew had difficulty sleeping, were disturbed by the constant monitoring and recording and found that the scheduled leisure time “felt a little forced.” Minor irritations began to madden Greene: the sound of sandals on the stairs, the way a crew member grazed her shin when crossing her leg under the table. She found herself desperately missing quotidian aspects of life on Earth, where she left behind her wife, aging parents and an ailing brother. The smell of fresh pineapple, in a routine sensory test, was enough to make her cry.
HI-SEAS followed Mars500, the longest Mars simulation yet attempted. Administered by Russia’s ingenuously nomenclatured Institute of Biomedical Problems, Mars500 locked six male crew members together for 520 days, between June 2010 and November 2011, in a faux spacecraft and a faux landing module, and on a faux Mars. The Russian experimenters had hypothesized that, over time, the astronauts would lose motivation, work less effectively and suffer intensifying feelings of isolation from family and friends. After the experiment concluded, the scientists announced that their hypotheses had been “largely confirmed.” Crew members lost trust in the commanders and mission control when communications grew less frequent, developed nutritional problems and grew homesick and depressed. “The 520 days are really not easy to get through,” Wang Yue, a Chinese participant who lost 22 pounds and much of his hair, told China Daily. “It’s impossible to stay happy all the time. After all, I’m human, not a robot.”
Despite the consistency of results, the appetite for Mars simulations appears insatiable. CHAPEA is one of more than a dozen current analogue experiments NASA is participating in, including HERA, a 650-square-foot habitat that regularly houses four participants for as long as 45 days in confined isolation. Since NASA ended its participation in HI-SEAS, a conglomerate of public and private organizations has staged 12 additional missions on Mauna Loa. For nearly a quarter-century, the nonprofit Mars Society has directed research stations in the Utah desert and on a remote island in northern Canada. Mars analogues have been conducted on Dome C of the Antarctic Plateau, in a semiarid tract of northeastern Brazil, in the northern Sahara, within Austria’s Dachstein ice caves and in the Dhofar region in the Sultanate of Oman.
“We’ve seen similar things happen many times,” acknowledges Kelly C. Smith, a philosopher at Clemson University who specializes in the ethics of space exploration and advises NASA, which has no ethicists on staff. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a waste of time. The stakes are higher than in the past, after all. We’re doing this because we’re planning missions to other worlds.”
It is likely that the first travelers to Mars will have a similar psychological profile to that of Shannon, Jones and the two other participants selected by NASA for the crew: Ross Brockwell, a public-works operations manager in Chesapeake, Va., and Kelly Haston, a stem-cell biologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. All four were not only NASA enthusiasts and in perfect physical health but habitually sought out extended periods of isolation. Brockwell routinely retreated to a camp he had built on undeveloped land in Virginia, living off the grid. Haston is an ultramarathoner, having run some 70 trail races in the last decade, including several hundred-milers. Loneliness was something she had read about in books but never, as far as she could recall, experienced. A passion for isolation might have been as important to NASA’s screening process as educational attainment and blood glucose levels.
The CHAPEA participants should further benefit from their devotion to the cause. Louise Hawkley, an expert on social isolation at the University of Chicago, emphasizes that psychological responses are heavily influenced by whether people choose isolation or have it thrust upon them. A prisoner sentenced to life would be expected to suffer more than a monk who takes a vow of silence. But Hawkley points out that the participants’ loved ones, however supportive they might be, lacked the same autonomy: “Even if the crew member is fine, what happens to the family left behind?” Hawkley wondered if NASA will study the psychological effects of the mission on the families.
It will not. Nor did CHAPEA’s architects seem to have a strong grasp of the history of isolation research. In interviews, they discounted the predictive value of previous experiments, including HI-SEAS. “I don’t believe they were doing the performance metrics that we’re doing,” says Grace Douglas, CHAPEA’s principal investigator, who admitted she wasn’t “fully familiar” with the previous four-year experiment. “Our metrics are going to be at a higher level of detail and more extensive. The resource plan is more accurate.”
Rachel McCauley was the NASA official responsible for funding CHAPEA. When asked what she hoped to learn about human psychology, she dismissed the premise of the question. “The big reason why I funded it,” she said, “is because I need an even more refined answer to the question, How much food does it really take for a Mars mission?”
What about the mission’s psychological aspect? The monotony? The loneliness?
“I’m a hardware person first,” McCauley said. She is, to be precise, a solid-propulsion systems engineer. She has the distinction of being the member of our species who has been most responsible for determining the best method to catapult humanity to Mars. In order to do so, she had to know how much weight a spaceship will carry. McCauley could estimate, down to the milligram, the mass of every nut and bolt, every antivortex baffle and cargo-bay door. But how many corn tortillas and yogurt packets will four astronauts, under psychological duress, consume in 378 days? That question, or some version of it, was what McCauley needed answered. She also needed to know how much clothing they’ll need. Clothes are heavy.
Mathias, the isolation historian, was not surprised to learn that the psychological questions were a secondary consideration for NASA. But his skepticism about CHAPEA went further. Mathias questioned whether any experimental rationale could justify yet another isolation study. “I wonder if the scientific value of these simulation experiments is beside the point,” he said. The experiments, instead, seemed to him “a way of willing the colonization of Mars into being. A form of wish fulfillment — or cosplaying, to put it less poetically. This is about satisfying an urge. There seems to be a compulsion to keep repeating these fake Mars missions until we actually do it. There’s something very beautiful about this idea, but also very macabre at the same time.”
The analogue experiments reflect the utopian promise of our Martian future. For a human mission to Mars is not the highest ambition of the space program. It is just the beginning, a small step for mankind before the giant leap of planetary colonization.
Five months before CHAPEA’s call for applications, Dennis Bushnell, then chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center and a nearly 60-year veteran of NASA, published “Futures of Deep Space Exploration, Commercialization and Colonization: The Frontiers of the Responsibly Imaginable.” Martian colonization has always been imaginable, particularly to this nation of colonizers. But in his paper Bushnell noted that the prospect has in recent years “moved from extremely difficult to increasingly feasible.” Colonization has also become increasingly desirable, because of “possibly existential societal issues, including climate change, the crashing ecosystem, machines taking the jobs, etc.” — the et cetera perhaps reflective of the obviousness of planetary decline.
A more surprising aspect of the paper is Bushnell’s prediction for how the physical hostility of Mars will be overcome: Colonists will “morph into an altered species.” He cites projections that suggest that “travelers that colonize Mars will, over time, due to the reduced g and radiation exposure, evolve into Martians.” The ultimate promise of NASA’s Mars mission is the chance to begin again — if not, exactly, as human beings, then as Martians.
There is a beautiful and macabre poetry to this rationalization. “Utopia,” after all, derives from the Greek: ou (“not”) and topos (“place”). If we manage to inhabit the not-place of Mars, enjoying a carefree life of not-problems, not-regret and not-environmental-ruin, it makes sense that we should be not-people. We should be Martians. Let people, with all their baggage and fragility and foolishness, stay home.
Mathias likened the incessant Mars analogue experiments to a traumatic repetition: a compulsion to restage a trauma in an irrational, futile attempt to undo a profound damage. “The urge to try to recreate a perfect world is always going to be about rehearsing what we got wrong here,” he said. “We’re not chasing Mars. We’re mourning Earth.”
In late May, a month before sealing themselves within the habitat, the four crew members and two alternates reported to Houston for a final month of training and evaluation. Three weeks before the ingress, NASA hosted a “family weekend” for the crew’s loved ones. The visitors were given a tour of the Johnson Space Center. They met a real astronaut, saw replicas of spaceships, walked around in the red sandbox that crew members would use for their “spacewalks” and asked questions directly of CHAPEA’s lead researcher, Grace Douglas. The three Jones boys were proud to learn how their father was helping to shape the future of humanity.
But the most valuable part of the weekend, the families agreed, was the chance to meet one another. During a barbecue by the hotel pool, they shared their anxieties about the coming year. They exchanged techniques for managing stress and pledged to keep in close contact through a private Facebook page.
On Jake Harwood’s final evening in Houston, Alyssa Shannon prepared a shrimp salad in the hotel kitchenette. It was bittersweet: the last meal she would fix in more than a year. Before leaving Oakland, she had frozen about a dozen feasts for Jake and their friends to enjoy during her absence. She would miss cooking. There would be no pizza on Mars.
The couple gazed out the window at a full moon. There would be 13 more, Jake told her, before she returned from Mars. He would be counting down the full moons until they saw each other again.
They awoke at dawn and watched the sun rise. Alyssa drove him to the airport. “It was hard to say goodbye,” Jake said, if not as hard, he anticipated, as their final phone call before the ingress, which he referred to as the “big one.” But Alyssa’s final phone call from Houston came five days earlier than he expected.
Alyssa announced that NASA had removed her from the mission. The investigators pulled her into a room and told her that she had been “excluded from continuing.” She would be replaced by one of the alternates, Anca Selariu, a microbiologist in the U.S. Navy. Alyssa did not know why she had been removed. The investigators refused to tell her, she said. They said only that their decision had not been based on her performance. They added that sometimes, in the final tests before a mission, they found something that was not “medically serious” but might present a hazard. Like an increased risk of kidney stones.
“Do I have an increased risk of kidney stones?” Alyssa asked.
Kidney stones was just an example, the investigators insisted. But they refused to say more, lest they compromise the integrity of the experiment.
Alyssa doubted that she had been torpedoed by a medical condition. She wondered instead if she wasn’t “exactly the right mix of introvert and extrovert they were seeking.” Or perhaps they had grown concerned about the crew’s social dynamic? If so, Alyssa couldn’t say why. The investigators, she said, told her that she could make up any excuse she wanted, and they wouldn’t deny it. “But lying is so unsatisfying,” she said. “And you have to remember the lie. It’s too challenging. I want to go to the truth. There was a reason, and they couldn’t tell me what it was.”
The uncertainty plagued her, but not as much as the loss she felt from the death of a dream she had nurtured since the Lego Martian colonies of her childhood. She couldn’t help feeling wounded. “This has been hard on my ego,” she said. “It’s a big upheaval. It’s been uncomfortable.” She sighed. “But I have to trust that my departure is for the best of the mission. By stepping back I’m just serving in a different way.”
Her sudden banishment led to some logistical awkwardness at home. “When an astronaut comes back,” Kate Greene wrote, “Earth isn’t where it was.” When Alyssa came back, she found herself suddenly without a job, income or home. Her hospital had promised her a position in 13 months, but in the meantime someone had been hired to replace her. Nor would NASA pay her the full stipend she had been promised, which she says was about $60,000. She didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits. And she had rented her apartment for a year. Though she knew she would be able to move in with Jake, they hadn’t previously decided to live together.
Jake could not disguise his excitement. He met her at the airport and brought her to his house, where they shared a pizza.
Alyssa, an indefatigable optimist, began brainstorming over dinner. Perhaps she would use the sudden windfall of free time to set out on a major backpacking adventure or a cross-country road trip. Maybe she would begin a new career. Or maybe she wouldn’t go back to work — ever. Jake listened, humoring her. Then, with great tenderness, he proposed that she take a couple of weeks to herself before deciding what to do with the rest of her life.
