How to Prevent Sex on Mars: His and Hers Spaceships?

Mission 'lands' without ever leaving planet

(NEWSER) - They’re free—and they don’t appear to have gone crazy. The crew of Russia’s simulated Mars mission has landed, by which we mean, been released from the narrow confines of the “spaceship” they’ve been trapped in for 520 days . The six men, ages 27 to 38, grinned widely as they greeted the crowd outside the capsule. “We hope that we can help in designing the future missions to Mars,” Frenchman Romain Charles said, according to the AP . More»

...without actually leaving the planet

(NEWSER) - A crew of cosmonauts has broken the record for longest space mission, having spent 438 days in a 12-foot-wide capsule. But they'll also break another record when their mission is up—the record for shortest distance traveled on a space mission—because they've never actually left Moscow in all that time. The Mars500 crew has 82 days left of a 520-day simulated mission to Mars, meant to test the psychological and physical impact of a long-distance space flight. The record for actual time in space is 437 days, set in 2005 by Valeri Polyakov, the Daily Mail reports. More»

Russia launches simulated mission in study

(NEWSER) - A multinational crew of cosmonauts will be embarking on a 520-day mission to nowhere today. The all-male crew—three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian, and a Chinese man—are taking part in a Mars mission simulation at a Moscow medical center locked in capsules, the BBC reports. The experiment aims to study the effects of fatigue, isolation, and stress. More»

Why a one-way ticket is the best way to the red planet

(NEWSER) - The most feasible way to get humans on Mars is to offer retirement-age astronauts one-way tickets to live out their last days on the red planet. Say what? It's not as crazy as it sounds, writes scientist Lawrence Krauss in the New York Times, who believes his plan would solve the major hurdles of a space mission to Mars. More»

(NEWSER) - Of all the hurdles NASA must overcome in order to reach its goal of getting humans to Mars by 2030, keeping the astronauts fed may be one of the most challenging, the Los Angeles Times reports. The agency’s food scientist must devise meals that are light and nutritious and have a 5-year shelf life—much longer than any space-bound food has had to last before. More»