NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew 399
globaljustin writes "Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA concluded, "Small women haven't been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there's no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it's brain power you want," says Drysdale. "The logical thing to do is to fly small women." Kate Greene, who wrote the linked article, took part in the first HI-SEAS experiment in Martian-style living, and has some compelling reasons for an all-women crew, energy efficiency chief among them: Week in and week out, the three female crew members expended less than half the calories of the three male crew members. Less than half! We were all exercising roughly the same amount—at least 45 minutes a day for five consecutive days a week—but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways. During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000. ...
The calorie requirements of an astronaut matter significantly when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch.
Dear Liza! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dear Liza! (Score:4, Funny)
Sadly, yes.
Because if it hadn't been there, sure as shit, someone would have bitched about a statement like that being missing.
People nitpick the submissions and never complement the good ones.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
People nitpick the submissions and never complement the good ones.
Speaking of nitpicking, it is "compliment". If we were "complementing" the good ones, we would be adding to the submissions rather than merely commenting on their inadequacies.
Re:Dear Liza! (Score:4, Insightful)
I would care more if slashdot let us edit our posts.
All this hassle over beta and we can't even edit our posts for short period after posting them to fix them.
Re:Dear Liza! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm indifferential to them.
Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:5, Interesting)
That is a pretty compelling reason to have most of the crew women.
However I'd argue in a truly remote environment where no external help is to be had, that the raw strength a few very fit males could provide could be useful in an emergency.
Some women can also be very strong, but then would there be any metabolism benefit?
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Enters Robonaut [nasa.gov].
Women prefer male bosses (Score:3, Interesting)
No really. Before you mod this flamebait, check the studies. It's 100% true. Statistically speaking (well, at least according to several large surveys), most women actually do prefer male authority in the work-place.
http://www.businessweek.com/ar... [businessweek.com]
And there are thousands of nightmare tales about all female workplaces...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem... [dailymail.co.uk]
Of course such statistics and stories will forever be dismissed by social justice warriors... And there are many here on Slashdot.
There's a throwback 1950's movie idea (Score:5, Funny)
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NASA has done long duration studies of groups with various sex compositions. IIRC, all male groups work well. Not surprisingly, since most militaries and NASA itself has lots of experience with those. Mixed groups do even better, although there can be problems with sex and jealousy. All female groups were unstable long term.
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Citation so we know what you're talking about?
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Um, that is not a "study" you linked to. It is an article about an anonymous survey which shows that 39% of women surveyed prefer male bosses and 61% prefer women or don't care. Your source does not even back-up your conclusion. A minority of women in one anonymous phone survey preferred male bosses.
And there are thousands of nightmare tales about all male workplaces (just ask anyone who has served in the military).
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Daily Mail articles highlighting a single example should be dismissed, SJW or no.
The Business Week article discusses a series of Gallup polls, which make a better case. But even there, 34% of people had "no preference" - not that different to the 39% that preferred a male boss. I also note these have been steadily converging for the last few decades.
In any case, it's not particularly relevant to a Mars mission - candidates would be selected on their ability to get along, not randomly from the population.
Re:Women prefer male bosses (Score:5, Funny)
the correct answer to space travel is obvious, its dwarfs
Obviously. Because dwarfs with high constitutions get saving throw bonuses, and they all get to hit bonuses vs. space orcs and galactic goblinoids.
Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, just send one guy. He can do all the heavy lifting; plus he'll be the happiest guy in the solar system.
Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm thinking small men who are disproportionally strong.
Continuing the line of reasoning...
Send only people with low metabolisms.
Send only people with dwarfism. (I think the actor who portrays Tyrian in game of thrones is smart enough to be a mission specialist if not a full out astronaut). They can be very strong.
Perhaps 4'6" males have lower metabolisms than 5'6" females and might still be stronger.
Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:5, Insightful)
Send amputees missing their legs. Legs are dead weight in space. You can maneuver in zero G with just your arms.
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no, really, I want to hear your punchlines...
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Sal A. Light
Say it fast aloud
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Dead.
The issue is not how to call him... (Score:3)
It's how will he pick up the phone with no arms or legs.
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Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite how radical that statement sounds, it's actually perfectly reasonable for a zero-G environment. They're not only dead weight, they're also in the way and make you require larger accomodations.
Even in Mars's gravity field a legless person would deal quite well, at least inside the facility (picture how easily you could get around without your legs if you suddenly were given 2.5x the arm strength, didn't have your legs weighing you down, and on top of that add in how most double amputees already have good arm strength to begin with). They should be able to "hop" with their arms all the way to a 2 1/2 meter ceiling without trouble, and the full arc would take a good two seconds to come back down. On the moon it'd be even easier. Of course, if they're legless, why would they even need such tall ceilings to begin with?