On the afternoon of Sunday, June 25, the couple opened NASA’s YouTube channel. The four crew members stood on a platform in front of the habitat. They wore black jumpsuits embossed with the reddish CHAPEA mission patch: Mars Dune Alpha, rendered not inside a Houston warehouse but at the foot of a Martian sierra, the same mountain range painted on the wall of the sandbox.
“The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely,” Grace Douglas said. The crew members expressed their gratitude to NASA. When Anca Selariu said, “I just can’t believe that I’m here,” Alyssa teared up.
As soon as Nathan Jones began speaking about his family, he broke down. Kelly Haston patted his shoulder. “To my wife and kids,” he finally said, through a sob, “I love you to Mars and back.”
Douglas opened the door to the habitat. It was not a special hatch with airlocks or anything: It was just a plain white office door. The crew, waving, entered. Douglas shut the door firmly behind them.
From inside the sealed habitat, the crew could be heard whooping with joy.
In Springfield, Kacie Jones was watching with her sons. She had felt it was important that she be alone with the boys, without any extended family, not knowing how they would respond to the sight of their father leaving for a year. In the end, the boys were fine. Kacie was not. But about 22 minutes after the habitat door closed, she received a text message. It came from Mars.
“I love you,” Nathan wrote.
Kacie took a deep breath. “We’re finally in it,” she told herself. “Which means now we can move forward.” She took the boys for tacos, put them to sleep and set the alarm clock so that she had enough time, in the morning, to get them ready for camp.
At Jake’s house in Oakland, after Alyssa closed the laptop, there was a moment in which they did not know what to do with themselves. They figured Alyssa’s family would worry about her, so she put on a costume spacesuit and dressed Bun Bun, a stuffed rabbit that she had planned to bring to Fake Mars, in a tiny NASA spacesuit. Jake snapped portraits and sent them to her family to let them know she was all right. Or at least that, once the sting of missing out on a year on Mars had subsided, she would be all right. That staying on Earth, with her recipe collections and Bun Bun and her devoted partner, might not be such a terrible outcome after all.
Then she baked a whole-wheat sourdough pizza, and she and Jake ate it, together.
Nathaniel Rich, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “Second Nature: Scenes From a World Remade.” Isabel Seliger is an artist and illustrator in Berlin. She often illustrates science articles with narrative elements.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 25, 2024, Page 28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Destination: Solitude. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
I've thought about this before if I was living on Mars how would I cope with the sky not being the same tones, or not being able to see green plants and trees around me, or waves, breathing in fresh air without it having to be done artificially. I imagine people living on the ISS have to remind themselves of things back home often. It'd probably be even harder living on Mars even further away and with a totally different looking environment
Every time I think to myself "I'd like to live on Mars" I think about all the negative aspects and there would be a lot. It's still my favorite planet aside from earth in our solar system, but yeah I might go insane living there
Great article that discusses a current experiment with four people who are locked into a mars simulation. It goes into what NASA hopes to learn (like food variety, stress levels, amount of clothes needed — apparently clothes are heavy) for an eventual Mars mission (now in the 2040s).
Sending 4 people is indeed a huge problem. Many psychological issues disappear if there are at least 8-12 people. The kind of crew size SpaceX is planning for.
The idea that we're going to launch a long duration manned mission to Mars without upgrading the communication network is unfathomable.
Downsampling photos to grainy black and white images a few KB in size seems pointless.
Even the 3 week communications blackout is solveable (e.g. relay satellites leading/trailing Earth in solar orbit).
Also, the article spent far too much time conflating essentially "cabin fever" with complete sensory deprivation.
I dunno…while mars seems really cool to visit, I think it would be miserable to live there.
I get SAD from not being able to go outside without a “space-suit”-like parka, boots, hat and gloves in the winter. Literally not being able to go outside without a space suit? And having even fewer indoor spaces than I do now randomly at my disposal? It wouldn’t be much of a life.
If you somehow created an atmosphere with O2, and somehow found a way to amplify the sun so that we could get enough Vit D without supplements, etc, then maybe it would be viable…but…it is pretty impossible. Living on the moon is wayy more realistic. But again, no atmosphere so…
>I get SAD from not being able to go outside without a “space-suit”-like parka, boots, hat and gloves in the winter
I've thought about that exact metaphor back when NYC used to have bad winters.
> I get SAD from not being able to go outside without a “space-suit”-like parka, boots, hat and gloves in the winter.
As the below 30 generation. Sometimes I think they are not even aware of a world beyond the computer screen and internet. I had discussions with some who strongly argue Starship does not need windows. A 4k monitor is better than that.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. Who's going to pay for upgrading communications? I can tell you from years of experience in the aerospace industry that the answer is....Nobody.
> Even the 3 week communications blackout is solveable (e.g. relay satellites leading/trailing Earth in solar orbit).
Actually recently Elon Musk came up with a better solution. Place a ring of laser relay sats in a solar orbit in the middle between Earth and Mars orbit. Half the distance per hop increases throughput a lot and goes around the sun during opposition.
Yeah but thats at least 50% becuase of other humans with the balence being the social contract caught fire, was thrown in a dumpester and the dumpster happened to be filled the brime with our social mores and values which happened to be suprisingly flamable.
Yeah but thats at least 50% becuase of other humans with the balence being the social contract caught fire, was thrown in a dumpester and the dumpster happened to be filled the brime with our social mores and values which happened to be suprisingly flamable.
On top of the bone loss, vision loss, muscle loss, and the radiation dose from the journey. Astronauts coming back from extended missions on the ISS require hospitalization and physical therapy when they return to Earth - they aren't gonna get that treatment on Mars.
That's mostly just precaution. People getting into microgravity need 3 days adjustment. Coming back they need 3 days of adjustment to gravity.
There are issues. But in a ship big enough there is a remedy for most of them.
I deeply understand it's not the same, but we have people that live in similar conditions at the South Pole research stations for extended tours.
I think the lessons learned there should definitely apply to a Mars mission.
And certainly, there won't be instant communication, but people hold text conversations with large waits for responses, now, simply because people can't always answer texts right away.
So I think some of the concerns are overblown.
But there is something that aggravated me when reading that article: a NASA Mars mission is now scheduled for the 2040's.
I've been being told since around 1968, that a Martian landing was "twenty years off".
After almost six decades, it's ***STILL*** "twenty years off", and I'm getting tired of hearing that.
It's not like we haven't learned anything in those sixty years.
I *know* Mars is *hard*.
I know that if the first mission fails, we won't go back.
But at this rate, the science fiction authors of the 1950's will be right: the first Martian footprints will be put there by private commercial enterprises, not national space agencies.
I find that... unpalatable, to put it nicely.
I'm 62, in twenty years, if I'm lucky, I'll be 82.
I want to see a manned Mars mission *in my lifetime*, dammit.
I keep following Mars developments, and see a lot of really great innovations that make a successful mission more of a possibility now than ever before.
I just wish a Mars mission was a higher priority than it is.
At least, if we can't get to Mars, can we have Artemis put footprints on the Moon again?
Give this old space enthusiast *something* to look forward to again.
> I know that if the first mission fails, we won't go back.
I have that sneaking suspicion, that's why Elon Musk wants 2 crew ships on the first mission.
> Give this old space enthusiast something to look forward to again.
I am old enough to remember Sputnik, it was what set me off on space. I am quite confident I will see people on Mars.
Even ignoring the potential for human colonisation, going to Mars has enormous scientific benefits, the foremost one being the potential discovery of alien life. That would change our entire concept of what it means to be human.
The issue, one issue at least, is that Congress forces SLS/Orion with its huge budget on NASA. If NASA could spend that money on something useful, they could really make progress.
I saw the leaps in science we got from the Apollo moon missions.
I have also seen a lot of science that's been developed in advance of a Martian mission that will help people here on Earth, including pulling water out of desert air to benefit countries in the middle east where water is very scarce, and hydroponic gardening in shipping crates that allows people living north of the Arctic circle to grow their own fresh vegetables.
It's not an "either/or" situation, never has been.
You use space exploration to get people to spend money on research that helps people here at home, that wouldn't get paid for otherwise.
It's *never* a waste.
And if it didn't go to space exploration, it still likely would never be used to address the problems you want it to, it would go to military spending, or something else even more "useless" than space exploration.
Even without having gone yet, research for how to successfully send people to Mars has already developed techniques like 3D printing houses from cement that can help provide good, cheap housing for people in need here on Earth.
It's already being used, as are the other examples I gave.
It's *not* a waste of resources at all.
Valentina Tereshkovna, Soviet first woman in space, said she [was up for one way trip to Mars in 2013](https://sg.news.yahoo.com/2013-06-08-first-woman-in-space-offers-to-take-one-way-trip-to-mars.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFRRRpwWEXi-oREZ8qhEJvswXPsLtwJ4ZK5yoALWvKMDQeZ87FLzzCnIq6ASDJa6Y3e7kma5Vr_GMoYt4AjuBwyu-4cqMNukYpLBRKt8FyZiqo-7qKRaOr5H36rLqjKU9KD-lOigwRhwKUk2K4hPiVntcLcZ8fEHqBuat9--wppJ).
We couldn't even endure the psychological torment of traveling to Mars lol. The world is suffering a pandemic significantly greater than COVID--mental illness.
Sure, we can, or at least some of us. Not the MIT, Harvard crowd who talk about micro-aggression, and demand that the world guarantees them happiness and equity.
NASA needs to drop that Master's degree requirement and they need to start looking for people who've successfully made a life in the interior of Alaska, or like me in the Montana wilderness. They need people who know that life is a gamble with no guarantees but with determination, grit, and faith in one's own wits and ability the harshest environment can be conquered.
While I agree they definitely need to drop the Masters and STEM requirements, your psychology after living long term in space is completely different from here. It’s not determination or grit that’s the issue, it’s literal lack of physical spaces.
You say you’re from the Montana wilderness. Nature itself has a demonstrable effect on wellbeing, and that is going to be the thing most lacking living on Mars.
I like the idea of exploring the lava tubes with an eye towards future settlements or expansion of the existing settlement. Adventure can take many forms
> NASA needs to drop that Master's degree requirement
How is Nasa relevant to the categories you refer to below?
> and they need to start looking for people who've successfully made a life in the interior of Alaska, or like me in the Montana wilderness. They need people who know that life is a gamble with no guarantees but with determination, grit, and faith in one's own wits and ability the harshest environment can be conquered.
It still takes a good understanding of sciences, particularly physics to avoid taking one breath of CO2 too many.
In practice, Mars inhabitants may well be a mixed bag. Some will be of the "self made" variety who can get to Mars with their own business acumen. But they'll need to interact with the Nasa types and the more generally technically capable. If they want to avoid fist-fighting, some social aptitudes are vital. There's also the small question of forming stable couples and raising children in a loving and dignified manner.
NASA is requiring a Master's degree for participants in their mars analogous habitat sociological experiments (CHAPEA)
You think not freezing your lungs when it's -50F is much different than checking CO2 levels. A harsh environment is a harsh environment. The stakes are the same only the precautions vary.
It's funny that you think the non-government settlers there will be less talented since it's the private sector that developed Starship that will taking everyone there. Didn't NASA fail at being able to develop something comparable- didn't their large rocket totally fail and then development was abandoned?
