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I've been following these efforts closely. For these projects, crewed endurance space efforts, I strongly believe the most difficult component is the human. It's really difficult to be isolated in a high stress environment. And we don't adequately simulate or study what that might truly be like. I know that this was about nutrition but I just don't think nutrition is going to be the hard part of these missions.

I say this with experience. Living and working doing science in the Arctic and on ships is grueling. It's grueling, and not anywhere near as difficult or unpredictable as being in space. The things that happen in that pressure cooker are really hard to explain to people who haven't lived it.

It's not ethical or easy to do the kinds of simulations that would actually be useful. How do you simulate "your colleague is gravely wounded and on life support. now you have to work for 90 hours straight to fix whatever mamed them". Oh, also, you have 9 months of mission left with one less crew.

It was mediocre at best but "for all man kind" highlights just how weird things might get in these places. The only analogous efforts I can imagine are the adventures of sea-fairing people of centuries past. Maybe we should invent time travel and do some sociological studies.

there is this review of "for all man kind"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7772588/

why should it be any different on mars than on earth?

> This show has a cool premise, that being what if the space race never ended. It's a sort-of alternate reality and it does a good job of weaving in actual historical events with where the timeline diverged. The main problem is that I feel like the show is being pulled in two directions. In one direction, there is the tension of the space race, engineers scrambling to be the first on the moon/mars and dealing with all manner of technical issues in a realistic-ish way. That part of the show I enjoy. Then, for some reason, the show also throws in a bunch of trite interpersonal drama and stupidity. Like inter-marital affairs, people leaking NASA secrets to the soviets, and a CLEARLY unstable drug-addicted astronaut being given solo control of a super important mission. It's like the showrunners thought the show couldn't stand on it's own without dumb drama, as if there couldn't organically be issues and drama in the context of Frigging SPACE. The first season does this better, but by the 2nd/3rd seasons most of the issues come not from unforeseen difficulties of life on the moon/mars but idiots. It really makes me wonder if they just aren't sure who their audience are. The people who like the technical stuff are not going to like the artificial drama, and vise-versa. Pick a lane, show, and stick with it.

I would argue that sometimes "dumb drama" is a good mirror of humanity. Inter-marital affairs really do happen (including in the highest levels of public policy as well as the astronaut corps), people do disclose "secrets" and pilots (including astronauts) are known to deceive medical professionals to avoid being "grounded".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak

https://www.space.com/spacex-employee-lawsuit-sex-discrimina...

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2019/04/30/after-video-of-sp...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/27/faa-pilot...

The drama isn’t even done that well. Like you say, it’s stupid; the people are on average just worse than the sort of people who would actually be there.

I wanted the technical sci-fi to be worth it, but it wasn’t. There really isn’t much catering to an engineer audience.

> The people who like the technical stuff are not going to like the artificial drama, and vise-versa. Pick a lane, show, and stick with it.

I like the show as-is. Maybe I'm not in love with every single subplot but in general the show is pretty great. IRL people have motivations that drive them to do greedy, irresponsible things -- even astronauts.

It's a little bit unfair to say that this mission was just about nutrition – apparently there were simulated stressors, although I wish there were more details about what there. That being said, you're right to say that people weren't being pushed psychologically to the "real" limit that you'd get on long-term isolated missions... I guess that's where The Right Stuff of ye olde Space Age comes in.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/chapea/about-chapea/

> It's really difficult to be isolated in a high stress environment.

Mars seems more like a high boredom environment. It's a dead planet where nothing more than the occasional feeble dust storm happen.

Mars' environment is extremely hostile to life, with no breathable air, temperatures more extreme than what's found in Antarctica, and no water or food resources that can be foraged. As if all this were not enough, radiation levels on its surface are also 20 times higher than what's found on Earth.

Adding to the difficulties imposed by the harshness of the environment and the paucity of its resources, a habitat there will be more remote than any human habitat that has existed in centuries, perhaps in history, in terms of difficulty of resupplying it.

Simply surviving without the vast support network of civilization at hand is a constant struggle on Earth, and all of this will be exponentially more challenging on Mars.

> Mars seems more like a high boredom environment.

Something tells me that the first few thousand people sent to Mars won't be bored. There will be tons of things to do in the pursuit of making a habitable space.

Besides that, you have the constant death factor. I know we all live with risk 24/7. But, unless we're doing something outside our comfort zone, our brains largely ignore it. Living on Mars will not be like that for a settler. There are real risks that some piece of equipment will fail and kill you all. You'll likely be well aware of that because you'll be working on it. (Or worse, that idiot over there holding the spanner the wrong way is working on it.)

