Last September 17th, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) finished recruitment of participants who will get training in virtual Mars environment for 1 year. They collected four spacemen who will participate in 1 year simulation training of deep space stress, which starts in fall 2022.

The reason why NASA chose Mars as virtual environment is to develop methods and technologies to prevent and solve potential problems in future manned spaceflight missions to the Moon and Mars. The objective of this training is to get information of how human body reacts in environment of long-term isolation in Mars. NASA will progress this experiment three times starting next fall of 2022.

The qualification for application of virtual Mars spaceman is who is 30 to 50 years old, has healthy metabolic age, speaks English well, who has citizenship or permanent residency of United States, who got at least master's degree in science and engineering, and pilot who has at least 1000 hours of flying experience. This training will progress in a module called “Mars Dune Alpha” in NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Huston, Texas. Mars Dune Alpha is 1,700 ft2 of Martian residence made by 3D printer. There are individual dormitories for four spacemen, work station, medical station, and food growing area. The four spacemen have to complete missions in limited connection with their families. They will train to explore, to cope dangerous situations such as resource shortage and equipment failure, and to grow crops to prepare their food.

Choi Ji-Hwan (Prof. of Department of Aerospace Engineering, KAIST) said, “It is fascinating doing human-in-the-loop simulation experiment for a long period by using modern science technology such as 3D printer, supercomputing and more things, instead of blast-off (rocket launch). The result of the simulations is going to be decided by how they imitated well the extreme environment of Mars. For example, the unstable wireless channel will cause communication errors and delays due to the distance between Mars and Earth. So by Mars experiment, they can find what problems will be discussed in real life of Martians and with which technology they can solve the problems. Also, these days, many countries and companies are paying attention to space, to overcome the crisis on Earth. I anticipate Korea will also get interested, and increase investment in space exploration and colonization works.”