More Female Astronauts, Less Money

NASA’s manned mission to Mars is estimated to cost $100 billion, but NASA can cut costs if they decide to have an all-female crew. NASA’s funded research project, HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation), simulated six crew members, three male and three female, living as astronauts on the surface of Mars in a geodesic dome at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Food, water, power, and communications were limited as it would be on the prospective Mars mission.

Throughout the HI-SEAS mission, a sleep study was conducted using a BodyMedia armband to track sleep and caloric expenditures. All crew members exercised the same amount of time five days a week and ate food proportions to maintain a healthy body weight. The results were clear that the three female crew members expended less than half of the calories of the three male crewmembers. The most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day while the least metabolically active female burned 1,475 calories per day. The women in general barely exceeded 2,000 calories in a day while men commonly went over 3,000 calories. Women overall ate smaller portions to maintain their needed bodyweight while men usually went back for seconds.

It is a simple chain reaction. Women eat less food than men, less food is less weight, less weight is less payload, less payload is less fuel needed to blast into orbit, and less fuel is less money, overall reducing the cost of the Mars mission.

Oxygen and water can be recycled, but not food, so by choosing women for NASA’s Mars mission, women astronauts could be minimizing costs to avoid the astronomical $100 billion estimate.