Ah...Astrology...
Dude, who ate my cheese ?
They need some honeys on board. Let’s get real.
‘Ground control to Major Tom....”
bump
Agree with posts re. Dudes alone for 17 months is recipe for tension. Check on navy studies regarding long under ice cruises on boomersubs add women stir and also send a dog a cat a bird and also a garden. But most importantly have them build some module for the mission not critical but important
Scatter oakum on the decks...
/johnny
Can you really store a 17 month supply of oxygen?
I thought this was the plot for a Twilight Zone episode.
Can you really store a 17 month supply of oxygen?
This has long been known. Ever since men have sailed long stretches aboard sailing ships, they are constantly given busywork to keep them occupied. The cleaning and maintenance is necessary, but it is also necessary for the mind.
If things turned out poorly when these men knew they were still on planet earth, I can imagine what the effect would be when they are in fact surrounded by an empty, airless, cold and heartless void.
Send the duck calls dudes, their wives and a few gators and that would be interesting.
Whiskey, Women, and Bowie Knives, should liven things up.
Did I say “Women”? I meant Woman.
The problem is they sent the “best of the best”. What they need to do is lock up a few couch potatoes with enough beer and chips to last them, and then see how it goes.
“That cannot be good for mission success, because mission-critical tasks will be scheduled for the day”
Jus make em go to sleep when the sun goes down and they’ll get up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when it comes back up!
Jeesh!
Stupid scientists!!!
This is a really tough environment. Locked in a windowless room with the same 5 guys, 24 hours a day, for a YEAR AND A HALF.
It only differs from solitary confinement in that you’re not totally solitary. As far as exercising: Limited space to do it in.
For one thing, develop faster engines to cut the travel time. Apparently this experiment assumed about an 8-month journey both ways. There’s an engine under development that could cut a 16 month trip down to a 3 month trip.
Secondly, ditch the astronaut’s ability to control ambient light. Simulate day and night with immutable computer-controlled lighting that closely mimics sunlight. Synchronize ship’s time with point of origin time.
Add 2 or 3 flat-screen displays in different ship areas. One might be a synchronized recording of a video camera overlooking Times Square. One might be a village street in England. One might be a farm scene. Mix it up a bit.
Make educational programs available: Hire astronauts who would like to pursue a degree or other classroom program while traveling, and play a classroom videotape at specified times. Have the astronauts submit do and coursework which would be transmitted to instructors and graded. In other words, they’re enrolled in real college while traveling. It’s Tuesday morning. I have to get up and go to my 8:30 Applied Marketing class.
Better yet, have at least some of the astronauts TEACH a class. Put them in front of a video camera with a book and transmit the result to a real class, of real students, on earth. Have interaction with the students. Have them grade the students’ papers.
Other jobs can be found for some of the others. Have them develop some real web sites. Do business consulting. Do tutoring or some kind of coaching, via video.
Some could write one or more books while making the journey. Fiction, nonfiction — whichever.
Upload video tapes of friends’ bicycle journeys, and have astronauts take a daily bike ride “with” their friends. This can include video of the trip and recorded commentary by the friend. Bike different locations: Today we’re doing the neighborhood circuit; next week we’re biking the scenic railroad route. Make it so that their earthbound friends can check up on the astronauts (and verify biking activity with the OTHER astronauts) in order to facilitate a bit of competition and accountability.
Set earth communications at a specific time each day. Internet is available in the evening. Except... maybe daily news and weather is available for a while in the a.m.
Storage is cheap these days. Store a lot of likely-to-be-accessed web sites.
Look at providing artificial gravity (perhaps using a tether of some sort) and possibly a “hamster wheel” where astronauts might go for walks and jogs. Make it wide enough for two astronauts to jog at the same time, and include a position bar and a video screen that takes them on different journeys.
Assign as many physical tasks as possible. Include some projects, with hand tools that can’t easily be used as weapons. Here’s some wood, instructions, and tools to shave and shape and sand the wood with. Hand-craft a small piece of furniture. Make it so that you can easily assemble it for demonstration, and then disassemble it for storage.
In short, make the journey as little like being locked up in near-solitary confinement a tin can, and as much like living on earth and working a real job with daily responsibilities, as you can.
The good news is that getting back from Mars is impossible at the moment - so they would only have to worry about 8.5 months of travel.
!
Imagine a crew crammed into an Orion capsule for the 445 day and 700 plus day mission planned to sample asteroids, especially since Obama foolishly cancelled the Altair lander.
On top of that, no one is going to Mars, or even to an asteroid, without NASA relaxing its standard on the individually calculated lifetime probability of "Radiation Exposure Induced Death," or "REID." An astronaut today is grounded if that calculation exceeds (or is expected to exceed 3 percent), and the sad fact is that a round trip ticket to Mars exceeds that standard going out the gate.
And nuclear rockets won't best the Holmann transfer orbit travel time by more than a third.
Handing the Moon over the Chinese is one of the dumbest ideas to come down the pike since the missile scandals of the Clinton administration.