Fake Mars Voyage to Test Limits of Stamina

NOORDWIJK, Netherlands (March 22) -- The formula sounds like an especially sadistic reality TV show: Seal six men into a cramped mock spaceship, severely limit their contact with the outside world, and keep them there for 17 months.

It is not a TV show, though there will be cameras recording all that happens inside the "spaceship." It is a research project, known as Mars 500, to find out how well a crew can endure the journey to the Red Planet, a trip that will involve as much confinement and isolation as a prison term. The six participants will stay in their spacecraft for 520 days, mimicking the length of the first human voyage to Mars and back.

To want to do this, "you need to be a little bit crazy," concedes Diego Urbina, a 26-year-old Italian-Colombian engineer who's a candidate for taking part in the project. But if he makes it onto the crew, "when the first human steps on Mars, I can actually say, 'Yeah, I helped do that.' That would make me feel very proud."

Urbina and the three other European finalists were introduced today at the European Space Agency's sprawling campus here. All four are unmarried male engineers ranging in age from 26 to 40, who are being compensated "just enough to pay the bills," Urbina said. The final crew will include two of the Europeans, one Chinese and three Russians.

Scientists say the experiment is flawed but will offer valuable insight into psychological stamina.

"The main obstacle of a human mission to Mars is not the technology [or] the human body. ... The main obstacle is the human mind," said Jason Kring of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "When we go [to Mars], we're going to have to understand things we'll find out in this simulation."

Mars 500 will be by far the longest isolation experiment ever conducted. During a 1999 space simulation that was less than half as long, participants literally came to blows amid accusations of sexual harassment and poor personal hygiene.

The fake Mars crew isn't expected to engage in such dramatics. Unlike the 1999 crew members, the six men on the crew will know each other well by the time they board their "spaceship," a cluster of stuffy, windowless chambers in the Moscow facility of the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems.

But no matter how famously they get along, their stay won't exactly be a frolic. For most of the trip, they'll be cooped up in about 2,100 square feet, an area smaller than many U.S. houses. By the end of the mission they'll have only unappetizing freeze-dried food. For much of their stay, questions they ask Mission Control won't be answered for 40 minutes, reflecting the communications delay astronauts will face on the way to Mars. For some months they will have no voice contact with the outside world at all, only email.

Worst of all, they will have no escape from each other.

Confinement "has a way of magnifying very small and insignificant things and potentially making them major issues," says Lawrence Palinkas of the University of Southern California, who studies people working in isolation. "Even the way people chew their food at dinner can be an irritant."

The participants of the 1999 isolation experiment quarreled over who should clean their quarters and how often. Tensions also arose over who infested the isolation chamber with head lice, which plagued some residents for up to 9 weeks before diagnosis.

During polar expeditions and others lonely pursuits, group members routinely show signs of depression and sometimes withdraw from their colleagues, studies show. Conflicts between team members arise. And the same will happen to the Mars 500 subjects, researchers say. The six men are also likely to get bored and frustrated and to lose interest in their work.

"The most difficult part of the mission was not a single event but more the monotony," Oliver Knickel, a participant in a 105-day trial run for Mars 500, told New Scientist magazine. A nosedive in a crew member's mental health could degrade his physical health and leave him unable to work well.

The Mars 500 participants do have one major advantage over a real Mars crew: They can quit. And that is one limit on the experiment's scientific value, says Gro Mjeldheim Sandal of the University of Bergin, who studied the 105-day trial run for Mars 500. The fact that subjects can escape may have an important impact on their psychology, she says.

More data would have come from having 30 or 40 subjects spend three months in the simulated spaceship, says Dietrich Manzey of the Technical University of Berlin, coauthor of a book about space psychology.

The 500-day format is partly the result of "a political decision," he said, motivated by the desire "to sell this particular vision, to go to Mars, to the public."

Still, Manzey, Sandal and others say the simulation will yield valuable data, and they're looking forward to seeing what happens inside the Earthbound spaceship.

So, a bit nervously, are the candidates.

"There are many things I still don't know about that will be hard, and I'm just waiting for them to appear," says Urbina. "The important thing is to try to add fun to what you are doing."