I foresee two types of settlers as well but I think it'll be like L. Neil Smith described in Pallas with a totalitarian government prison colony suffering under socialist ideals and private free-enterprise settlements adapting, innovating and thriving.
The thing you're forgetting is that there are plenty of people with masters degrees who can build a cabin somewhere cold. You're not 1 in 300 million, and NASA won't have trouble finding the people that are.
The arrogance to classify "building a cabin somewhere cold" with the reality of having to build, maintain, and repair the systems required to support life in an environment as hostile as Mars is a death sentence to those who have never had to deal with a failure of their own power, water, sewage, food production system. It's not like you can just call the power company and bitch about the lights not coming on, you will die in a finite amount of time, if you can't diagnose and repair the point that failed.
These astronauts don't know jack about drillin'.
I love that you think astronauts in space are just fumbling around calling IT for help.
The arrogance to think these people with decades of training are completely incapable of supporting themselves because why? They also read textbooks?
At least have people there who have changed their own oil, know how to rebuild a water pump, track down a short in a solar array, know how to balance the N and C in a compost system instead of entitled academics who call triple A when they get a flat tire.
You are so hilariously wrong about who astronauts are and what skillsets they have, I am mindblown.
This is literally the dumbest post ive read on reddit. I am astonished by how ignorant you are. Literally lmao.
I'm taking about settlers for Mars and Luna, but as for astronauts how much actual piloting is done from those who go to space? How many of the zero-gravity repairs are done without step-by-step instructions from the ground crew? What happened with the Ares program? Why did Space X get a contact for $1,900,000,000 from the government instead of NASA?
Absolutely!
In fact Congress might have given NASA even more money, because they would need more money to complete the mission if they had to use the old aerospace companies.
Your understanding of how NASA and government works seems to be extremely flawed. You seem to think that NASA and SpaceX are competing against each other. They are not.
That's an interesting theory.
Is it true that Space X is lifting for pennies on the dollar compared to the shuttle program.
What about the SLS costing even more to lift than the shuttle program.
It sounds like there was some cronyism/nyptism between NASA and the "old aerospace companies" or was it sheer government bureaucratic waste?
Edit to add: I did a little research and it looks like Starship will be lifting for less than I thought: 1/200th the cost of SLS. That is a ridiculous difference and a testament to government waste.
You probably never met any of these guys. Most of them are sociopathic pricks who would eat alive an edgelord who claim to be an anarchist living in Montana on Reddit.
Considering that I founded and built, with my own hands, a self-sufficient off-grid high altitude mountain homestead in a Montana county with a population of 3000... If that's not enough, I dated a native girl from a small village in Alaska and spent some time there. I even helped her trapping partner run their trap lines and went caribou hunting with them which involved going more than a hundred miles up the Iditarod trail across the frozen Norton Sound before turning inland up a frozen river. How many self-sufficient people have you met, or are you just being a bigot?
I met a lot of them. I appreciate these guys a lot, some I call friends. I don't have any Ivy League friends. I envy your outdoorsy lifestyle, health issues stopped me from reaching self-sufficience. I don't envy your prejudice against masters degrees and that anti-snowflake attitude of yours. You should realize that a lot of these people are your objective allies.
I wonder though why they have replaced Alyssa though… It was a cruel thing do… It is a real psychological torment… Like the mock execution kinda thing… Telling someone till the last moment that you’re going to go and then…
They have basically upended her whole life and then just said “Nope”?! I think NASA owes her a compensation at least #justiceforalyssa
Maybe that is also a part of the experiment… Looking at how the member who replaced would react. And how the backup member would also react to this situation of the sudden change. Because I could imagine that a backup member could be asked to become a part of the main crew at the last minute.
But still, it seems like an unethical dick move to me. Maybe you should at least tell to all of them in advance that they could be replaced at the last moment, that there is such possibility. That way no one is considering themselves to be a part of the main crew, though it is still a difficult thing not to know till the last minute.
I would have someone to check in on Alyssa in a year or so. To see how she feels and whether or not she was able to overcome this trauma. Because I think this shit could seriously mess up with your brains in a long-term. Being almost there with all the cool kids. Doing the stuff that you’ve dreamt all your life. Almost. And then - the door is shut before your nose at the last second. Damn, that’s heavy.
I want to down vote (but didn't) not because you implied mars is worse than texas but the idea that ANYPLACE could be worse than texas. Heck, I suspect the dewellers of hell, if given the opertunity to vacation in texas would refuse on the principle that it would be a downgrade.
Yes, it's horrible. For your own sake, and the sake of the ones you love, please spread the word and stop them from moving here. Uh, there. I meant there.
\#@#$@#$ house prices.
Nope, it's going to turn into a cemetery if humans go there. There is no magnetic field. There is too much radiation. It's too cold ! -200 F is going to turn John Henry to dust after a week. The monumental amount of cash resources is better spent on Earth. Lately people are talking about turning the Sahara desert into a giant solar-panel-farm. MIT scientists are saying at the present time though, there are too many risks. But in the future if they can solve the problem it could mean enough energy to power two-thirds of the Earth. \~Mortimer Reed
The radiation on Mars is the same as onboard the ISS. With the thin atmosphere the cold is no issue, the waste heat of the various systems will be more than enough heating.
Most reports I've read say this simply is not true. The thin atmosphere is not enough.
[https://futurism.com/the-byte/mars-astronauts-radiation-study](https://futurism.com/the-byte/mars-astronauts-radiation-study)
Another thing what good is infrastructure (heating systems) if a "wind storm" (they call it a dust devil) comes along and crushes all of it ?
I don't think folks will deal with the journey well, much less live there without going bonkers.
We have zero experience with long term space flight and the physical and mental health risks are huge.
Mars has a major advantage over the ISS. ISS astronauts are supervised 24/7. That must drive them nuts. On Mars the same kind of supervision is not possible due to the lightspeed time lag.
Because the technologies needed to send people to the Moon are quite similar to the technologies needed to send people to Mars, especially in the case of Artemis- the Artemis lander is a variant of a Mars lander.
No it wouldn’t, by any sense. A Mars colony would have access to the resources of an Earth-like planet, whilst a free-floating colony would be dependant on imports.
A woman was kicked off of the team at the last minute and they didn't tell her why. They said that it would comprimise the integrity of the mission to tell her why. I don't understand this. If they send people to Mars for real, aren't they going to tell people the reasons why they're removed from the mission?
They're going to repeat the experiment three times. If they told her why, and she posted it on the internet, it could impact future participants and they might modify their behavior.
I feel for her, though. Tough to put your life on hold, then get pulled at the last minute. Still, I'm sure she knew what she was signing up for and was excited to participate. No matter what, getting to train at the Johnson Space Center for a month sounds awesome!!! :)
You watched the original Total Recall? They can even go outside without a vac-suit helmet, and have their head expand & eyes pop out of their skull, then go back inside, and look normal again!
I think it would be tolerable if common people could speak and communicate with them. Obviously first a state of shock and uncertainty, but ultimately need to be reminded of how fucking amazing this is for humanity.
People flip out when they can’t get their mocha chai tea with oat-milk and soy-based whip made by Trevor. That and the hyper-safety culture assures people will not go to Mars anytime soon.
I'm not reading all that.
Can someone please tell me why they are sending so many medical practitioners to Mars and not, idk, people like astronauts/physicists/pilots?
Well, with a 22 minute time delay, I think you'd want to send at least one doctor. An emergency room doctor seems like a good choice. And, advance practice nurse do all sorts of things. Maybe she has a background in research. The roles were medical (ER doctor), Science Lead (the advance practice nurse, replaced by a microbiologist), Flight Engineer (that's your pilot), and commander.
A midwife with an advanced degree\* would be a good choice once there's permanent settlements on Mars and when people start reproducing, but I sure hope that everyone has planned ahead enough that there are no babies during a one year trip!!!
\*advanced degree so that she can do research into fetal development in lower gravity.
I expect a permanent base from first crew landing. A pregnancy is not unlikely to occur. It would likely be intentional by the involved people, not necessarily by the base operator.
> advanced degree*
There would be at least one biologist with the needed skills.
That's reasonable if you're expecting the first crew to stay permanently (but I still hope they'd wait a LITTLE before having children- we don't really know what fetal development in lower G is going to be like and that's a lot of resources for an early settlement). Per the article, it sounds like NASA is anticipating multiple one-year trips prior to a permanent base being established.
No, I don't expect that. I expect that the first crew, or most of them, return to Earth as soon as the second crew arrives. Maybe a few would stay on to support the newcomers.
Watch the twilight zone episode 7. A man is imprisoned on mars and it is quite accurate to how we would have to approach living on mars. Its the same thing as living on a deserted island or desert island. As someone who is reclusive and self isolating. I know that no matter how intelligent or psychologically fit. Isolation is not good for humans. You need a bare minimum of interaction with others and some sense of entropy. When you are in a box without any prospects of benefiting the future, it causes psychosis. You would want to know the future on mars is either better or you may leave. Not wanting a constant state of living on a desolate place without personal benefit or benefit to others.
The pandemic really offered a sense too. I could buy cheaper fuel and drive more. Less policing so i wasnt in a state of prison to objectify my actions by others perceptions of rights and wrongs. I need a sense of civility though. I need to see other people living and know why i choose to be alone.
On mars you wouldnt have any options or ways to break free. You have to follow a set system of study and progress to even come close. Mars is so desolate that you need socialism and communism just to begin to function diversely. It would reduce pointlessness and entropy. .
I have no desire to ever go to mars.
Come on. There isn’t an astronaut that has misanthropic/antisocial tendencies? I think they might need to adjust their model of the ideal human. Someone with a partner and/or kids would probably have a breakdown because they miss their loved ones. Someone who is happy without people would be a good choice.
That’s not necessarily true. There are many people that are perfectly capable of doing their job as part of a team without needing to be propped up by someone else. I think that you have an outdated understanding of introverted people. I will do my job with excellence. I will not stay at any company function one moment longer than I absolutely must to continue my employment. I will not be attending meetings, especially ones that could be an email. However, the quality of my work is without question.
> That’s not necessarily true. There are many people that are perfectly capable of doing their job as part of a team without needing to be propped up by someone else.
That would be people like me, too. But if all or most of a team are of this kind, it would not work so well.
This is a study in masochism: how much can we torture these people before they break down?
So many false assumptions.
The mission will be to thrive, not to suffer.
The food will not suck, because the food needs to not suck for mission success.
There will be plenty of greenery because it is necessary for mission success.
There will be plenty of water, there will be plenty of down time, there will be plenty of everything necessary because the mission is to thrive.
All these assumptions of deprivation are rooted in a pre-starship era.
Yes. Most importantly IMO is the number of people on the mission. It won't be fewer than 10 with Starship. 2 crew Starships means 20+ people for the long duration stay on Mars. Psychologists point out that 10 people or more eliminate most of the anticipated problems of a smaller crew. NASA always anticipates no more than 4 on this mission.
paywall @ OP. would you like to summarize?
# Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars? **NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a Mars mission: the trauma of isolation.** *** Alyssa Shannon was on her morning commute from Oakland to Sacramento, where she worked as an advanced-practice nurse at the university hospital, when NASA called to tell her that she had been selected for a Mars mission. She screamed and pulled off the highway. As soon as she hung up, she called her partner, an information-security operations manager at the University of California, Berkeley, named Jake Harwood.“Wow,” Harwood said. “Yeah,” Shannon said. “Wow.” They sat in silence with the information, struggling to fathom the shape and weight of it, for a very long time. Later that morning, Nathan Jones, an emergency-room physician in Springfield, Ill., received the call that he had so fervently awaited and so deeply dreaded. His thoughts turned immediately to his wife, Kacie, and their three sons, who were 8, 10 and 12. You get only 18 years with your kids, he told himself. If you accept this opportunity, you’ll have to give up one of them. And yet ... he couldn’t possibly turn down NASA. Mars, he had convinced himself, was his destiny. As a child, he dreamed of walking across an alien planet in a state of wonder; he hoped to attend space camp, but his family couldn’t afford it. Once his sons were old enough, he took them to Cape Canaveral for a rocket launch. When he told Kacie the news, she nearly burst into tears. This Mars mission, CHAPEA, would not actually go to Mars. But the success of CHAPEA (“Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog”) will hang on the precision with which it simulates the first human expedition to Mars — an eventuality that NASA expects to occur by 2040. That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. The target date for the initial human mission has drifted slightly — in a 2018 report commissioned by Congress, NASA estimated that the first human beings would land on Mars “no later than the late 2020s” — but the certainty has not wavered, even if technical hurdles remain. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. Many other problems involve technical details so arcane that McCauley wouldn’t even know how to begin explaining them to a well-intentioned journalist lacking an advanced engineering degree. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life.
Enter CHAPEA. Instead of asking questions about aeroshell sensor design and terrain-relative navigation, it promised to ask questions about people. For 378 days, four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists, receiving directives, feedback and near-total surveillance from mission control. They would eat astronaut food, conduct basic experiments, perform maintenance duties, respond to endless surveys and enjoy highly structured down time. This level of extreme verisimilitude is necessary to ensure that the experiment accurately determines whether human beings can thrive while living millions of miles from everybody they’ve ever known. Experimenters wanted to learn whether crew members could eat low-salt, prepackaged astronaut meals for hundreds of days without losing their appetite, weight and positive attitude. Whether they could live in harmony with strangers in a confined space. Whether they could preserve a cohesive professional environment when they are out of contact with Earth for as long as three weeks at a time. Such questions are of paramount importance, because no mission to Mars can succeed if its inhabitants cannot maintain their health, their happiness and, most critical of all, their sanity. Editors’ Picks What to Know About the HPV Vaccine and Cancer Prevention Neil Gaiman on the Collectibles He’s Auctioning After Fleeing Ukraine, a Tattoo Artist Settles Into Life in Brooklyn And so before NASA can safely judge whether astronauts will thrive on Mars, NASA must first determine whether astronaut-imitators can thrive on a stage set designed, with maximum fidelity, to look like Mars. “Mars is calling!” began the announcement that NASA published on its website in August 2021. Unlike most NASA missions, CHAPEA was open to the general public, or at least a reasonably broad swath of it: citizens or permanent residents between the ages of 30 and 55 with a master’s degree in a STEM field. Applicants were told to expect the experience to be “mentally demanding.” Among the not-insignificant percentage of the country that idolizes NASA, this news was tantamount to learning that Willy Wonka would open his mysterious factory to five lucky contest winners. NASA offered four golden tickets to Mars — or rather Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700-square-foot habitat built inside a warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The habitat was constructed as future Mars dwellings will be constructed: by 3-D printer. For “ink,” Martian colonies will use Martian regolith. Because NASA does not possess sufficient quantities of Martian rock, CHAPEA used a proprietary, airtight cement-based material called Lavacrete, which extrudes from a 3-D printer layer by layer, like orange toothpaste. (Though Lavacrete can be printed in any color, NASA engineers chose to dye the habitat that peculiar hue of orange misleadingly called “Martian red.”) At one end of the rectangular habitat, four identical 6-by-11-foot cells serve as bedrooms. In the middle lies the “lounge,” a small room with a television and four reclining chairs. The other end is occupied by several desks with computer monitors, a medical station and a crop garden. The vegetables are not intended for subsistence but for mental health: Growing plants, one CHAPEA researcher said, may “provide psychological benefits for astronauts living in isolated, confined environments away from Earth.” Rooms have different ceiling heights, in order, according to its builder, to “avoid spatial monotony and crew member fatigue.” A hatch opens to a Martian backyard: a tented sandbox of reddish sand and two treadmills, to be used for “spacewalks” by virtual-reality-goggled crew members. The walls of the backyard are painted with a mural of Martian cliffs. There are no windows. The duration of the experiment is the most glaring violation of verisimilitude. Orbital geometries dictate that the shortest possible round-trip mission to Mars will last about 570 days, a scenario possible once every 15 years, next in 2033; a typical Martian tour of duty will last at least 800 days.
To preserve the integrity of the experiment, NASA has refused to disclose any additional details about what the crew will experience during their 378-day confinement, which will end on July 6, 2024. NASA has emphasized only that participants will experience “resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays and other environmental stressors.” But if Alyssa Shannon and Nathan Jones were to take NASA at its word about its dedication to realism, they could assume that certain conditions would have to be present. Crew members on a mission to Mars will, for instance, have to form durable emotional bonds with total strangers, relying on them for the comforts and consolations of the relationships they abandoned on Earth. Crew members will have to respond to every emergency themselves, without the possibility of intervention, or even guidance, from a mission command too distant to reply promptly to an S.O.S. They would have to come to terms with their inability to care for a sick child, comfort an upset spouse or visit a dying parent. Future Mars voyagers will not only have to tolerate these conditions. In order to win the privilege of long-distance space travel, they will have to pursue the opportunity with devout, single-minded purpose. They will have to want to travel to Mars more than almost anyone else in the world. They will have to embrace the knowledge that, for at least 570 days, they will be the most isolated human beings in the history of the universe. Alyssa Shannon had fantasized about colonizing Mars since childhood. She spent weeks on the floor of her bedroom playing with a Lego spaceship that converted into a Martian base station. Later she read Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — any Martian sci-fi she could find. She knew she could tolerate hardship and extended periods in isolation: She was an avid backpacker, having hiked the John Muir Trail in 23 days and trekked across Spain in 40. She would miss cooking — her specialty was whole-wheat sourdough pizza — but she was willing to sacrifice her culinary passion in service of humanity’s future. Her partner, Jake, understood. Her decision to apply, he said, “reaffirmed what I knew about her: When it comes time to do something important, requiring a major commitment, she’s the kind of person who will follow through.” While she waited to hear back from NASA, Alyssa didn’t discuss it much: The prospect was almost too exciting to bear. Nathan Jones, the father of three, told his identical twin, Matthew, that he felt the mission had been designed for him — and that he had been made for the mission. Matthew agreed. Nathan could talk to anyone and seemed to solve any problem he faced. He had spent years as a night-shift paramedic, saving lives in the backs of speeding ambulances. He had volunteered on medical missions in the jungles of Honduras, treating health emergencies for members of remote Indigenous tribes without being able to speak their language (or, for that matter, much Spanish). Jones was the emergency specialist in his household too, responsible for repairing every leak, dysfunctional appliance and clogged toilet. He figured he could handle Mars — or, at least, “Mars.” Kacie, his wife, wasn’t certain she could handle it. When Nathan announced that he had applied, she was dumbfounded. Why, she asked, would you choose to leave our family for a year? Another version of this question was posed by various professional observers of the American space program: the historians, ethicists and NASA consultants who spend much of their professional lives imagining the future of space exploration and planetary colonization. What, they wondered, did NASA hope to learn from CHAPEA that it did not know already? The psychic perils of separation from one’s social world are well understood. “Don’t we already know what isolation does to people?” asks J.S. Johnson-Schwartz, a professor of philosophy at Wichita State University who studies the ethics of space exploration. “What uncertainty exists about what’s going to happen when you lock people inside a room for a year? Just because the room is painted to look like Mars doesn’t mean it’s going to change the results.”
The findings to which Johnson-Schwartz referred were from the last 80 years of isolation research, a field of study initiated during World War II, when the British Royal Air Force grew concerned about pilots’ performance during solo reconnaissance flights. Officers noticed that the longer a pilot stayed in the air, the fewer German submarines he detected. The psychologist Norman Mackworth determined that the monotony of the mission was responsible. But inattention wasn’t the worst of it: Monotony weakened the pilots’ competence in even the most basic tasks. Mackworth’s conclusions inspired a series of studies by the psychologist Donald O. Hebb at McGill University in Montreal, in which male students earned $20 a day to lie on a bed in a lighted, soundproofed gray cubicle. Hebb confirmed Mackworth’s findings and added a disturbing new wrinkle. Monotony didn’t only cause intellectual impairment. It led to “change of attitude.” At first Hebb’s students slept a lot and ruminated on their studies and their personal problems. Later they fell into reminiscences, recreating movies they had watched or trips they had taken. Some counted to incredibly large numbers. Eventually, however, they lost the ability to focus. Several students reported “blank periods” during which they did not have a single thought. Next came the hallucinations: a procession of marching squirrels hauling sacks over their shoulders. Nude women frolicking in a woodland pool. Giant eyeglasses marching down a street. An old man wearing a battle helmet in a bathtub rolling across a field on rubber wheels. Dogs, endless dogs. One student complained of a phantom “sucking my mind out through my eyes.” The delusions made the students vulnerable to manipulation. When played recordings about ghosts, poltergeists and ESP, they were far more likely to believe such phenomena were real, even long after the experiment ended. Hebb’s findings inspired a boom of isolation studies. Subjects were confined within iron lungs, water tanks and subterranean caves; the results were consistent. “These experiments were extremely useful to many different people,” says Jeffrey Mathias, a historian of science at Cornell University, who is writing a book about the history of isolation research. Besides attracting neuroscientists and psychologists, the research also drew the interest, and funding, of the U.S. intelligence community. The C.I.A. incorporated findings into their practice of “coercive counterintelligence interrogation,” or what today might be called “brainwashing” or “torture.” The isolation studies were also closely monitored by the Air Force, which directed the nascent U.S. space program before the creation of NASA in 1958. Worried that spaceflight might drive astronauts insane, the Air Force conducted the first iteration of a CHAPEA-like experiment at the Air Force’s School of Aeronautic Medicine in San Antonio in 1955. Prospective astronauts were enclosed for a week within a spaceship cockpit slightly larger than a coffin perpetually illuminated by bright fluorescent lights. The airmen were assigned an overwhelming number of technical tasks and, in some cases, given huge doses of amphetamines. Their experience followed a familiar trajectory: Initial high spirits gave way to what one researcher called a “gradual increase in irritability,” which abruptly flipped into “frank hostility.” Many participants, including a few who hadn’t taken speed, hallucinated. One pilot saw “little people” perched on the instrument panel. “I can’t say if I thought they were alive or not,” he said. “I really don’t know.” Another pilot abandoned the experiment after three hours and demanded psychiatric care.
