A new paper assessing spaceflight mortality. Not sure how useful it is, given the admitted paucity of data.
[Update a few minutes later]
When a Mars simulation goes wrong. Yes, we have a lot to learn before we go to other planets, and even then, people will die, often in terrible ways. Part of the answer is that we have to be more ambitious about how many we send. Six simply isn’t enough.
A new paper assessing spaceflight mortality. Not sure how useful it is, given the admitted paucity of data.
As we learned from The Right Stuff, the average age of test pilots at Edwards in the 1950s was mid-to-late 20s, for reasons similar to those as laid out in this paper’s abstract for skew away from age related mortality. Common sense much?
The Mars story was interesting. I guess they had to have a bad design in order to intentionally create stress and artificially create problems?
For a real base, they were min/maxing the wrong things. A long term stay requires plenty of living space and there isn’t any reason why they couldn’t have it or create it over time. Instead of mining a real base would have to be robust. It would also need nuclear power or a solar system that provides much more power than just enough to get by.
The health problems are best solved by what Rand said, send more people. Many tasks will be best performed by specialists and you need to have enough people there to actually have people who can be specialists.
My question to Rand and the commentariate, assuming that with limitations in down mass, we would just send more craft, how large of a party should be sent when we do land on Mars? Would this be a number suitable for the Moon?
Bonus question: What do you think would happen when a corpse is exposed on Mars? Maybe a corpse farm is one of the first experiments we need to run.
“For a real base, they were min/maxing the wrong things. A long-term stay requires plenty of living space and there isn’t any reason why they couldn’t have it or create it over time. . .”
In practice, yes, each “mission” adds or builds infrastructure so that as time goes on it develops into something downright comfortable.
It’s my understanding that this is not the charter of HI-SEAS. Basically, they want to find out what will happen to Mission One, and they were willing to repeat that experiment at least six times to get enough quality data and turn that data into some good recommendations for the actual mission.
As I see it, I think that approach is correct. Think about it: if I told you what Mission Six would be like, based on my five previous simulations, that wouldn’t be worth very much, that is, compared to making recommendations based on the real experience of the first real mission.
Moving on, yeah, six might be too few people, as Rand says. To clarify, this program had five previous simulations, all successful, with six people. This one didn’t even have that many, just four, which seems a mistake in hindsight. Wodun’s question is right on, how many do we need for a decent chance at a viable mission? I would go further, and ask, what are their main strengths?
In addition to simulations, another way to try out the answers is in fiction. Zubrin’s First Landing (2001) is not bad, in that it seems he put a lot of thought into coming up with good, workable combinations. I believe he said six was a minimum crew. I don’t remember them all, but I agree with his first two: well, yes, you have to have a pilot, else you can’t land. Next, you need a mechanic, pure and simple. Things are going to break down.
Now, I probably won’t be in the minority thinking Dr. Zubrin is an original thinker, but a tad on the optimistic side when it comes to sending things, and people, to Mars.
I would add a doctor, or even a doctor plus a medic. It may not be reasonable to assume HI-SEAS could find such, given that they’re volunteers who give up a lot. For a real mission though, they’d attract a lot of talented people, many with multiple specialties, so a doctor-scientist or scientist-medic is not out of the question.
One last question, that won’t be answered for a while: what’s up with that electrical panel? Was it poorly designed? Improperly installed? Poorly maintained over time due to . . . crew mistakes or bad documentation? What?