Trying to survive and dealing with the inevitable crisis situations that will come up (critical life support machinery breaks down etc) and the efforts to actually establish a colony will make life far from boring. After 100 years yeah maybe.
Just like Phoenix suburbs --- yet they allegedly support life.
Colonization will entail a pretty large population of people across all fields of expertise. You will also have all supplies and materials necessary for any sort of contingencies. You're not going to have the electrician trying to improv as a doctor. I think it's highly probable that many people will die, but not in particularly grueling ways, but far more mundane. Around 600 people have gone to space (which I'll define as at least LEO). During this (including training), about 30 people have died. A death ratio of 5% is ridiculously high, and most of the incidents have been far from remarkable. Fire in a capsule, oxygen valve failure, heat shield failure, don't use solid rocket boosters, and so on.

It'll be the same stuff with Mars, except the death ratio will likely be substantially higher. It'll again be from just incidents that will look stupid in hindsight. And they will have been, but when you're working to prevent a billion bad outcomes, a few will always manage to wiggle through the cracks. All things considered I think Mars colonization will probably be far easier than the guys who were engaging in civilization building in the past. Settlers in times past were dealing with hostile natives, hostile waters, unknown diseases, unpredictable weather, even mundane things like rats getting into your rations, and had very little ability to measure or adapt to what they were dealing with. For instance Vasco de Gama (Europe to India guy) took 3 weeks to cross the Indian ocean the first time. On his way back, it took 3 months. By the time he returned, about 70% of his crew was dead.

Colonizing Mars will be absolutely brutal but we will have quite far fewer unknowns. Of course the issues will will have to deal with will be far harsher than anything anybody else ever had to manage, but they are known - and so that really simplifies the process.

People arguing in favour of mars colonisation always kind of skip the time between now and a future in which we’re able to ship an entire populace to another planet.

We will need to send smaller crews first. Not just to do the science and validation necessary, but also because it would be plain unethical to send a large group of people without knowing what effect that kind of travel will have on them. And all of that in spite of knowing how that venture would even be technologically feasible.

If you haven’t, I can highly recommend reading A city on mars by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith.

“ All things considered I think Mars colonization will probably be far easier than the guys who were engaging in civilization building in the past.”

Those explorers of eras past were going places that not only sustained ample plant and animal resources (in quantities that would surprise modern people) but entire human populations. There is almost nothing on Mars that will sustain us.

The settlers were ipso facto the hostile group, as they were settling another people’s land. Otherwise, we’d call them visitors.

(edit) My intention wasn’t political correctness but that words are important. “unwanted” is more fitting than “hostile,” as it matches the intention of the settlers.

Are there any stories or examples you could provide of what you described with arctic work? That sounds quite interesting!
Buy me a beer in person and you can have as many as you want until you're bored. Post them publicly on the internet for anyone to recall at any moment? Absolutely not, under no circumstances, no.

Which is an important and relevant boundary for this discussion. Any space extended space travel is going to be mind numbingly public. Which is not a good thing

One thing I don't understand: In over two decades of ISS operation, there apparently was never time to do a zero-g pregnancy experiment on mice or other small mammals. Zach/Kelly Weinersmith mentioned this in an interview with Sean Carroll on Mars colonization: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dJqr_cCi9tM

If it turned out that mice can't properly reproduce in the zero-g environment of the ISS, it would be very likely that (much heavier) humans can't properly reproduce in the low-g environment of Mars. Which would be a very important thing to figure out. Perhaps more important than the mostly psychological Mars simulation project.

> One thing I don't understand: In over two decades of ISS operation, there apparently was never time to do a zero-g pregnancy experiment on mice or other small mammals.

Coincidentally, I was looking for research into zero-g pregnancy myself a few days ago and was surprised just as you are. I did, however, find https://www.audubon.org/news/the-amazing-story-cold-war-spac.... The Soviets did some good research on this subject and were able to successfully hatch birds at least.

Interesting. Here is more detail on how those Soviet quail experiments went: https://finchwench.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/cosmoquails/

Unfortunately, the chicks often came out deformed and many died early. Though birds are not closely related to us (our last common ancestor lived more than 300 million years ago), so I really would like to see ISS experiments on whether mice fare any better, or perhaps even worse.

Overall, I'm pessimistic about colonizing Mars. In the interview mentioned before, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith also mention other problems, like the necessity to live underground in caves, due to radiation. Building an underground city on Earth would be vastly easier than on Mars, yet nothing like it has ever been tried.

I think the most likely thing that will happen is this: In about 20 years, NASA will use Starship (a SpaceX rocket currently in development) to send a few US Americans to Mars, they will plant the flag of the nation, and, having beat the Chinese, that will be mostly the end of humanity's Mars aspirations.

Basically like the moon missions: Once the novelty is gone, people will likely lose interest in earlier aspirations of establishing a permanent base. Especially if the ISS mice turn out crippled.

I found this quote from the article especially heartfelt. To me it doesn't just convey a hopeful message, it also shows the attitude and inner strength of someone who just endured the closest thing we have to living & working on a new frontier. It's a powerful message when read through that lens.

