Do you enjoy the outdoors, need plenty of private time and crave red meat? If so, you are not going to Mars 鈥� at least not with Mars One, a Dutch non-profit organisation aiming to send humans on a one-way mission to the Red Planet by 2023. If the scheme ever gets off the ground.
This week for astronauts officially opened. Although anyone in the world over the age of 18 , the team says not everyone will be up to the challenge.
鈥淲e will be looking for a near-impossible combination of character traits,鈥� says Gerard 鈥榯 Hooft, a Nobel-winning physicist and ambassador for the project.
Advertisement
In addition to meeting fitness and mental health standards, people with the right stuff for Mars must be resilient, creative and empathetic. They will have to work well in close quarters with international crewmates. 鈥淚f you take things too personally, you aren鈥檛 the right person to go,鈥� says chief medical officer Norbert Kraft. 鈥淚f someone says, 鈥業 need to climb mountains and smell flowers鈥�, they are not the person for this鈥� You should be able to survive in a hostile environment, and not freak out in a tin can.鈥� Meat and fish will be off the menu, at least at first. 鈥淵ou have to eat your vegetables,鈥� says Kraft.
Most importantly, candidates will have to feel comfortable being on TV and online almost around the clock. To help raise $6 billion, Mars One founders plan to turn the mission into a reality TV show, with the audience voting in the selection process.
For round one, applicants will make a brief video. The public will vote for their favourites, although this won鈥檛 affect the selection process. After a second, televised round in which the public will vote on candidates from their home country, Mars One will choose 20 to 40 aspiring astronauts to become employees and start training in 2015, for seven years.
Candidates will spend three months each year in a simulated Mars base so selectors can watch how they interact and weed out anyone who is not adjusting well. 鈥淓veryone is going to have some vulnerabilities,鈥� says of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, who is not part of the Mars One team. On-Earth simulations, he adds, are much cheaper than endangering the success of a real mission to Mars.
Basner studied sleep habits in the Mars500 project, which saw six men spend 520 days in a mock spaceship. All six had been screened for psychiatric and health disorders. 鈥淭he tests have a value in predicting certain behaviours,鈥� says Basner. 鈥淏ut these missions are so extreme, the right tools have not been developed yet.鈥�
In Mars500, insomnia and depression manifested within the first few weeks. Tests showed that researchers could not have predicted who would have suffered these effects. So even if the Mars One mission doesn鈥檛 take off, says Basner, crew selection and training might tell us something unanticipated about the people who will eventually travel to Mars.
The Mars One set-up is unprecedented, says Basner. 鈥淥bviously, the fact that you have to stay there, and that this is probably going to be a TV show, could create a bias in the people we are going to see.鈥�
And what are the chances that the mission will be pulled off? 鈥淚 have no idea,鈥� he says.
