As NASA continues to plan for a future space mission to Mars, here's one thing the government agency should consider sending along with the spacecraft: a crew made up entirely of women.
That's what Kate Greene argues in a piece she recently wrote for Slate. Her reasoning? Simply put, it could be more economical.
Greene knows this firsthand because she participated in the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, known as HI-SEAS for short, last year. While taking part in this NASA-funded research project, Greene and five other crewmembers mimicked the experience of living on the surface of Mars for four months in a geodesic dome on the side of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano.
This first HI-SEAS mission was designed to research the types of food astronauts might eat while exploring the Red Planet. As such, Greene conducted a study using the wearable device BodyMedia, which gave estimates of daily and weekly caloric expenditure. She found that week after week, the three female crew members expended half as many calories as the male crewmembers, even though they all exercised roughly 45 minutes daily five consecutive days a week.
"During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000," Greene wrote.
She also noticed that women ate smaller portions than men during meals. While any woman that has eaten a meal with a member of the opposite sex can probably attest to that, the amount of food a person eats matters greatly when it comes to space travel.
"The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch," Greene wrote.
As Greene pointed out, she's not the first person to think that women might make for better astronauts. Some medical studies from the 1950s and 1960s showed that female bodies had stronger hearts and may be better able to withstand vibrations and exposure to radiation. Psychological studies also suggested that women could deal with isolation and lack of sensory inputs better than men. In the early 1960s, NASA even considered creating an all-female astronaut corps, which failed to get off the ground, because of the fear of backlash if a female astronaut was killed and NASA's tendency to put military pilots on crews, who were always male at that time.
More recently in the early 2000s, systems analyst in advanced life support and contractor with NASA Alan Drysdale found that the smallest women in a NASA program used less than half the resources of the largest men. He told Greene that his calculations show that a spacecraft with a crew of just small women could launch at half the payload cost.
Ultimately, Greene came to the conclusion that having diversity on a space mission is a valuable asset. However, if this idea inspires more women to become astronauts, be it through programs or of their own accord, no one could deny how awesome that would be.
