Startseite
Podcasts
The Daily Podcast
The Sunday Read: ‘Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?’

The Sunday Read: ‘Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?’

The Daily vor 2 Jahren

0:00

49:35

That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted
conviction within NASA. Rachel McCauley, until recently the
acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July,
a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first
human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical
difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never
closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on
poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation
and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate
communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a
year and half later. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will
overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what
nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the
psychological torment of Martian life.

A mission known as CHAPEA, an experiment in which four ordinary
people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian
colonists for 378 days, sets out to answer that question.

For more information on today’s episode, visit
nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each
episode will be made available by the next workday.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your
favorite podcast app here
https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher.
For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York
Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for
information about our collection and use of personal data for
advertising.