I'm pretty sure I took a few trips to outer space in a basement that looked just like that.

It doesn't have to take 17 months to get to Mars and back. We could do it in half that time, or less, if were were willing to spend the money.

Boredom, isolation, cramped spaces, with the potential for a sudden emergency that could kill you?

Simple: Recruit submariners.

Feral_and_Preposterous: That's why there needs to be a complement of sluts on board. And weed.

Send only the sluts, weed, and live cameras and there will be no problem with financing the trip.

El Morro: Chances are high someone will have a total meltdown 3/4 of the way there and start ripping wires and hitting switches like an old school telephone board operator, shouting, "what are they gonna do, arrest me?!"

I doubt that. Any serious recruitment/training process would weed those sorts of people out. They'd be highly motivated to reach their goal, especially if they've just spent 6 months getting there and there is only 2 months left to go (17 month mission implies 8 months there, 8 months back, 1 month at Mars).

One thing to remember, is that this test wasn't really realistic: They didn't have the actual goal of getting to Mars. They knew they'd just be sitting in a room with the same people for 17 months. And note that they really didn't have to *MAINTAIN* the "spacecraft". Astronauts on real mission often have enough to do that they complain they don't have any free time, and I suspect that would be true on a real Mars mission.

At better way to test this would be with two missions that had a significant "break" in the middle: Perhaps a few days of "freedom" outside the ship collecting "samples", combined with a major party at the end before they go back in, to simulate the break and stimulation of achieving the goal of walking on Mars.

tbriggs: [cache.io9.com image 504x300]
This research has been done before.

We're not hitchhiking anymore. We're RIDING!

tbriggs: [cache.io9.com image 504x300]
This research has been done before.

Beaten to it.
Gonna post anyway :)

"Expected 2001: a space odyssey, got a dutch frat house."

miniflea: KellyX: I say pair up one female and one male per each crew member, both of them qualified to do the job, but basically they're sexual partners too, not necessarily romantic, but as a way of relaxing and burning off stress.

/seriously

Yeah, that works. Until they go crazy and the doctor cuts another mans baby out of his conscious wife, killing her then himself. The baby is left to be raised by martians and then comes back to earth and founds a new religion. He is eventually torn apart by an angry mob. Yeah real good plan there.

Thou art God.

dittybopper: miniflea: KellyX: I say pair up one female and one male per each crew member, both of them qualified to do the job, but basically they're sexual partners too, not necessarily romantic, but as a way of relaxing and burning off stress.

/seriously

Yeah, that works. Until they go crazy and the doctor cuts another mans baby out of his conscious wife, killing her then himself. The baby is left to be raised by martians and then comes back to earth and founds a new religion. He is eventually torn apart by an angry mob. Yeah real good plan there.

Thou art God.

I grok.

KellyX: it was only to relieve sexual tension and boredom...



They just called it recreation.

KellyX: dittybopper: Yeah, that works. Until they go crazy and the doctor cuts another mans baby out of his conscious wife, killing her then himself. The baby is left to be raised by martians and then comes back to earth and founds a new religion. He is eventually torn apart by an angry mob. Yeah real good plan there.

Thou art God.

Well, clearly everyone would be screened for STDs, allergies, etc. and put on those birth control shots/pills/whatever that prevents pregnancy for like 5 years or something... You're also talking a mission some 10-15 year from now, so a lot of these problems might get resolved with technology.

That zooming sound you hear is the joke doing a low pass over your cranium.

The Mars Society has a research station more than one hundred miles North of Resolute on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic. It looks pretty realistic on the outside, although I haven't seen much of the inside.

Link to Wikipedia article

The High Arctic has several advantages as a simulation of Mars:  1) it is very cold; 2) it is dry; 3) it is remote and virtually unpopulated; 4) the geology is not unlike Mars and in the dark season, it doesn't get a lot of light which would simulate Mars' dim distant Sun.

All in all it is a good simulation, although even the Russian simulation captures one of the main features of interplanetary travel, namely being stuck in a nasty basement room with four or five guys for six months without so much as a window to look out of.

In reality, a Mars craft might add some dangers and trials of its own. For one thing, unless it was insulated or built into an asteroid, the craft would be exposed to cosmic rays and solar radiation, which, as we recently learned, might cause Alzeihemer's or similar maladies. The hull of a craft light enough to launch into space from the ground or assemble in orbit around the Earth or Moon would not protect astronauts from radiation or micro-meteorites. You'd need to cover the craft with synthetic stone or concrete, or else mine an asteroid and then accelerate it slowly to high speeds.

In short, this is a much bigger job than sailing around the world alone.

Also, some scientists think that it would save a lot of money and effort if the volunteers were willing to make a one way trip (as in die there). It would cost untold billions a year to keep them alive until a large enough Mars colony was created to allow the colonists to be essentially independent of Earth. It takes a special kind of space nut to volunteer for a one-way suicide mission, but you could probably gather together a crew if you weren't too picky on qualifications.

But a real Mars mission needs to include a real good surgeon, maybe a psychiatrist, and several different kinds of scientists, all super-qualified and all super-trained and super-dedicated to the mission.

It won't be a space opera unless you mean the kind of opera where everybody is waiving magical swords around and Götterdämmerung is going on in the background.

KellyX: Never read it... Guess I thought this was serious comment cause this are serious KellyX

It was kind of detailed for some Farker to have come up with it on his own.

But hey, I've missed cultural references myself, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

I wonder if some of them, you know, went gay.

Cosmo1: Hey, Yuri, did you like, you know, ever um, do it with, like, another guy?

Yuri: Nyet!!!! And it's going to stay that way!!!!!

Cosmo1: Sigh, this is going to be one long, boring mission!!

Yuri: And stop looking at me like that!!!

gmoney101: Did anyone think about taking a gander out the window every now and then?

[www.oregonl5.org image 640x420]

I would find it hard to get bored of that view

That and the notion of being the first human to step foot on another planet would be plenty of motivation, enough to ignore your podmates' body stink and annoying habits.