> "We can do these things together," Brockwell said. "We can use our senses of wonder and purpose, to achieve peace and prosperity and to unlock knowledge and joy for the benefit of everyone in every part of planet Earth," he added.

I bet they did not give even a minute thought about the people who live and die in tiny boxes on desolate icefields. There was weird customs and rules to make this life possible, as for example Peter Freuchen documented.

This should be the starting point, imho. Those cultures were honed in 10000 years just for Mars survival perfection.

It’s still an order of magnitude more chill off a life than Mars. You’re surrounded by drinkable water and breathable air and some critters to hunt
Also how simple it is to remove yourself from some situation. Something is getting on nerves. You can just put on some clothing and walk outside. Stand there for 15 minutes or half and hour and get to decompress... No such opportunity on other objects...
A lot has been written by and about Peter Freuchen. Could you provide a more specific reference for these customs and rules? I'd like to read-up on it.
I read the "Vagrant Viking" fifty years ago. And the book was probably heavily censored in translation because ungodly family habits. So I am not sure where I got all the ideas from.

There was somebody else married to eskimo too, interesting because he made an Umiak suitable for outboard engine.

Browsing the modern web would be a nightmare from Mars, with a 30-minute ping and all the HTTP back-and-forth that modern pages require.

I guess you would have to use an Earth-based remote desktop.

I have been thinking recently that Mars and maybe the Moon would need to use asynchronous messages. Basically, email but with multiple message types.

For browsing the web, they would send a message requesting a page, and get back the messages for the page in 30 minutes. They would probably send a request for whole site instead of round-trips for links.

This means that interactive JavaScript sites would never work. There would need to be way to download app or web app that could send messages to update state. Or way to install local server that can sync with Earth.

> Browsing the modern web would be a nightmare from Mars

Getting website articles and other media via rss feeds would be easiest. Email and usenet style nntp, also.

There's been work done on protocols optimized for inter-planetary networks, taking into round trip times when it comes to retransmissions and windowing, etc. Gateways can be setup between those protocols and earth's tcp internet.

But every communication back and forth still takes many minutes. Interactive websites would take at least one round trip minutes for every request, every form submission, every javascript call to a back-end server, etc. Remote desktop solutions would encounter this same problem, too.

At the moment the fastest link to Mars is about 6 megabits per second. Presumably that could be scaled up quite a bit, but I assume bandwidth will be a consideration for a while, too.

Early on it will make sense to bring a lot of your own entertainment media and reference materials via thumb drive or other storage media, to have instant access and save bandwidth for other things.

With a fat enough pipe and big enough cache web browsing could be doable with push based caching.

Counterstrike or zoom meetings? Not so much.

That would still have a 30 minute ping. You should just have a Martian Internet and then sync up the two every few hours or something.
>You should just have a Martian Internet and then sync up the two every few hours or something.

the "internet" is just a network of computers. "sync up the two" would involve replicating the servers and coming up with some sort of consensus protocol. Needless to say, that's non-trivial to implement and needs to be done for each site individually. If there was a martian colony it might be economically feasible for some sites to do this, but if it's just a few astronauts the most feasible way of implementing internet browsing would be something like archive.today, where you send a url to some server on earth, the server runs a headless browser and takes a screenshot, and sends the captured contents back to mars/spacecraft.

The question is whether it will be like Usenet with nntp or a BBS with xmodem
It would have a 30 minute ping for rendering, but all the round trips required for loading the page would be a few orders of magnitude shorter.
Probably not possible for the first several years, with limited bandwidth. Maybe they could use sneakernet for periodic updates.
You just need Martian internet infrastructure and banking. Those institutions can sync balances with earth based banks later behind the scenes.
We'd need a "Bank for Interplanetary Settlements".
...only to run into a page that drops a nasty overlay on your browser window because you have Adblock enabled.
Logging in to your bank account to pay the Mars mortgage would take like 4 hours.
Buffering... please wait
Maybe one day we’ll see relay stations in space. One spaced every x miles transmitting the internet from earth. Ping should be minimal.
The delay is from the time of flight of light between Earth and Mars. Relays can only add additional processing time without shortening that, though they could potentially help with signal integrity. You also can't just freely place a relay between earth and Mars and have it stay between them — both planets are orbiting the sun and the relay also would be, with a period that doesn't match either planet.
CHAPEA Mission 1 Egress Event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNezVXznaHQ
This is quite a sacrifice for humanity's sake, so thank you to these people for taking part in this experiment.

I'm surprised more effort wasn't put in to making the habitat homely. It's very austere and scientific. I'd have thought that this experiment would also provide means to test ways to provide comfort in trying situations.

I recommend the book A City On Mars, which covers many aspects related to the feasibility of traveling to and colonizing Mars.
How much law do we take with us? marslegalcode.org
I could not really find a TLDR or dive into the mission results... Is there something already?