You Can Now Apply for NASA's One-Year Simulated Mars Mission
Here's your chance to get away from it all
Here’s an opportunity to say that you left your last job because conditions were better on Mars. NASA is now accepting applications for the next CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) mission to spend a year experiencing what it would like to be on Mars. This second edition of the CHAPEA mission is scheduled to commence in the Spring of 2025. You won’t have too long to decide whether to apply, though, as the application deadline is one day after April Fools Day: April 2, 2024.
That doesn’t mean that NASA will be fooling around with this. NASA is serious about finding out how people would do under a variety of Martian conditions. NASA also seems quite serious about eventually sending humans to Mars. And before you plop people on Mars, you have to “planet,” so to speak, because conditions on Mars will be very different from those on Earth.
Of course, the CHAPEA mission won’t in actuality send you to Mars. No one on Earth is quite ready to transport humans to the Red Planet just yet as this would be a bit beyond the current service area for Ubers and Lyfts.
Instead, if selected for the CHAPEA mission, you’ll spend the year with three other chosen ones in a simulated 3-D printed Martian environment that’s a little bit smaller than Mars itself by oh about 1,550,000,000,000,000 square feet. This indoor location—dubbed the Mars Dune Alpha—is a 1,700-square-foot space that’s located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. NASA describes the living quarters as consisting of “private crew quarters, a kitchen, and dedicated areas for medical, recreation, fitness, work, and crop growth activities, as well as a technical work area and two bathrooms.” As you can see, there isn’t a Mars bar in these quarters. And, no, the phrase “crop growth activities” is not a euphemism for something.
Here’s a video from NASA showing what Mars Dune Alpha will look like:
Now, if you think that this will be a one-year vacation on a 3D Martian beach, don’t pack your thongs and sunscreen just yet. NASA will put you to work. Throughout the year, you’ll do different things such as taking simulated spacewalks, performing maintenance work, conducting science experiments. executing robotic operations, exercising, and maintaining crop growth. These will be done in tandem with the others. As a result, the four who’ll experience what it’s like to be on the fourth planet from the Sun will likely get to know each other pretty darn well.
All along the way, NASA will be collecting data on how all of you are doing so that they can better understand how humans may perform and react under Martian conditions. This may include various environmental stressors and communication delays, which can be substantial. So if you are the type of person who gets aggravated when someone doesn’t respond to your text within a minute then you may want to reconsider.
NASA will pay you for this work. That doesn’t mean that you should seek this mission simply because you need the pay and that job as a dog food taster hasn’t come through yet. NASA hasn’t specified how much they’ll pay yet and has indicated that “applicants should have a strong desire for unique, rewarding adventures and interest in contributing to NASA’s work to prepare for the first human journey to Mars.” In other words, you’ve got to have plenty of intrinsic motivation to do this mission.
Also, the NASA announcement specifies that they are looking for, “healthy, motivated U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are non-smokers, 30-55 years old, and proficient in English for effective communication between crewmates and mission control.” This is going to rule out those in Generation Z—so-called Zoomers—and Baby Boomers.
Additionally, there are scientific education requirements because, you know, science matters. You can qualify if you’ve got a master’s degree in a STEM field, a medical degree, or are two years into a STEM doctoral degree. Note that any of these have to be from or in an accredited institution—not that anyone would ever set up a scam University just to make money, right? You also have to have at least one thousand hours of experience piloting an aircraft.
This will be the second of three planned CHAPEA missions. The first CHAPEA mission is a little over halfway done, having been launched on June 25, 2023. The first CHAPEA crew is comprised of Kelly Haston, Ph.D., as the Commander, Ross Brockwell as the flight engineer, Nathan Jones, M.D. as the medical officer, and Anca Selariu, Ph.D. as the science officer.
So, if you really want to get away from it all and have the requisite motivation and scientific background, consider applying for the CHAPEA mission. You could end up contributing also to science, helping future missions to Mars, and experiencing a very, very different atmosphere.
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