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160 - Down Periscope

El Cid

on June 12, 2017

Gotta rise to the occasion, bruh.

So it looks like Mister Sergei is having some performance issues. Is it just zero gee-induced fluid distribution problems, or is there something else going on here? Only time (and more pages) will tell.



Hollah!




What's all this then, Ciddy baby! Have you gone all feminist on us? A touch light in the loafers, are we?

No. This is real science, dammit! Apparently it's a very real possibility that the first mission to Mars will be all female. Why, you ask? Well, for a number of reasons. First, female astronauts consume about half as many calories as their male counterparts which, given the immense cost of sending anything into orbit, could reduce the mission cost by hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. Arguably though, some of this cost could be recuperated by selecting very small males, but there's more. Women have stronger hearts, their bodies tolerate high G-forces better than men's, and most importantly of all, they don't appear to be susceptible to the so-far-unexplained permanent vision loss issues which affect 30 percent of male astronauts who spend long periods in weightlessness. As I wrote about in a previous blurb, many astronauts have seen a significant and permanent drop-off in the quality of their vision after prolonged periods in low Earth orbit, and we have yet to figure out what's causing this or how to screen for it. A Mars mission will take multiple years, and it's important that your crew be able to see when they get there so, as it stands now, only female astronauts would even be eligible to go.

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Multiple space agencies seem to be getting wise to the advantages of using more female astronauts. Russia recently did a simulated run of a planned 2029 moon mission with an all female crew, and likewise NASA did a 30 day simulation of a near-Earth asteroid mission with female astronauts, complete with virtual reality spacewalks (which sounds pretty gnarly, actually).

A future Mars mission is at least fifteen years away, according to NASA. So it's entirely possible that we'll solve a lot of these problems during that time. But if not, it's a very real possibility that, for long term space missions, male astronauts may find themselves on the sidelines. We shouldn't be too surprised if the first manned mission to Mars… doesn't include any men!