The Sunday Read: ‘Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life. A mission known as CHAPEA, an experiment in which four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists for 378 days, sets out to answer that question.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Imagine volunteering to live on Mars for 378 days, only you never actually leave planet Earth.
0:15.0	You walk through a plain white office door inside of a warehouse in Houston.
0:21.0	The door shuts behind you and you're locked inside a stage designed
0:26.6	to look like a Martian habitat. For more than a year you and three other
0:31.8	volunteers are completely isolated from the outside world
0:35.9	inside the 1700 square foot structure, where everything is made from 3D printed imitation
0:42.3	Martian rock. You eat freeze-dried space food for every meal.
0:47.8	You wear virtual reality goggles and walk around a red sandbox to simulate spacewalks. You're under near constant surveillance
0:56.2	from mission control. And to mimic the actual conditions of communication between Earth and
1:01.9	Mars, any message you send to family or of communication between Earth and Mars.
1:03.0	Any message you send to family or friends back home
1:06.0	takes at least 22 minutes to arrive.
1:10.0	To the people who applied, mainly NASA super-fans who were required to have
1:14.8	master's degrees in math or science, this experiment sounded like a dream come
1:19.6	true, the chance to make a noble sacrifice for the future of humanity.
1:25.0	Being invited to participate felt like winning a tour of Wollie Wanker's chocolate
1:30.1	factory even though we know through repeated research over many decades, the pernicious effects
1:36.2	of prolonged, confined isolation on the human psyche.
1:41.1	The study is in progress right now, and it's coming to an end this summer.
1:45.0	What will NASA learn from this that we don't already know?
1:49.0	And when the participants leave that stage set,
1:52.0	how will they have changed?
	...

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