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I say they should make a porno, actually. Who doesn't want to do what sex on other planets will be like?

Granted, many of us here on /. don't even know what sex on this planet is like... :)

only intelligent discussion from here on out.

Yeah, like that's going to happen...

WTF!?

If I were going on a trip to Mars, the last thing I'd take along would be some techno-listening Eurotrash with unreasonable demands for prompt health care and a propensity for labor unrest. Hell, with their thin figures and tight jeans, some Eurotrashtronaut might get sucked out of the spacecraft through some any ol' tiny tear in the outer wall.

Don't they need any good old corn-fed Midwestern American boys on this mission? Sign me up.

Biodome was a different kind of experiment. There, they were trying to create a self-sustaining Martian colony. The Russians are conducting a much simpler experiment...stick a bunch of people into a metal tube for year and a half and see if they go looney or not. From the article, it doesn't mention if the mission has to live on the same water or not, or a slowly dwindling food supply. But, that is probably secondary to the just-as-dangerous mental effects isolation being targeted for study.

An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.

See: Biodome. The failed movie or the failed experiment.

 
Biosphere 2 was designed by ecological mystics with a minimum of engineering and scientific support to meet specific environmental, ecological, philosophical, and quasi-religious goals. This lead them to make many costly errors;

• They tried to leap from a laboratory bench experiment to a full scale operating facility, which lead to many problems.
• They were well along in construction before the discovered the windows wouldn't work - resulting a lengthy and expensive delay to develop new windows.
• Late in construction they discovered that they hadn't accounted for changes in atmospheric volume due to temperature changes - resulting in the (expensive) last minute addition of the 'lungs'.
• They never ran a small scale simulation with animals and insects, or a small scale simulation long enough to allow plants to spread - resulting in the discovery of multiple nasty interactions between the various ecological elements inside Biosphere.
• Because of the lengthy delays in construction and the lack of scientific and engineering rigor in the design of the 'experiment' they rushed to perform the first lockout mission - without properly testing and commissioning the facility.
• The 'Bionauts' were chosen on the basis of political and philosophical correctness and acceptability rather than being a properly selected and trained team.

Etc... etc... etc..
 
In short, Biosphere 2 isn't a valid standard to judge such experiments by. Sadly, it was such a highly visible flop and so few people are aware of the reasons why, they've poisoned the well for decades and rendered it difficult for actual scientists and engineers to gain funding and acceptance for such work. As shown by your comment...

It's kinda hard to play real-time interactive games when you're dealing with round-trip signal times of up to 40 minutes... I think that would knock out MMO games. Now something like split-screen Halo, on the other hand, doesn't require that, but is more likely to forment anger amongst the crew.

On the gripping hand, the old naval solution would probably work best. That is, keep the crew occupied with enough busywork that they don't have time to piss each other off. This was the standard practice on old sailing men of war; you needed large crews for combat/damage repair and for certain shipkeeping tasks, but otherwise they sat around with little to do. Hence, rituals of inspection, holystoning the deck, etc. This is also why modern crew-reduction initiatives on ships can backfire; smaller crews have a harder time performing damage control than larger ones.

Anyways, for a Mars mission you need a lot of crew for the surface exploration in order to get as much data as possible; the cruise phases (for the most part) have little for them to do. They'd likely be occoupied running different experiments and performing regular maintenance, and exercising (a lot) rather than just being couch kudzu.