A message from the Cosmonautic School in Siberia regarding crew selection.

The following is a summary of the email exchange that took place on April 12 between Mars Academy members and the students at the Cosmonautic School in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. These students do not have Web access so they cannot participate in our online discussions. However, we expect to have regular contribution from them in this section.

Dear friends at the Mars Academy! Greetings from Siberia! Here are students at the Cosmonautic School Alexei and Nastya and our teacher Valentina. Thank you for the message on the place of the mission Hebes Chasma which was selected for landing.

Regarding crew selection :

We would be very interested in discussing the human aspect of a long mission to Mars. Given the fact that these missions take more than two years, how would you select a crew? We would select the people for the crew putting a special attention to the point if they are good specialists in their field of science. Once Charles Dickens said, that one should marry the woman who laughs at his jokes. So we think that there is very important if people understand the others well. Would you take pilots, or scientists? We think there must be pilots and scientists both.

How would the compatibility of the astronauts be ensured? The compatibility of the astronauts should be ensured by the busy plan of their joint work during the whole mission.

Would you be in favor of a mixed crew or just men? We would be in favour of a mixed crew. The students think there must be one third of women and two thirds of men in the crew.

What experiences have been learned in MIR regarding this? They work on this during the experiments on the Earth. They are too busy in MIR to think about it, as we suppose and our teachers intend.

Do you think that they will keep themselves busy all the time? We heard that there are graphs of increasing and falling of the capacity for work. and graphs of the dynamic of the treatments. According to them the types of activities like life maintenance, experiments, observing, parties, holidays, lectures, studying could be planned on the Earth and the plan of the activities (work) may by coordinated with the graph of the capacity of work.

Do you think the crew members should be introverts or extroverts? We think they might be both, the main idea is that they must be psychologically steady (stable). But too many extroverts could not be taken to the crew, and introverts are better for a monotonous work.

Keep in touch. Looking forward to hearing from you, Alexei, Nastya and Valentina