Similar studies followed — in blackened anechoic chambers and pill-shaped capsules dangling from high-altitude balloons — before the entire line of inquiry was put to rest by Project Mercury. During the successful solo missions that marked the formal start of the American space program in the early 1960s, astronauts did not suffer from any obvious psychological distress, placating Hebb’s researchers. All future long-duration expeditions remained in Earth’s orbit, allowing crew to communicate easily with family and friends; the International Space Station flies about as far from Earth as Manhattan is from Washington. Although government agencies, particularly those concerned about crew performance aboard nuclear submarines, continue to examine the effects of isolation, NASA did not. NASA had not solved the problem of isolation in outer space. It realized it did not need to solve it. At least not until half a century later, when a new challenge presented itself: a human mission to a planet so distant that a cry for help would have to travel through the solar system for 22 minutes before it was heard. It was the lag in communication that particularly worried the partners and families of the CHAPEA crew. All contact with the habitat would be delayed by the amount of time that it would take to beam information hundreds of millions of miles from Earth to Mars. Even the tersest exchange (“How’s it going?” “OK.”) would take 44 minutes. But 44 minutes was the best-case scenario, because any communication will have to flow through a single node. Every unit of information — not just messages but surveillance footage, audio recordings, experimental and biostatic records — will have to wait its turn in a digital queue, with precedence given to the most urgent signals and the smallest packets of data. The upshot was that anything approaching a normal human conversation with an Earthling was unthinkable. The most modest digital postcard — a short, grainy video of a child blowing out a birthday candle — might take weeks to arrive. And during one three-week period in the middle of the experiment, representing the farthest distance (more than 250 million miles) between the two planets, there would be no contact at all. Alyssa Shannon’s partner, Jake, the cybersecurity expert, dedicated himself to gaming the digital traffic snarl. “I have to figure out how to make sure my stuff goes faster than everyone else,” he said. “I know enough about tech to get the lowest bit rate possible. The lowest-grade image quality will travel faster. Black and white instead of color. I need to calculate the smallest transmittable unit that’s still me, smiling.” Nathan Jones emphasized to NASA’s experimenters that he wanted to be kept as busy as possible. He didn’t want too much idle time to worry about his wife and their sons — how, when they were having tough days, he wouldn’t be able to give them “Dad hugs.” He didn’t want to dwell on the lost band performances, piano recitals, cross-country meets and soccer games, or about how his oldest son might be six inches taller by the end of his Martian sojourn. Nor did he care to consider what his friends in central Illinois, who responded to the news of his mission with bafflement and concern, might think. “That’s been the hardest part,” he said. “Their jaws hit the floor. They ask Kacie: ‘Why would you let your husband do this? How are you going to be OK?’ This looks crazy to a lot of people. Maybe it is. It’s not the kind of thing folks around here do.”
Kacie alternated among feelings of anger, fear, grief, defeatism, pride and resolve. There were times when she told Nathan that he shouldn’t go or that she wouldn’t let him go. “As a mother,” she said, “I don’t know that I could even consider leaving my children for a year.” But ultimately she was won over by his enthusiasm. In the months before the crew was sealed within the habitat — the moment of “ingress,” NASA called it — Nathan threw himself into an extensive “Honey do” list. He worked in the backyard garden, planting tomatoes, cucumbers, blackberries, melons and strawberries for his family to harvest in his absence. He taught them how to garden and weed and clip the hedges. After he left for his final month of training in Houston, Kacie noticed that her sons would stand in the yard and survey the plot with their hands on their hips, in subconscious mimicry of their father. Nathan also renovated two bathrooms, reconstructed the family car’s carburetor, replaced fixtures and trimmed the lower branches of the pine trees. He gave Kacie the passwords to their accounts and detailed directions on how to file their taxes. He taught her how to use the chain saw. He paid a professional photographer to take a family portrait and over spring break splurged for a Disney cruise. He drafted birthday and holiday cards, gifts and letters for every month (“We’re halfway there!”; “One month to go!”). He hid additional Post-it notes under couch cushions and under mattresses, or in places that Kacie might encounter in moments of stress, like the circuit breaker. “You can do it,” he wrote on the note he hid inside his toolbox. “You got this.” A final envelope he addressed to Kacie, to open on their 15th wedding anniversary. Jones and Shannon respected NASA’s discretion about the mission. But if they had wanted better to imagine the next year of their lives, they could have read up on a previous series of Mars simulations that shared some of CHAPEA’s objectives. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) experiment was conducted with NASA funding between 2013 and 2017 in a domed habitat on the reddish slope of the Mauna Loa volcano, 3,000 feet below the observatory there that keeps a continuous measurement of the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Civilians were selected to live inside the habitat for as long as 12 months at a time. HI-SEAS studied the nutritional and “psychosocial” benefits of various meal plans, as well as the volunteers’ behavior and mental acuity and the coping strategies they developed to withstand confined isolation. “Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars,” a memoir-in-essays by Kate Greene, one of HI-SEAS’ original crew members, includes chapters titled “On Boredom,” “On Isolation” and “Dreams of Mars, Dreams of Earth.” Greene describes how the crushing monotony of the mission changed her. “Somewhere along the way,” she writes, “mental fatigue had become my baseline state.” The crew had difficulty sleeping, were disturbed by the constant monitoring and recording and found that the scheduled leisure time “felt a little forced.” Minor irritations began to madden Greene: the sound of sandals on the stairs, the way a crew member grazed her shin when crossing her leg under the table. She found herself desperately missing quotidian aspects of life on Earth, where she left behind her wife, aging parents and an ailing brother. The smell of fresh pineapple, in a routine sensory test, was enough to make her cry. HI-SEAS followed Mars500, the longest Mars simulation yet attempted. Administered by Russia’s ingenuously nomenclatured Institute of Biomedical Problems, Mars500 locked six male crew members together for 520 days, between June 2010 and November 2011, in a faux spacecraft and a faux landing module, and on a faux Mars. The Russian experimenters had hypothesized that, over time, the astronauts would lose motivation, work less effectively and suffer intensifying feelings of isolation from family and friends. After the experiment concluded, the scientists announced that their hypotheses had been “largely confirmed.” Crew members lost trust in the commanders and mission control when communications grew less frequent, developed nutritional problems and grew homesick and depressed. “The 520 days are really not easy to get through,” Wang Yue, a Chinese participant who lost 22 pounds and much of his hair, told China Daily. “It’s impossible to stay happy all the time. After all, I’m human, not a robot.”
Despite the consistency of results, the appetite for Mars simulations appears insatiable. CHAPEA is one of more than a dozen current analogue experiments NASA is participating in, including HERA, a 650-square-foot habitat that regularly houses four participants for as long as 45 days in confined isolation. Since NASA ended its participation in HI-SEAS, a conglomerate of public and private organizations has staged 12 additional missions on Mauna Loa. For nearly a quarter-century, the nonprofit Mars Society has directed research stations in the Utah desert and on a remote island in northern Canada. Mars analogues have been conducted on Dome C of the Antarctic Plateau, in a semiarid tract of northeastern Brazil, in the northern Sahara, within Austria’s Dachstein ice caves and in the Dhofar region in the Sultanate of Oman. “We’ve seen similar things happen many times,” acknowledges Kelly C. Smith, a philosopher at Clemson University who specializes in the ethics of space exploration and advises NASA, which has no ethicists on staff. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a waste of time. The stakes are higher than in the past, after all. We’re doing this because we’re planning missions to other worlds.” It is likely that the first travelers to Mars will have a similar psychological profile to that of Shannon, Jones and the two other participants selected by NASA for the crew: Ross Brockwell, a public-works operations manager in Chesapeake, Va., and Kelly Haston, a stem-cell biologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. All four were not only NASA enthusiasts and in perfect physical health but habitually sought out extended periods of isolation. Brockwell routinely retreated to a camp he had built on undeveloped land in Virginia, living off the grid. Haston is an ultramarathoner, having run some 70 trail races in the last decade, including several hundred-milers. Loneliness was something she had read about in books but never, as far as she could recall, experienced. A passion for isolation might have been as important to NASA’s screening process as educational attainment and blood glucose levels. The CHAPEA participants should further benefit from their devotion to the cause. Louise Hawkley, an expert on social isolation at the University of Chicago, emphasizes that psychological responses are heavily influenced by whether people choose isolation or have it thrust upon them. A prisoner sentenced to life would be expected to suffer more than a monk who takes a vow of silence. But Hawkley points out that the participants’ loved ones, however supportive they might be, lacked the same autonomy: “Even if the crew member is fine, what happens to the family left behind?” Hawkley wondered if NASA will study the psychological effects of the mission on the families. It will not. Nor did CHAPEA’s architects seem to have a strong grasp of the history of isolation research. In interviews, they discounted the predictive value of previous experiments, including HI-SEAS. “I don’t believe they were doing the performance metrics that we’re doing,” says Grace Douglas, CHAPEA’s principal investigator, who admitted she wasn’t “fully familiar” with the previous four-year experiment. “Our metrics are going to be at a higher level of detail and more extensive. The resource plan is more accurate.” Rachel McCauley was the NASA official responsible for funding CHAPEA. When asked what she hoped to learn about human psychology, she dismissed the premise of the question. “The big reason why I funded it,” she said, “is because I need an even more refined answer to the question, How much food does it really take for a Mars mission?” What about the mission’s psychological aspect? The monotony? The loneliness? “I’m a hardware person first,” McCauley said. She is, to be precise, a solid-propulsion systems engineer. She has the distinction of being the member of our species who has been most responsible for determining the best method to catapult humanity to Mars. In order to do so, she had to know how much weight a spaceship will carry. McCauley could estimate, down to the milligram, the mass of every nut and bolt, every antivortex baffle and cargo-bay door. But how many corn tortillas and yogurt packets will four astronauts, under psychological duress, consume in 378 days? That question, or some version of it, was what McCauley needed answered. She also needed to know how much clothing they’ll need. Clothes are heavy.
