[ExI] Concerns Grow Over Conditions on Navy Carrier

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2026 at 8:09 AM BillK via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> Nine months, and some crew members are becoming unstable?
>
> With all the talk about trips to Mars soon, I asked how long that would take.
> The fastest estimate was approx. 9 months going, wait 500 days, then 9
> months back.
> The round trip takes approx. 3 years.
> Can the crew remain stable for that long in isolation?

The psychological screening for astronauts is far stricter than the
psychological screening for deployment on a Navy carrier.  The
envisioned trip is within the limits of peak human ability: there are
individuals who could do it, you just have to find them (and possibly
build them up to that level).

> Can they carry enough supplies for three years?

That's just a matter of cargo capacity.  It is possible to make a
spacecraft that can hold the astronauts and 3 years of consumables.
In principle it is possible to make a small ecosystem that can grow
new food without any external inputs (treating the entire spacecraft
as a closed system) except for energy (and possibly not even that, if
the spacecraft's power is nuclear rather than solar), though efforts
to do so are mostly in the prototyping phase right now.