The European Space Agency Want You, Space Cadet

For an important mission to Earth?

Their spaceship will comprise a series of interlocked modules in an research institute in Moscow, and once the doors are closed tight, the volunteers will be cut off from all contact with the outside world except by a delayed radio link.

They will face simulated emergencies, daily work routines and experiments, as well as boredom and, no doubt, personal friction from confinement in just 550 cubic metres (19,250 cubic feet), the equivalent of nine truck containers.

Communications with the simulated mission control and loved-ones will take up to 40 minutes, the time that a radio signal takes to cross the void between Earth and a spaceship on Mars. Food will comprise mainly the packaged stuff of the kind eaten aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The goal is to gain experience about the psychological challenges that a crew will face on a trip to Mars.

They're accepting applications now. Hey, if you have nothing else going on...

More like this

We have already covered, in quite some detail the problems of passing gas in space.
Black holes have come up a couple of times this week, and I've always wondered something.
Ok - I'm crowdsourcing the internet, because the google has failed: there are two science fiction short stories that I need titles and authors for, source in anthology or collection would be better still.
Last Saturday, we went to see WALL-E with our 4 year old niece. It's the story of an ordinary cleaning robot (WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) that, well, keeps cleaning a city on earth long after humans have left earth.