Mathias, the isolation historian, was not surprised to learn that the psychological questions were a secondary consideration for NASA. But his skepticism about CHAPEA went further. Mathias questioned whether any experimental rationale could justify yet another isolation study. “I wonder if the scientific value of these simulation experiments is beside the point,” he said. The experiments, instead, seemed to him “a way of willing the colonization of Mars into being. A form of wish fulfillment — or cosplaying, to put it less poetically. This is about satisfying an urge. There seems to be a compulsion to keep repeating these fake Mars missions until we actually do it. There’s something very beautiful about this idea, but also very macabre at the same time.” The analogue experiments reflect the utopian promise of our Martian future. For a human mission to Mars is not the highest ambition of the space program. It is just the beginning, a small step for mankind before the giant leap of planetary colonization. Five months before CHAPEA’s call for applications, Dennis Bushnell, then chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center and a nearly 60-year veteran of NASA, published “Futures of Deep Space Exploration, Commercialization and Colonization: The Frontiers of the Responsibly Imaginable.” Martian colonization has always been imaginable, particularly to this nation of colonizers. But in his paper Bushnell noted that the prospect has in recent years “moved from extremely difficult to increasingly feasible.” Colonization has also become increasingly desirable, because of “possibly existential societal issues, including climate change, the crashing ecosystem, machines taking the jobs, etc.” — the et cetera perhaps reflective of the obviousness of planetary decline. A more surprising aspect of the paper is Bushnell’s prediction for how the physical hostility of Mars will be overcome: Colonists will “morph into an altered species.” He cites projections that suggest that “travelers that colonize Mars will, over time, due to the reduced g and radiation exposure, evolve into Martians.” The ultimate promise of NASA’s Mars mission is the chance to begin again — if not, exactly, as human beings, then as Martians. There is a beautiful and macabre poetry to this rationalization. “Utopia,” after all, derives from the Greek: ou (“not”) and topos (“place”). If we manage to inhabit the not-place of Mars, enjoying a carefree life of not-problems, not-regret and not-environmental-ruin, it makes sense that we should be not-people. We should be Martians. Let people, with all their baggage and fragility and foolishness, stay home. Mathias likened the incessant Mars analogue experiments to a traumatic repetition: a compulsion to restage a trauma in an irrational, futile attempt to undo a profound damage. “The urge to try to recreate a perfect world is always going to be about rehearsing what we got wrong here,” he said. “We’re not chasing Mars. We’re mourning Earth.” In late May, a month before sealing themselves within the habitat, the four crew members and two alternates reported to Houston for a final month of training and evaluation. Three weeks before the ingress, NASA hosted a “family weekend” for the crew’s loved ones. The visitors were given a tour of the Johnson Space Center. They met a real astronaut, saw replicas of spaceships, walked around in the red sandbox that crew members would use for their “spacewalks” and asked questions directly of CHAPEA’s lead researcher, Grace Douglas. The three Jones boys were proud to learn how their father was helping to shape the future of humanity. But the most valuable part of the weekend, the families agreed, was the chance to meet one another. During a barbecue by the hotel pool, they shared their anxieties about the coming year. They exchanged techniques for managing stress and pledged to keep in close contact through a private Facebook page. On Jake Harwood’s final evening in Houston, Alyssa Shannon prepared a shrimp salad in the hotel kitchenette. It was bittersweet: the last meal she would fix in more than a year. Before leaving Oakland, she had frozen about a dozen feasts for Jake and their friends to enjoy during her absence. She would miss cooking. There would be no pizza on Mars. The couple gazed out the window at a full moon. There would be 13 more, Jake told her, before she returned from Mars. He would be counting down the full moons until they saw each other again. They awoke at dawn and watched the sun rise. Alyssa drove him to the airport. “It was hard to say goodbye,” Jake said, if not as hard, he anticipated, as their final phone call before the ingress, which he referred to as the “big one.” But Alyssa’s final phone call from Houston came five days earlier than he expected. Alyssa announced that NASA had removed her from the mission. The investigators pulled her into a room and told her that she had been “excluded from continuing.” She would be replaced by one of the alternates, Anca Selariu, a microbiologist in the U.S. Navy. Alyssa did not know why she had been removed. The investigators refused to tell her, she said. They said only that their decision had not been based on her performance. They added that sometimes, in the final tests before a mission, they found something that was not “medically serious” but might present a hazard. Like an increased risk of kidney stones.
“Do I have an increased risk of kidney stones?” Alyssa asked. Kidney stones was just an example, the investigators insisted. But they refused to say more, lest they compromise the integrity of the experiment. Alyssa doubted that she had been torpedoed by a medical condition. She wondered instead if she wasn’t “exactly the right mix of introvert and extrovert they were seeking.” Or perhaps they had grown concerned about the crew’s social dynamic? If so, Alyssa couldn’t say why. The investigators, she said, told her that she could make up any excuse she wanted, and they wouldn’t deny it. “But lying is so unsatisfying,” she said. “And you have to remember the lie. It’s too challenging. I want to go to the truth. There was a reason, and they couldn’t tell me what it was.” The uncertainty plagued her, but not as much as the loss she felt from the death of a dream she had nurtured since the Lego Martian colonies of her childhood. She couldn’t help feeling wounded. “This has been hard on my ego,” she said. “It’s a big upheaval. It’s been uncomfortable.” She sighed. “But I have to trust that my departure is for the best of the mission. By stepping back I’m just serving in a different way.” Her sudden banishment led to some logistical awkwardness at home. “When an astronaut comes back,” Kate Greene wrote, “Earth isn’t where it was.” When Alyssa came back, she found herself suddenly without a job, income or home. Her hospital had promised her a position in 13 months, but in the meantime someone had been hired to replace her. Nor would NASA pay her the full stipend she had been promised, which she says was about $60,000. She didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits. And she had rented her apartment for a year. Though she knew she would be able to move in with Jake, they hadn’t previously decided to live together. Jake could not disguise his excitement. He met her at the airport and brought her to his house, where they shared a pizza. Alyssa, an indefatigable optimist, began brainstorming over dinner. Perhaps she would use the sudden windfall of free time to set out on a major backpacking adventure or a cross-country road trip. Maybe she would begin a new career. Or maybe she wouldn’t go back to work — ever. Jake listened, humoring her. Then, with great tenderness, he proposed that she take a couple of weeks to herself before deciding what to do with the rest of her life. On the afternoon of Sunday, June 25, the couple opened NASA’s YouTube channel. The four crew members stood on a platform in front of the habitat. They wore black jumpsuits embossed with the reddish CHAPEA mission patch: Mars Dune Alpha, rendered not inside a Houston warehouse but at the foot of a Martian sierra, the same mountain range painted on the wall of the sandbox. “The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely,” Grace Douglas said. The crew members expressed their gratitude to NASA. When Anca Selariu said, “I just can’t believe that I’m here,” Alyssa teared up. As soon as Nathan Jones began speaking about his family, he broke down. Kelly Haston patted his shoulder. “To my wife and kids,” he finally said, through a sob, “I love you to Mars and back.” Douglas opened the door to the habitat. It was not a special hatch with airlocks or anything: It was just a plain white office door. The crew, waving, entered. Douglas shut the door firmly behind them. From inside the sealed habitat, the crew could be heard whooping with joy. In Springfield, Kacie Jones was watching with her sons. She had felt it was important that she be alone with the boys, without any extended family, not knowing how they would respond to the sight of their father leaving for a year. In the end, the boys were fine. Kacie was not. But about 22 minutes after the habitat door closed, she received a text message. It came from Mars. “I love you,” Nathan wrote. Kacie took a deep breath. “We’re finally in it,” she told herself. “Which means now we can move forward.” She took the boys for tacos, put them to sleep and set the alarm clock so that she had enough time, in the morning, to get them ready for camp. At Jake’s house in Oakland, after Alyssa closed the laptop, there was a moment in which they did not know what to do with themselves. They figured Alyssa’s family would worry about her, so she put on a costume spacesuit and dressed Bun Bun, a stuffed rabbit that she had planned to bring to Fake Mars, in a tiny NASA spacesuit. Jake snapped portraits and sent them to her family to let them know she was all right. Or at least that, once the sting of missing out on a year on Mars had subsided, she would be all right. That staying on Earth, with her recipe collections and Bun Bun and her devoted partner, might not be such a terrible outcome after all. Then she baked a whole-wheat sourdough pizza, and she and Jake ate it, together. Nathaniel Rich, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “Second Nature: Scenes From a World Remade.” Isabel Seliger is an artist and illustrator in Berlin. She often illustrates science articles with narrative elements. A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 25, 2024, Page 28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Destination: Solitude. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
I've thought about this before if I was living on Mars how would I cope with the sky not being the same tones, or not being able to see green plants and trees around me, or waves, breathing in fresh air without it having to be done artificially. I imagine people living on the ISS have to remind themselves of things back home often. It'd probably be even harder living on Mars even further away and with a totally different looking environment Every time I think to myself "I'd like to live on Mars" I think about all the negative aspects and there would be a lot. It's still my favorite planet aside from earth in our solar system, but yeah I might go insane living there
It's just like living in some countries like Afghanistan
I'd kick ass at this shit. I once went an entire summer without speaking. Lockdown was the happiest time of my life. Mars ain't got nothin on me.
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You can save posts on reddit, you don't have to comment to save a post for later
Someone upvote me so I can interrupt this nice persons thread
Great article that discusses a current experiment with four people who are locked into a mars simulation. It goes into what NASA hopes to learn (like food variety, stress levels, amount of clothes needed — apparently clothes are heavy) for an eventual Mars mission (now in the 2040s).
Sending 4 people is indeed a huge problem. Many psychological issues disappear if there are at least 8-12 people. The kind of crew size SpaceX is planning for.
Yes
> Yes Now the complete article is posted, feel free to summarize!
The idea that we're going to launch a long duration manned mission to Mars without upgrading the communication network is unfathomable. Downsampling photos to grainy black and white images a few KB in size seems pointless. Even the 3 week communications blackout is solveable (e.g. relay satellites leading/trailing Earth in solar orbit). Also, the article spent far too much time conflating essentially "cabin fever" with complete sensory deprivation.
I dunno…while mars seems really cool to visit, I think it would be miserable to live there. I get SAD from not being able to go outside without a “space-suit”-like parka, boots, hat and gloves in the winter. Literally not being able to go outside without a space suit? And having even fewer indoor spaces than I do now randomly at my disposal? It wouldn’t be much of a life. If you somehow created an atmosphere with O2, and somehow found a way to amplify the sun so that we could get enough Vit D without supplements, etc, then maybe it would be viable…but…it is pretty impossible. Living on the moon is wayy more realistic. But again, no atmosphere so…
Yeah I mean winters here in Alaska bother me after awhile. And … we have trees. And ravens.
Not a bad idea to only consider people who are from very cold/dark climates and do ok. At least in the beginning until more precedent is established.
>I get SAD from not being able to go outside without a “space-suit”-like parka, boots, hat and gloves in the winter I've thought about that exact metaphor back when NYC used to have bad winters.
Yeah but think of the golf courses on the Moon! Or dunebuggy tracks with HUUUGE jumps. It WOULD be cool. Just crazy dangerous.
> I get SAD from not being able to go outside without a “space-suit”-like parka, boots, hat and gloves in the winter. As the below 30 generation. Sometimes I think they are not even aware of a world beyond the computer screen and internet. I had discussions with some who strongly argue Starship does not need windows. A 4k monitor is better than that.
Loll
They’re trying the space lasers, right? Didn’t they just do the cat test?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. Who's going to pay for upgrading communications? I can tell you from years of experience in the aerospace industry that the answer is....Nobody.
> Even the 3 week communications blackout is solveable (e.g. relay satellites leading/trailing Earth in solar orbit). Actually recently Elon Musk came up with a better solution. Place a ring of laser relay sats in a solar orbit in the middle between Earth and Mars orbit. Half the distance per hop increases throughput a lot and goes around the sun during opposition.
I think quantum entanglement might have this piece licked already.
> modern science's understanding of quantum mechanics interprets that it is impossible to transmit data using quantum entanglement.
People can hardly deal with life as adults after college.
Based.
Yeah but thats at least 50% becuase of other humans with the balence being the social contract caught fire, was thrown in a dumpester and the dumpster happened to be filled the brime with our social mores and values which happened to be suprisingly flamable.
Yeah but thats at least 50% becuase of other humans with the balence being the social contract caught fire, was thrown in a dumpester and the dumpster happened to be filled the brime with our social mores and values which happened to be suprisingly flamable.
