Kinda puts 9 months needed to get to Mars into an interesting perspective.
Is there a "fast fix" for treating anemia? Because if humans do get there and land on a surface, this will probably be required.
Is there a "fast fix" for treating anemia? Because if humans do get there and land on a surface, this will probably be required.
Really? Where have you been for the last two years?
On the other hand, it does fully supports your hypothesis that the psychological stress will be huge.
Even the biosphere-style experiments, there's always the subconscious knowledge that you can make a call and bail at any time.
That's very different than knowing you have no lifeline. Les Stroud from Survivorman talks about how on one of his stints, he tested the emergency walkie/satellite phone or whatever and got nothing. So he's got some idea.
There are people out there who can do it, but it takes a special breed.
So yeah, take Covid stress, and like turn it up to 11.
People on death row meet your criteria and probably endure more stress and a lot of them don’t develop psychiatric disease.
It doesn't take 9 months to go to Mars. It's true that the idealized Hohmann trajectory to Mars takes ~8.6 months, but reality is both a lot more messy and more amenable to optimization.
Just to take this year's launch window as an example:
The absolute lowest launch Δv trajectory is about 390 days, at 3.73km/s. This is obviously unworkable.
However, if you limit yourself to the lower, faster half of the porkchop plot, you'll find that the lowest Δv trajectory is ~200 days, at 4.3km/s.
If you are willing to spend 5km/s, you can bring the trip time down to ~150 days.
And if you have a fully retanked starship in orbit (assumptions: 250t mass at burnout including payload and landing fuel, 1200t tanks, 365s average Isp. These are very conservative, and will probably all be improved upon before any trip to mars is realistic.), which nets you 5615m/s, you can push that down to 130 days.
From reading the article, we don't know why it's happening. So we don't know how to treat it yet.