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This was a big plot point in a scifi novel I read years ago. A group of people willingly underwent amputation to reduce the mass of legs, allowing them to add more people to their launch crew.
If I remember correctly, there is a staged automobile accident, causing the main character to lose his legs (not knowing it was intentional) resolving the problem of being separated from the love interest who would be on the shuttle.
This is really going to bother me until I can remember what novel it was.
Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:4, Funny)
Send amputees missing their legs. Legs are dead weight in space. You can maneuver in zero G with just your arms.
StarFox pilots have their legs cut off so they can fit into the cockpits of the Arwings and to prevent blackouts in high-acceleration maneuvers.
Go look at the original box art and manuals if you don't believe me. They've all got mechanical prosthetics.
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Dyson spheres can't be built by either people or gods.
Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Literally millions of diverse fathers can be shipped in much smaller containers requiring minimal upkeep.
Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:5, Insightful)
However I'd argue in a truly remote environment where no external help is to be had, that the raw strength a few very fit males could provide could be useful in an emergency.
Power tools. Everything from screwdrivers to come-alongs to chain blocks to robotic arms.
And of course the added benefit of not having crews making babies at the worst possible time. On a one-way mission (say to Mars) there's no reason the all-female crew couldn't just bring along frozen sperm and produce the first generation of Martians.
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However I'd argue in a truly remote environment where no external help is to be had, that the raw strength a few very fit males could provide could be useful in an emergency.
I don't know... I think it'd make sense to try to evaluate the likelihood of needing that raw strength. What are possible situations that a manned mission to Mars would need strength? Now eliminate all of those situations where a group of women would be strong enough to accomplish the task. Now that that set, and eliminate the situations in which men would not be strong enough. Now you have the set of situations/tasks where men's strength would be of benefit to the mission.
Now you do a sort of risk ana
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What are possible situations that a manned mission to Mars would need strength?
Infinite given you'd be in a delicate habitat on Mars with no idea what to expect.
Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, put differently, a diversity of skills and abilities is what you want to deal with the unknown. NASA knows this, of course. But it's not just a variety of PhDs that you want, it's a variety of physical capacities and problem-solving approaches.
Historically, NASA has expected any improvisation to happen on the ground, where teams could experiment and relay the best, tested idea back to the guy in space. That becomes less practical the further you get form Earth. Diversity beyond "diversity of PhDs" will be valuable.
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That is a pretty compelling reason to have most of the crew women.
Time to whip out my Dr Strangelove DVD and review the bit about mineshafts.
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What weight can a woman lift? I guess 50 kg (on earth, yes I know the difference between mass and weight).
What weight can a man lift? I guess 100 kg.
What is the range of 90% of weights that could need lifting in an emergency? Anything from 1 to 1000 kg - guessing again.
So men are only useful for a range between 50 and 100 kg, which is (100 - 50) / 1000 = 5% of the time.
Not worth taking a man, I say.
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Hello! It's a mission to Mars. [wikipedia.org]
oh man (Score:3)
This is going to be great. I can't think of a single reply to this I could make that wouldn't start an immediate flame war other than the one I'm making, and that's only because it's totally off topic. And I think there's still a 50/50 chance it'll happen.
Re:oh man (Score:5, Funny)
My mother was killed in a flame-war, you insensitive clod!
Re:oh man (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not an all midget crew?
Diversity is best (Score:2)
I suggest a mixed crew, with a diversity of strengths and weaknesses. Plus for a super long journey (one which they may not return from), companionship from the opposite sex will likely be important for long term mental health.
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I suggest all robot crew. Telepresence capabilities and careful modelling and tracking of the environment will enable pseudo-realtime exploration on Mars. This is possible now.
If a crew is sent I wonder if actually a bisexual polyamorous crew would be the most cohesive. The less defences the better I guess?
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I suggest all robot crew. Telepresence capabilities and careful modelling and tracking of the environment will enable pseudo-realtime exploration on Mars. This is possible now.
What the fuck are you smoking? Possible? It's HAPPENING NOW. [wikipedia.org] And arguably has happened since the 70's.
Re:Diversity is best (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the fact that Mars is the only planet known to man that is solely inhabited by robots
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I was not aware that teledildonics was that far advanced.
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companionship from the opposite sex will likely be important for long term mental health.
Or it could cause problems. Imagine having to break off a relationship while stuck in a tiny spaceship with that person for months. Imagine if one of the women became pregnant. Lots of things could go wrong.
