NASA Space Habitat Research Goes Undersea

PSandusky writes "NASA is preparing to make use of Aquarius, the underwater laboratory off Key Largo, for an extended period of time to research the effects of isolation in habitats situated in extreme environments. Planned areas of research include extravehicular activity logistics and crew health and performance. According to NASA's factsheet (PDF), the mission will include some communication with schools and social media sites. "

Your awfully short sighted.

[geekoid]

Putting people in an environment that consists of a low mistake tolerance adds different pressures to the test.

ON land and something goes wrong, then you are likely to survive, and the people in the test know this.
Put it underwater, then they know if something goes wrong they are probably going to die.
Because it's on earth, you can do this test longer then you can on the ISS.
You don't have to worry about the issues that arise from weightlessness.

This project tis needed to help understand the effect of long term space travel.

FYI they do collect day on the effects of being in the ISS.

I hope they also use the team member to start testing way t deal with other world liquid water environments.

Life imitating art....

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't this an Asimov short story?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterclap

Re:Your awfully short sighted.

[Wingnut5]

Well, the US Navy has been doing this more or less since 1954 with the launching of the USS Nautilus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571)) [wikipedia.org] Round the world submerged with the USS Triton (SSRN/SSN-586), the first vessel to execute a submerged circumnavigation of the Earth (Operation Sandblast) in early 1960. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Triton_%28SSRN-586%29) And with many other boats and submariners. Meets all the requirements that nasa is more or less looking for : adventurer, boredom, excitement, a little terror at times. Nothing like taking a boat out after a shipyard overhaul and taking it down to its test depth while listening to the hull compress with the pressure. Yep, a lot of data there

Re:This is news???

[gstoddart]

And why go underwater? Facebook security [techcrunch.com] conventions should get you the requisite amount of isolation to practice for deep space travel!

Simple, because it's actually a hostile environment if you're not careful, and because for any space-suit training, it's the closest thing to low gravity we can simulate.

When you're trying to seriously evaluate how you would handle an extreme environment, you don't just run around playing make-believe.

Air locks and the associated protocols are important both under water and in space.