It seems to me that a group of single people would be the best choice for the mission. It’s debatable whether a single-sex crew would be better, but if men and women are on the crew, I would try to balance it with 3 single women and 3 single men. You can bet that if there’s a mixed crew, odds are, some screwing around is going to happen, even among disciplined people. So there should either be all one sex or a balance. Jealousy could crop up in those scenarios, but it seems less likely than with married people.
As mentioned above, jealousy and marriage dynamics could easily interfere with the mission. With married people without their spouses, the temptation and guilt associated with the desire to or act of cheating will really be a distraction. With single people, I’d guess there might be more competition.
The difference between this mission and the Biosphere projects is that these people *can’t * quit and go home. They finish or they die. This is of course just armchair psychology, so I’d be interested in expert opinions on whether the option of quitting in a stressful situation might influence behavior.
In addition to spreading out the skills so no one person is key to the mission, boredom on the trip seems to be one of the biggest hurdles. These people are set on a trajectory and have to wait…and then all of a sudden they’re orbiting Mars and have the intense job of landing the ship just so. If they aren’t kept sharp during the months long trip, the sudden stress and activity level could be too much for them.
Millions of dollars spent, a beautiful facility constructed, every variable taken into account, and in the end this very statement is one of the largest reasons BS1 failed. How could it not. If they really wanted to have an experiment reopen the moon as a viable place to stick an experimental colony - it’s closer and cheaper [maybe].
Why isn’t NASA doing more of these Big Brother experiments?. Just put 6 people in a studio with chores to do and see how long it takes before they kill each other. No need for big technology so far.
Are you sure about this? Light takes less than 9 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun. Earth is 93M miles from the sun (1AU), Mars is about 1.5AU from the Sun, so sunlight would take around 13 minutes to get to Mars. Which means the max Earth/Mars distance is about 2.5AU, or in the range of 22 light-minutes, unless I’ve really goofed the math (which is certainly possible).
…the more I read, the more I realize a manned Mars mission makes no sense-for a fraction of the cost, we could send 20 robotic missions to Mars (and accomplish more).
Anybody know when a sample return mission will happen? :smack:
There is even the question of the scientific value of a sample return mission versus a probe or rover with extensive on-board lab facilities. A sample return mission would take up a considerable portion of the weight budget to return a handful of surface samples; a rover with multi-discipline capability, like the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory give more value even if you are stuck with only the capabilities you build into it at mission inception, and the clever blokes at JPL seem to dedicate every waking our to ecking out every last bit of capability. The Voyager probes, for instance, were wildly effective beyond anyone’s expectation, and despite several problems encountered on route, effectively fulfilling the Grand Tour objectives despite being scaled back.
Manned space efforts make sense in the context of learning how to put people in space, and there is an economic value to this in terms of activities that are not limited in scope to focused mission objectives–for instance, the mining of asteroids, or permanent habitation for the sake of, well, being in space–but from the point of view of scientific yield manned space versus unmanned exploration is a no-brainer; it’s a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper to send robotic probes, and the cost of failure is lower yet.