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Hence the saying: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
Food is not the limiting factor (Score:5, Informative)
Instead it is: Radiation and muscle loss
Long term travel exposes humans large amounts of radiation, in particular from cosmic rays, and from
In addition, living in a low gravity environment destroys your bones.
These two issues are far more problematic than food, air, and water.
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I'd worry about the unfinished sentence, lack of punctuation and random capitalization before ambiguities that are quite adequately resolved by context.
Re:Food is not the limiting factor (Score:5, Interesting)
That is, of course, for a given radiation dose, which is independent of body cross section - which is relevant in real-world scenarios. If we assume an isotropic radiation exposure profile, an average male height of 174cm, an average female height of 161 cm, and asssume an equivalent profile, then a man presents a 17% higher profile to radiation exposurediation exposure, so if a woman has a 50% higher (150%) cancer risk, then it's only 29% higher for a fixed radiation flux per square meter.
However, let's look further at this. Given the smaller size of members of a female crew, you can shrink the spacecraft occupant space by 8% on each axis, or a volumetric decrease of 26%. Mass changes are more difficult to reckon. Life support, food, water, etc is dependent on metabolism, which the article shows is dramatically lower for women in space. Fuel needs are proportional to all other mass issues. Only a few things (such as computers and scientific equipment) don't trace back to crew member size and mass. Regardless, for a given launch weight, it's clear that you can afford the mass of a significantly increased amount of radiation shielding for a female crew due to the weight savings elsewhere, probably easily more than offsetting the cancer risk.
Beyond this, the average US astronaut age is 34, an age well after when most women are done having children (assuming that they even want to have children). Given that the article states the risk is from breast, ovarian, and utirine cancer, I wouldn't be surprised if many would consider full hysterectomy for the ability to travel to Mars.
That's great and all but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's great and all, but the right way to post this is that the ideal astronaut has a low calorie requirements and leave unsaid that the people who can fill that role is women. No need to drag sexism into the fight when there are perfectly logical rationals for crew selection.
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How about looking at it this way:
A spaceship full of healthy, trim, petite lonely females, isolated from the rest of humanity for years. On High Def TV.
What's not to like?
Re:That's great and all but... (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like a great reality show. That should help NASA fund the trip.
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No, this is the point I'm trying to make:
1) Find idea criteria.
2) Select people that best fit criteria.
3) OH LOOK, they're all female.
The part where you go out of your way to target women is where you forcefully insert sexism into a hole it doesn't belong in.
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The definition of male and female can get rather murky when you really start looking at the variety of people out there.
There's a reason that the olympics uses testosterone levels and not whatever sexual organs you may (or may not) have.
Granted the pool of astronauts is a lot smaller so it probably doesn't matter that much but it would suck to be that one small 'male' astronaut with a low metabolic rate that wasn't even considered because the astronaut shows up in a database as having a penis.
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Nice. So i'm not the only person to have seen Mallrats.
or little people. (Score:2)
Their next alternative was people with dwarfism, but many of them suffer from problems that shorten their lifespan considerably. Actually, I kid ... the article *actually* said:
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Actually, I think you've hit the nail on the head. If calorie requirements were such a problem, they'd be actively seeking people who are intersex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
But, I suspect they are NOT a problem. One could easily fit enough food to last for years in a small enough space that the tradeoffs for picking a person based on the many other attributes that would be far more valuable than the limited space that food would take up.
Now if you want to feed that person fresh vegetables the whole
myopic analysis & sexism (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem w/ the "women only" conclusion is that it myopically focuses on **ONE** factor as if it is the determining factor in mission success.
Part of this is the fault of NASA admin/beauracracy: "We can't spare the weight" is an excuse for all kinds of ideas NASA wanted to kill...
"Too heavy" is almost a trope in NASA/space circles...it's the go-to way for beauracrats to make their presence known.
As others have pointed out, weight and food requirements are not a determining factor in mission success.
At be
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Exactly. To generalize an attribute to sex is sexism, because people aren't average. If we need strong people to be firefighters, then should we require that firefighters be men? No, because we can simply require people to pass a strength test.
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No need to drag sexism into the fight when there are perfectly logical rationals for crew selection.
This study was essentially how to maximize the brainpower/resource ratio for a mars mission and group W was consistently higher than group M. Why is it sexist to identify group W's common characteristic? Your "right way to post this" leaves out the results...and turns into clickbait! To me this is about as close as you can get to "the most qualified person for the job" that /. is always clamoring for whenever race or gender come up.
TFA is exactly sexism (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone not realizing that there are differences between men and women is an idiot. Men can lift more weight than women, and we have known this for thousands of years. In fact my favorite book "The Republic" has Socrates stating that Women should be in the military, even though everyone else argues that they can't carry as much weight into battle. It's not a shock, it's a fact that we each have some strong and weak points regarding our physique.
