Mars Rising..the Science Channel

I don't know if many of you are watching this series or not? Whereas I knew of many of challenges facing a manned mission to Mars I did not know the extent of the problems.. such as cosmic radiation, bone/muscle atrophy, and just being couped up with the same people for such a duration.

They emphasized the need for people who can think outside the box, team players..Of course if we live to see such a mission it will be astronauts. But what if you had a self healing, functioning, fully computerized spacecraft with a robot helper. Your mission is to pick your 4 man(women) crew assuming they were also deemed healthy enough...mission leaves in a month - who would you pick/why?

Good post. Many people look at the hard task of moving people from point A to point B and back to A, and never consider the time spent in between.On a six or seven month flight to Titan, it would be the gum chewing or the knuckle popping or the wisecracks that would lead to murder.

As a side note: I wonder how long it will be before the first murder in space? Remember the woman astronaut who drove across country bent on harming someone because of a love affair? Would you want to go to space for a few months cooped up with her?

What was that movie of the ships filled with the last trees, greenery etc, guy goes whack and kills his crewmates, and there are three robots that help him? Dooee, Huey, and Loui? One of my all time faves from the days of Big Chuck and Lil John comedy show here in Cleveland.

They actually said that a lot of psychological profiling would take place before anyone was named to the crew. Further, they mentioned a russian sky lab astronaut that was on the verge of killing another in space. They talked him out of it.

Concerning the crew I would take

1) Nurse..
2) Leader.. am thinking maybe Bret Favre
3) Adventurer.. Bear Grylls comes to mind
4) Science/Engineering expert..

Hmmm, I'd pick Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I think it would make it a lot more pleasant to watch the daily news if these folks were off planet.

If they do send people to Mars then it should only be 2 people and no more. A man and a women. 2 years is a long trip my friend. They could download movies and games to keep them busy on the way. This reminded me of the Disney film called Rocketman. LMAO!

reply to post by cloakndagger


Actually I think seven would be about right. Enough so that if someone got on your nerves, even after all the tests, you could find other people to socialize with. An odd number so that there would be enough sexual tension to keep the mental side of the explorers awake.

As a side not, with that number, a single fatality would not be as likely to end the mission either.

Did you guys know that the Russians are already planning a seventeen month Earth-based simulation for just this very mission?

Makes a lot of sense to run the test on Earth first to see if it's even possible.

n order to prepare for the arduous journey, four Russians and two people selected by ESA will participate in experiments to simulate long-distance space travel: They will be locked up in a model spacecraft for 520 days as human guinea pigs. No outside air and no daylight will penetrate the container's aluminum walls.

It will be interesting to see how it works out. One of the applicants is a prisoner, who claims he's used to confined spaces for long periods.

reply to post by Badge01


Shades of Australia! Mars the prison planet. I can see it now.

I was impressed by them using six as a good number. I was just using common sense on not having too low a number and endangering the mission, or too high a number and having a support problem.

And a good find there on the Russians.

reply to post by NGC2736


Yeah, can't remember where I saw that on the Russians.

Did you read the last paragraph where they talk about a similar experiment they did for a six-month isolation?

These were carefully screened applicants also and they ended up with one guy aborting, and one of the team leaders trying to, uh, 'kiss' one of the females from Canada. She says she ended up going to bed armed for the rest of the experiment.

It may be that the only way one can do this kind of mission is if the crew is placed in suspended animation for the majority of the voyage.

Or we could recruit people like us that spend a lot of time on the net, put them in separate compartments, and let them interact via keyboards.

It keeps down kissing.

The Mars Rising series is turning out to be very good. They had another installment on there and talked about the two times that there was an 'us vs them' moment for the US crews where they were getting too many orders from Houston and went on strike in Skylab (this is a great article called Stop the Rocket I Want To Get Off).

There was also one where the Soviet Astronauts did the same on the space station.

(from the 'Stop the Rocket' link) In 1982 two Soyuz cosmonauts, Valentin Vitalyevich Lebedev and Anatoli Berezovoi, spent a 211-day flight in near silence because they got on each other's nerves so much - a situation that started almost from the moment they climbed into the spacecraft.

They also talked some more on the latest Mars Rising show about the inability to really take a shower and get clean due to the lack of water.

In fact that's another impediment to long space travel - the lack of ability to carry water. They'd have to have 450 refrigerator sized compartments of food for such a journey they theorized, and mentioned how they now realize the importance of a variety of good food. One of the previous astronauts mentioned that he experienced food cravings from almost the moment he was on board and that he'd have 'killed' for a glass of milk or even anything different.

It occurred to me that most of us know how that feels when you compare it to the way you feel on a long airplane flight. There's a sticky feeling you get, along with a sense of being stifled by the confinement to your seat and the reprocessed air.

I was thinking 'man no way I could hang out in an airplane for even a flight to Australia let alone spend 17 months in a spacecraft with the reprocessed air and drinking my own reprocessed and reclaimed urine'.

I'm really starting to think that until they solve the problem or develop the technique of safely putting a man in suspended animation that this mission is not going to be possible.

Right now the record is 438 days held by Valerie Polyakov. The mars mission round trip would require more than twice that.

Here's a pretty good article translated from the Russian

Anyway the last Mars Rising episode will be next Tuesday (with many replays). Don't miss it.



[edit on 28-11-2007 by Badge01]