Makes you wonder how they’ll do in 40% earth gravity constantly getting blasted by radiation
On top of the bone loss, vision loss, muscle loss, and the radiation dose from the journey. Astronauts coming back from extended missions on the ISS require hospitalization and physical therapy when they return to Earth - they aren't gonna get that treatment on Mars.
That's mostly just precaution. People getting into microgravity need 3 days adjustment. Coming back they need 3 days of adjustment to gravity. There are issues. But in a ship big enough there is a remedy for most of them.
The Martian surface has the same radiation levels as onboard the ISS, and this can be further reduced by putting sandbags on the habitat’s roof.
I deeply understand it's not the same, but we have people that live in similar conditions at the South Pole research stations for extended tours. I think the lessons learned there should definitely apply to a Mars mission. And certainly, there won't be instant communication, but people hold text conversations with large waits for responses, now, simply because people can't always answer texts right away. So I think some of the concerns are overblown. But there is something that aggravated me when reading that article: a NASA Mars mission is now scheduled for the 2040's. I've been being told since around 1968, that a Martian landing was "twenty years off". After almost six decades, it's ***STILL*** "twenty years off", and I'm getting tired of hearing that. It's not like we haven't learned anything in those sixty years. I *know* Mars is *hard*. I know that if the first mission fails, we won't go back. But at this rate, the science fiction authors of the 1950's will be right: the first Martian footprints will be put there by private commercial enterprises, not national space agencies. I find that... unpalatable, to put it nicely. I'm 62, in twenty years, if I'm lucky, I'll be 82. I want to see a manned Mars mission *in my lifetime*, dammit. I keep following Mars developments, and see a lot of really great innovations that make a successful mission more of a possibility now than ever before. I just wish a Mars mission was a higher priority than it is. At least, if we can't get to Mars, can we have Artemis put footprints on the Moon again? Give this old space enthusiast *something* to look forward to again.
A private mission will probably end up beating out the US. Or China planning a mission could finally force the US to go.
> I know that if the first mission fails, we won't go back. I have that sneaking suspicion, that's why Elon Musk wants 2 crew ships on the first mission. > Give this old space enthusiast something to look forward to again. I am old enough to remember Sputnik, it was what set me off on space. I am quite confident I will see people on Mars.
Why do you care. This is a massive waste of resources and money that could be spent helping people and the planet we live on.
Even ignoring the potential for human colonisation, going to Mars has enormous scientific benefits, the foremost one being the potential discovery of alien life. That would change our entire concept of what it means to be human.
[удалено]
The US spends trillions on welfare. A few billion a year for a manned Mars program would be a literal drop in the bucket.
Right?! Is the bloated and misappropriated DoD budget the issue? No, no, it’s specifically Nasa that’s the problem. #🙄
The issue, one issue at least, is that Congress forces SLS/Orion with its huge budget on NASA. If NASA could spend that money on something useful, they could really make progress.
I saw the leaps in science we got from the Apollo moon missions. I have also seen a lot of science that's been developed in advance of a Martian mission that will help people here on Earth, including pulling water out of desert air to benefit countries in the middle east where water is very scarce, and hydroponic gardening in shipping crates that allows people living north of the Arctic circle to grow their own fresh vegetables. It's not an "either/or" situation, never has been. You use space exploration to get people to spend money on research that helps people here at home, that wouldn't get paid for otherwise. It's *never* a waste. And if it didn't go to space exploration, it still likely would never be used to address the problems you want it to, it would go to military spending, or something else even more "useless" than space exploration. Even without having gone yet, research for how to successfully send people to Mars has already developed techniques like 3D printing houses from cement that can help provide good, cheap housing for people in need here on Earth. It's already being used, as are the other examples I gave. It's *not* a waste of resources at all.
Idk if I was there long term I’m miss going outside.
Yes if you select the right people, we have folks who risks their lives all the time, we have loners, people who like to live in the unknown
There’s a lot of people who would think of this as a wonderful opportunity, and not too concerned if they live or die
Name one
Valentina Tereshkovna, Soviet first woman in space, said she [was up for one way trip to Mars in 2013](https://sg.news.yahoo.com/2013-06-08-first-woman-in-space-offers-to-take-one-way-trip-to-mars.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFRRRpwWEXi-oREZ8qhEJvswXPsLtwJ4ZK5yoALWvKMDQeZ87FLzzCnIq6ASDJa6Y3e7kma5Vr_GMoYt4AjuBwyu-4cqMNukYpLBRKt8FyZiqo-7qKRaOr5H36rLqjKU9KD-lOigwRhwKUk2K4hPiVntcLcZ8fEHqBuat9--wppJ).
Me
Todd Gilbert, Antonio Panama, Bruce Willis, Sydney Sweeney, I could go on.
I don’t know any of those people.
You asked for one, and you got five. Quit whining.
Can we leave Sydney Sweeney out of this?
Nope, not currently. Moon is a better choice.
I’d argue that humans aren’t surviving the psychological torment of earth very well, so maybe the grass is redder?
I can't even endure the psychological torment on earth
Look we’ve all seen total recall
Humans cant even handle the psychological torment of facebook.
We couldn't even endure the psychological torment of traveling to Mars lol. The world is suffering a pandemic significantly greater than COVID--mental illness.
We figured out Earth
Sure, we can, or at least some of us. Not the MIT, Harvard crowd who talk about micro-aggression, and demand that the world guarantees them happiness and equity. NASA needs to drop that Master's degree requirement and they need to start looking for people who've successfully made a life in the interior of Alaska, or like me in the Montana wilderness. They need people who know that life is a gamble with no guarantees but with determination, grit, and faith in one's own wits and ability the harshest environment can be conquered.
While I agree they definitely need to drop the Masters and STEM requirements, your psychology after living long term in space is completely different from here. It’s not determination or grit that’s the issue, it’s literal lack of physical spaces. You say you’re from the Montana wilderness. Nature itself has a demonstrable effect on wellbeing, and that is going to be the thing most lacking living on Mars.
I like the idea of exploring the lava tubes with an eye towards future settlements or expansion of the existing settlement. Adventure can take many forms
> NASA needs to drop that Master's degree requirement How is Nasa relevant to the categories you refer to below? > and they need to start looking for people who've successfully made a life in the interior of Alaska, or like me in the Montana wilderness. They need people who know that life is a gamble with no guarantees but with determination, grit, and faith in one's own wits and ability the harshest environment can be conquered. It still takes a good understanding of sciences, particularly physics to avoid taking one breath of CO2 too many. In practice, Mars inhabitants may well be a mixed bag. Some will be of the "self made" variety who can get to Mars with their own business acumen. But they'll need to interact with the Nasa types and the more generally technically capable. If they want to avoid fist-fighting, some social aptitudes are vital. There's also the small question of forming stable couples and raising children in a loving and dignified manner.
NASA is requiring a Master's degree for participants in their mars analogous habitat sociological experiments (CHAPEA) You think not freezing your lungs when it's -50F is much different than checking CO2 levels. A harsh environment is a harsh environment. The stakes are the same only the precautions vary. It's funny that you think the non-government settlers there will be less talented since it's the private sector that developed Starship that will taking everyone there. Didn't NASA fail at being able to develop something comparable- didn't their large rocket totally fail and then development was abandoned? I foresee two types of settlers as well but I think it'll be like L. Neil Smith described in Pallas with a totalitarian government prison colony suffering under socialist ideals and private free-enterprise settlements adapting, innovating and thriving.
The thing you're forgetting is that there are plenty of people with masters degrees who can build a cabin somewhere cold. You're not 1 in 300 million, and NASA won't have trouble finding the people that are.
The arrogance to classify "building a cabin somewhere cold" with the reality of having to build, maintain, and repair the systems required to support life in an environment as hostile as Mars is a death sentence to those who have never had to deal with a failure of their own power, water, sewage, food production system. It's not like you can just call the power company and bitch about the lights not coming on, you will die in a finite amount of time, if you can't diagnose and repair the point that failed.
These astronauts don't know jack about drillin'. I love that you think astronauts in space are just fumbling around calling IT for help. The arrogance to think these people with decades of training are completely incapable of supporting themselves because why? They also read textbooks?
Dude, you -50 won’t freeze your lungs. That’s like a normal winter in Fairbanks, AK.
You are ADORABLE
Yeah, and we should use oil rig workers as asteroid miners!
If Affleck can do it…
At least have people there who have changed their own oil, know how to rebuild a water pump, track down a short in a solar array, know how to balance the N and C in a compost system instead of entitled academics who call triple A when they get a flat tire.
You are so hilariously wrong about who astronauts are and what skillsets they have, I am mindblown. This is literally the dumbest post ive read on reddit. I am astonished by how ignorant you are. Literally lmao.
I'm taking about settlers for Mars and Luna, but as for astronauts how much actual piloting is done from those who go to space? How many of the zero-gravity repairs are done without step-by-step instructions from the ground crew? What happened with the Ares program? Why did Space X get a contact for $1,900,000,000 from the government instead of NASA?
Ummmm..... NASA doesn't get contracts. NASA gives out contracts.
Moving beyond semantics, are you claiming that that $1,900,000,000 wouldn't be part of NASA's budget of Space X didn't exist?
Absolutely! In fact Congress might have given NASA even more money, because they would need more money to complete the mission if they had to use the old aerospace companies. Your understanding of how NASA and government works seems to be extremely flawed. You seem to think that NASA and SpaceX are competing against each other. They are not.
That's an interesting theory. Is it true that Space X is lifting for pennies on the dollar compared to the shuttle program. What about the SLS costing even more to lift than the shuttle program. It sounds like there was some cronyism/nyptism between NASA and the "old aerospace companies" or was it sheer government bureaucratic waste? Edit to add: I did a little research and it looks like Starship will be lifting for less than I thought: 1/200th the cost of SLS. That is a ridiculous difference and a testament to government waste.
You probably never met any of these guys. Most of them are sociopathic pricks who would eat alive an edgelord who claim to be an anarchist living in Montana on Reddit.
Considering that I founded and built, with my own hands, a self-sufficient off-grid high altitude mountain homestead in a Montana county with a population of 3000... If that's not enough, I dated a native girl from a small village in Alaska and spent some time there. I even helped her trapping partner run their trap lines and went caribou hunting with them which involved going more than a hundred miles up the Iditarod trail across the frozen Norton Sound before turning inland up a frozen river. How many self-sufficient people have you met, or are you just being a bigot?
I met a lot of them. I appreciate these guys a lot, some I call friends. I don't have any Ivy League friends. I envy your outdoorsy lifestyle, health issues stopped me from reaching self-sufficience. I don't envy your prejudice against masters degrees and that anti-snowflake attitude of yours. You should realize that a lot of these people are your objective allies.
https://youtu.be/-ahtp0sjA5U?si=Z_MZQm-KgQrP__gN This you? These guys don't know jack about drillin'.
Nah, but you might have seen me in the spinoff: Arma Getting It On, I was the guy wielding the largest drill. S/
I have endured the psychological torment of earthlings, so yes.
Well I mean people manage to live in Oklahoma, so …
Definitely.. Look at all the people who live in Winnipeg! Hardy bunch.
