Nasa ends year-long Mars simulation on Hawaii
bbc.com
bbc.com
(This is far easier than trying to get it declassified)
How far have you looked? A quick google seems to confirm that NASA are talking to the Navy about this all the time.
Jesus. It only took them 110 years of submarine experience to realize a need for that? Well, that explains why the data wasn't available to NASA in the 60s…
Also submarines are a good source of data but not necessarily a good analogy.
Space exploration isn't the military, rank, duties, discipline and many other things like even the what drives the individuals are quite different.
A submarine would have a considerably larger crew than a manned Mars mission.
While a submarine has a very specific mission they are supported by the navy and their nation state, if they are caught in a bad situation they know that help is not only possible but would muster virtually every resource available to save them.
Submariners are selected first for their mental profile rather than a skill set and trained, astronauts are usually selected for their skill set first and then trained to adapt. In general there are more people that would deal well with isolation than there are world class biochemists and geologists that could adapt to such mental conditions.
Submariners have fairly basic duties, they are trained to be able to execute them under duress and the mental stress from both isolation and combat. Mars explorers would have to use their intelligence and think every day, you don't send them there with an SOP booklet to push buttons you send them there to discover so it's really important to understand how isolation affects their thinking process and creativity and what stimuli need to be created or simulated to keep their brains in working order to keep their creativity and intelligence up to maximize their effectiveness.
And you could probably find 1000 other different variations that make it pretty important to do these studies on the people like the ones that end up going to Mars rather than just say well the navy has done it and their peeps didn't go crazy so we'll be fine.
It's not 100 days, NASA already does 100 day missions on the ISS, there's little NASA doesn't know from direct experience that any navy could tell them. The most common scenario for a mission to Mars would involve 6 month trips with 18 month stays on the Martian surface, for a total of well over 2 years away from Earth. With a crew of maybe 4, on the low end. That's a situation that's completely unprecedented in history. Not only do you have extended isolation, but there's no way to get out of that isolation, no matter what happens. They are locked in to that extremely long term of isolation, there's no abort scenario to bring them back home sooner (in many mission designs anyway). The closest analogy on Earth isn't submarine voyages, it's actually prison. And that's a big reason why there's been a desire to study these sorts of things separately, without the extensive cost of space hardware in the picture. Because it is an unknown and it does have the potential to impact the potential success of a mission.
The Pitcairn Islands were settled by mutineers from the Bounty, and this settlement wasn't recontacted for 18 years.
Small groups of people being out of practical contact with anyone else would have been relatively common in the Age of Sail--it's only with the development of radio telegraphy that ship voyages were not horribly isolated.
http://i.imgur.com/oQnNUfY.jpg
Is that a Tardis on the left?
The surroundings look martian enough. They weren't trying to artifically simulate a day/night cycle were they? (No articles mention this)
Just go to 4chan and check out a lair thread. People will go to utterly squalid lengths to stay glued to their skinner boxes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
It might be interesting to actually break that comparison down a bit. I won't attempt to do that, but a couple of things jump to mind.
1. The 'cost per kilo' to Everest is probably a lot lower. 2. The chance of mortality per trip is impossible to know for Mars, but we can just assume it's about the same as for Everest. 3. Everest has a lot more atmosphere than any location on Mars. 4. I'm not certain, but I believe there are locations on Mars that are warmer on average than Everest. 5. Mars lacks an effective planetary radiation shield. 6. A somewhat educated guess on my part: because the atmosphere is so thin on Mars, the wind at its worst can't cause anything like the damage it can on Everest. One of the few intentional unscientific things in The Martian was how much force wind on Mars has. 7. I think the big Mars win, compare to Everest, is how much flat land you there is available.
This is a kind of whimsical thought process, but it belies a deeper mental struggle on my part. There are few people more excited about the prospect of humans forming living on Mars. It just makes me giddy and warm all over thinking about it. But at the same time, there are countless enormous and serious problems here on earth that could be attacked with the huge sums of money and resources required to setup shop on Mars.
So what it is all about? Musk says that we need to make humans a multi-planetary species. Ok, fair enough. But consider the timeframe and odds of an event on earth that would make human life here impossible. Sure, we could have a total nuclear war after 10x worst case climate change after etc etc etc. But I think that will leave more people alive and more or less functional in the long term than we could put on Mars in a hundred years.
So what is it about?
One of my dark guesses is this: Musk, looking into the future, sees humanity tearing itself apart for various reasons. And that those death spasms, over the course of years and decades, will likely destroy any extreme, 'mars replacement' outposts we make here on earth.
Millions of miles away, a few thousand people on Mars might be immune to such events.
This is an emotionally driven analysis on my part, but it does cross my mind from time to time.
In the meantime, I look forward to this Saturday's SpaceX launch and return! And even more keenly I look forward to next month's Mars Architecture presentation.
Mars is a dead planet it is not geologically active which means it has a solid core that does not provide a dynamo effect.
We still don't know why, one of the theories is that it lacks a large moon which might have an important impact on the longevity of the planet.
The other suspect is nuclear elements that decay and produce heat but it is not known if it's enoguh to keep the plant cool.
The other 2 planets that are still active are Venus and Pluto.
Pluto has a very large moon (relative to its size) but Venus doesn't, however it could be that the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus is enoguh to keep the planet not only warm but in overdrive because the atmosphere is thick and heavy it puts a lot of pressure on Venus which might be enough to keep it going.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/nepal/ar...
Maybe we will have to wait for the official reports and papers.
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