We also know that women tend to use more emotion in judgement
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
And this comparison is useful to point out because.... ?
Re:So? (Score:4, Interesting)
And how does the most metabolically active female compare to the least metabolically active male?
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The whole thing has macabre connotations, reminds me of the popular (in 90s) Russian novel "Omon Ra" - a fictitious noir account of Soviet space program, where one of the stages of preparation for the flight "To The Cosmos" was amputation of both legs - in order to fit into a small rocket...
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That's what I was thinking. A similarly sized male with similar fitness and muscle mass would probably burn the same calories. Sex has nothing to do with it.
I am pretty sure that depending the frequency and the intensity it might have a great effect on calorie requirements. Obviously I can't be sure since there is no first hand experience on these matters on /., but that's what bibliography indicates.
Hmm, of course now that I think about it maybe the last statement was not accurate, as "first hand" does come into mind when thinking about the relevant experience of the average /.er...
Why I have Always Maintained (Score:2)
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Why not work towards brain-in-a-jar technology?
Or how about, you know, robots?
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So Larry Buchanan was right? (Score:5, Funny)
And what about Venus? (Score:5, Funny)
That's how the adage goes... (Score:5, Funny)
Mars Needs Women (Score:4, Funny)
Yet another case of Science Fiction becoming Science Fact ;)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
"Undoubtedly one of the stupidest motion pictures ever made. How I got talked into it, I don't know." -- Tommy Kirk
Wanted - seven dwarfs for a space mission! (Score:2)
That argument could be extended to suggest that crew should be only people with Dwarfism. Everything could be smaller!
Then you could name the spaceship "Snow White", and sell the movie rights to Disney.
Old news (Score:4, Informative)
I recall hearing that from a physiological standpoint, the best fighter pilot is a short female with slightly elevated blood pressure. Apparently, such a pilot could tolerate G-forces better in addition to requiring slightly less thrust from the aircraft. I'm not surprised they're better in space.
Of course for historical reasons that's not a common profile for a fighter pilot or an astronaut.
All Acronyms Subject To Change (Score:2)
NASHLA?
Infocom!!! (Score:3)
it ain't just the food (Score:5, Informative)
They suck down less oxygen too. Divers know this firsthand ;-)
Seems reasonable to me (Score:2)
Razor Edge (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Razor Edge (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, that's just the false pragamatism. In the old just post jim crow days, they did this with race, too. This article reeks of pro-feminist propaganda. What if they said that the crew should be all white because they scored higher on some test, or better yet, separate-but-equal missions, but the non white mission received half the funds? Seriously, in any other configuration, the statements made by this article would be considered bigoted, but since it's pro woman who cares, right? For great social justice?
The only people deserving of hate here are the hypocrites who come up with this bullshit and try to pass it off as moral.
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Nonsense. Let's say your men need 3000 kCal/d and your women need 2000 kCal/d. You can afford to send three women for every two men you eliminate from the crew. It's a no brainer.
Seriously, Nobody? (Score:5, Funny)
...just don't put any mission critical supplies in pickle jars.
Yes! (Score:2)
And there we have it (Score:2)
The plot for Amazon Women From Mars II.
Mars needs our women! (Score:2)
Snow White and the seven dwarfs (Score:2)
Synchronized menses (Score:3, Insightful)
Suspended Animation (Score:3)
So are we giving up on the idea of some sort of low metabolism sleep state?
Re:Exercising "roughly the same amount" (Score:5, Informative)
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Basal Metabolic rate accounts for the difference, not the exercise.
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No it doesn't because you are grossly oversimplifying.
BMR calculators give an average estimate, not an exact individual figure. People vary around the average. To complicate things further, people are NOT equally efficient in their absorption of calories/nutrients from the same food.
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No, it's stupidity -- getting gender and race all fucking mixed up and stuff.
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If you're looking for volunteers, I've got a kid that I would be more than happy to send to Mars for a few months.
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Which one is East Asia in that example? My money's on her.
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Apparently four women is a stable number. This was the advice from a 14th century Moslem man on what is the best number of wives to have. One will be lonely when the husband is away, two will fight, three will gang up two to one, just as you said, but four works out to two stable pairs.
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Surely it had absolutely nothing to the fact that by and large women were actively discouraged if not banned from higher education throughout most of modern history, with as a general rule up until the 20th century only aristocratic women being able to take up the sciences (as a hobby - but even that was actively discouraged, supposedly "bad for their health"), and the few women that managed to publish scientific findings generally had to do so under a male name. No, clearly that had no influence whatsoever