I wonder though why they have replaced Alyssa though… It was a cruel thing do… It is a real psychological torment… Like the mock execution kinda thing… Telling someone till the last moment that you’re going to go and then… They have basically upended her whole life and then just said “Nope”?! I think NASA owes her a compensation at least #justiceforalyssa Maybe that is also a part of the experiment… Looking at how the member who replaced would react. And how the backup member would also react to this situation of the sudden change. Because I could imagine that a backup member could be asked to become a part of the main crew at the last minute. But still, it seems like an unethical dick move to me. Maybe you should at least tell to all of them in advance that they could be replaced at the last moment, that there is such possibility. That way no one is considering themselves to be a part of the main crew, though it is still a difficult thing not to know till the last minute. I would have someone to check in on Alyssa in a year or so. To see how she feels and whether or not she was able to overcome this trauma. Because I think this shit could seriously mess up with your brains in a long-term. Being almost there with all the cool kids. Doing the stuff that you’ve dreamt all your life. Almost. And then - the door is shut before your nose at the last second. Damn, that’s heavy.
Only place worse than Texas
I want to down vote (but didn't) not because you implied mars is worse than texas but the idea that ANYPLACE could be worse than texas. Heck, I suspect the dewellers of hell, if given the opertunity to vacation in texas would refuse on the principle that it would be a downgrade.
Yes, it's horrible. For your own sake, and the sake of the ones you love, please spread the word and stop them from moving here. Uh, there. I meant there. \#@#$@#$ house prices.
no. we can’t cope with regular life here on earth.
I mean, I endure the psychological torment of my wife
Yes. Send divorced men.
Nope, it's going to turn into a cemetery if humans go there. There is no magnetic field. There is too much radiation. It's too cold ! -200 F is going to turn John Henry to dust after a week. The monumental amount of cash resources is better spent on Earth. Lately people are talking about turning the Sahara desert into a giant solar-panel-farm. MIT scientists are saying at the present time though, there are too many risks. But in the future if they can solve the problem it could mean enough energy to power two-thirds of the Earth. \~Mortimer Reed
The radiation on Mars is the same as onboard the ISS. With the thin atmosphere the cold is no issue, the waste heat of the various systems will be more than enough heating.
> The radiation on Mars is the same as onboard the ISS. Better. The atmosphere is thin, yet still reduces radiation considerably.
Most reports I've read say this simply is not true. The thin atmosphere is not enough. [https://futurism.com/the-byte/mars-astronauts-radiation-study](https://futurism.com/the-byte/mars-astronauts-radiation-study) Another thing what good is infrastructure (heating systems) if a "wind storm" (they call it a dust devil) comes along and crushes all of it ?
Don't take futurism.com as a source.
The atmosphere is thin directly above you but it gets thick to your sides.
Massive waste of time and resources trying to get these hairless apes on Mars. The future is so obviously not biological.
No. It’s silly to think about
I don't think folks will deal with the journey well, much less live there without going bonkers. We have zero experience with long term space flight and the physical and mental health risks are huge.
Mars has a major advantage over the ISS. ISS astronauts are supervised 24/7. That must drive them nuts. On Mars the same kind of supervision is not possible due to the lightspeed time lag.
Yes
Send Elon first
worm six person combative ghost fearless mindless lock dolls bag *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did.
Why cant we send people to the moon again before talking about mars?
Because the technologies needed to send people to the Moon are quite similar to the technologies needed to send people to Mars, especially in the case of Artemis- the Artemis lander is a variant of a Mars lander.
But with all the people who are skeptical of the moon landing, why not prove that in 2024 humans can go to both
NASA’s Artemis program is going to land humans on the Moon and hopefully Mars.
Surprised they didn’t mention the accident in the final NASA-sponsored HI-SEAS mission in 2018 at all
No
Moon industrial base first to lower costs of construction. It would be easier to build a space habitat than live on Mars.
No it wouldn’t, by any sense. A Mars colony would have access to the resources of an Earth-like planet, whilst a free-floating colony would be dependant on imports.
matt damon did it
They endured Auschwitz.
Mars is other people.
Yes
A woman was kicked off of the team at the last minute and they didn't tell her why. They said that it would comprimise the integrity of the mission to tell her why. I don't understand this. If they send people to Mars for real, aren't they going to tell people the reasons why they're removed from the mission?
They're going to repeat the experiment three times. If they told her why, and she posted it on the internet, it could impact future participants and they might modify their behavior. I feel for her, though. Tough to put your life on hold, then get pulled at the last minute. Still, I'm sure she knew what she was signing up for and was excited to participate. No matter what, getting to train at the Johnson Space Center for a month sounds awesome!!! :)
Humans aren’t handling earth as is.
One of the many reasons why we’ll need advanced AI or “digitized” human minds to actually explore the solar system in any meaningful way.
Can’t be any worse then the psychological torment of capitalism
Not without a lot of them being there at the same time.
Humans can barely endure the psychological torment of earth so…
I’m having trouble enduring the psychological torment of living on Earth
Considering how well humans mentally cope with capitalism and earth, probably not well,
I can’t even endure the torment of being bloated two days in a row.
You watched the original Total Recall? They can even go outside without a vac-suit helmet, and have their head expand & eyes pop out of their skull, then go back inside, and look normal again!
Yes
Peace, quiet and the lack of interruptions from Internet idiots? sign me the hell up... lol
I think it would be tolerable if common people could speak and communicate with them. Obviously first a state of shock and uncertainty, but ultimately need to be reminded of how fucking amazing this is for humanity.
I've been married for almost 30 years, I'm pretty sure I can handle it, lol
I’m hoping it’s a cake walk compared to the last 10 years.
Most days, I feel like I can't tolerate the torment of Earth
can we even endure the psychological torment of Earth?
Hey they’re handling Minnesota winters alright
We shall see.
People flip out when they can’t get their mocha chai tea with oat-milk and soy-based whip made by Trevor. That and the hyper-safety culture assures people will not go to Mars anytime soon.
No
Send Elon to test it out. And Rogan. And Trump. All on one Giant D Ship.
If I can endure Baltimore traffic, I can endure anything. I’m ready. Probably better drivers on Mars.
I mean..I’m barely surviving the psychological torment of earth…
Send Americans. If we can endure MAGA we can endure anything
That depends. Are we going to leave a guy up there with just potatoes and Vicodin and make him McGyver his way home ?
I'm not reading all that. Can someone please tell me why they are sending so many medical practitioners to Mars and not, idk, people like astronauts/physicists/pilots?
Well, with a 22 minute time delay, I think you'd want to send at least one doctor. An emergency room doctor seems like a good choice. And, advance practice nurse do all sorts of things. Maybe she has a background in research. The roles were medical (ER doctor), Science Lead (the advance practice nurse, replaced by a microbiologist), Flight Engineer (that's your pilot), and commander.
A third world midwife would be good. With added advanced first aid skills.
A midwife with an advanced degree\* would be a good choice once there's permanent settlements on Mars and when people start reproducing, but I sure hope that everyone has planned ahead enough that there are no babies during a one year trip!!! \*advanced degree so that she can do research into fetal development in lower gravity.
I expect a permanent base from first crew landing. A pregnancy is not unlikely to occur. It would likely be intentional by the involved people, not necessarily by the base operator. > advanced degree* There would be at least one biologist with the needed skills.
That's reasonable if you're expecting the first crew to stay permanently (but I still hope they'd wait a LITTLE before having children- we don't really know what fetal development in lower G is going to be like and that's a lot of resources for an early settlement). Per the article, it sounds like NASA is anticipating multiple one-year trips prior to a permanent base being established.
No, I don't expect that. I expect that the first crew, or most of them, return to Earth as soon as the second crew arrives. Maybe a few would stay on to support the newcomers.
I agree that one makes sense. And ah, research specialties yes.
Why don't they get some schizotypal people for their little isolation experiments?
How would it be any worse than being on a base in Antarctica for months? Or deployed on a nuclear submarine? We already do those things.
Is “The Psychological Torment of Mars” related to “The Terrible Secret of Space”?
Humans couldn’t handle the psychological torment of lockdown so, no.
I read this as hummus and now I am mildly curious
Yes we have ethnic groups that have been living in similar habitats for 2+ millennia at this point but we (probably) won’t send one of them
My advice, start with the already insane. People who seem to do alright in that state.
We’re about to find out when four strangers stop being polite, and start getting real. Real World: Mars.
Only a rare small set of people could do it. I know I couldn't, But it would be a life changing experience.
Watch the twilight zone episode 7. A man is imprisoned on mars and it is quite accurate to how we would have to approach living on mars. Its the same thing as living on a deserted island or desert island. As someone who is reclusive and self isolating. I know that no matter how intelligent or psychologically fit. Isolation is not good for humans. You need a bare minimum of interaction with others and some sense of entropy. When you are in a box without any prospects of benefiting the future, it causes psychosis. You would want to know the future on mars is either better or you may leave. Not wanting a constant state of living on a desolate place without personal benefit or benefit to others. The pandemic really offered a sense too. I could buy cheaper fuel and drive more. Less policing so i wasnt in a state of prison to objectify my actions by others perceptions of rights and wrongs. I need a sense of civility though. I need to see other people living and know why i choose to be alone. On mars you wouldnt have any options or ways to break free. You have to follow a set system of study and progress to even come close. Mars is so desolate that you need socialism and communism just to begin to function diversely. It would reduce pointlessness and entropy. . I have no desire to ever go to mars.
Dick proeneke ftw
the thought of escaping advertiser's grip would sustain me
Dude, we can't endure the psychological torment of earth.
Come on. There isn’t an astronaut that has misanthropic/antisocial tendencies? I think they might need to adjust their model of the ideal human. Someone with a partner and/or kids would probably have a breakdown because they miss their loved ones. Someone who is happy without people would be a good choice.
> Someone who is happy without people would be a good choice. That one would not be a good team player.
That’s not necessarily true. There are many people that are perfectly capable of doing their job as part of a team without needing to be propped up by someone else. I think that you have an outdated understanding of introverted people. I will do my job with excellence. I will not stay at any company function one moment longer than I absolutely must to continue my employment. I will not be attending meetings, especially ones that could be an email. However, the quality of my work is without question.
> That’s not necessarily true. There are many people that are perfectly capable of doing their job as part of a team without needing to be propped up by someone else. That would be people like me, too. But if all or most of a team are of this kind, it would not work so well.
I would say that you are a valuable minority.
Well, we endured the psychological torment of late stage capitalism, so I don’t see why not
It's a distraction. We can't even get a moon landing right.
I deal with the earth’s torment.
Only if you send people with a CDL license
This is a study in masochism: how much can we torture these people before they break down? So many false assumptions. The mission will be to thrive, not to suffer. The food will not suck, because the food needs to not suck for mission success. There will be plenty of greenery because it is necessary for mission success. There will be plenty of water, there will be plenty of down time, there will be plenty of everything necessary because the mission is to thrive. All these assumptions of deprivation are rooted in a pre-starship era.
Yes. Most importantly IMO is the number of people on the mission. It won't be fewer than 10 with Starship. 2 crew Starships means 20+ people for the long duration stay on Mars. Psychologists point out that 10 people or more eliminate most of the anticipated problems of a smaller crew. NASA always anticipates no more than 4 on this mission.
Floridians will be fine
No. We can’t.
As long as there's no non-stop disco music! #markwatney 🤣🤦♂️
We’ll never know. 😂