Ballardian

Paul emails to tell me of this news item:

The European Space Agency (Esa) is after volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crewmembers spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow.

Once the hatches are closed, the crew’s only contact with the outside world is a radio link to “Earth” with a realistic delay of 40 minutes.”

Sounds like the perfect opportunity for an enterprising Ballard fan to take the plunge and find out first-hand what it’s like to be one of JGB’s damaged astronauts.

Especially since the psychological effects will be closely monitored:

But, while Esa says it will do nothing that puts the lives of the simulation crew at unnecessary risk, officials running the experiment have made it clear they would need a convincing reason to let someone out of the modules once the experiment had begun.

“The idea behind this experiment is simply to put six people in a very close environment and see how they behave,” Bruno Gardini, project manager for Esa’s Aurora space exploration programme, told BBC News. “

The simulated behavioural experiment disguised as a working spaceship is also the theme of Ballard’s short-story ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, in which a scientist chooses to remain inside the mock environment, rather than ‘return’ to Earth.

I’ll be posting something on ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ and its 1960s TV adaptation sometime over the next few days, if you’re at all interested.