Would You Be a Good Candidate for This NASA Mission?

I'm sure that most of you have seen some variation of "would you give up the NFL for a year for a million dollars?" Or "You have to live in this cabin for a year but you don't have internet access, then win X, Y, Z".

Those things popped into my mind this morning when I ran across the story about NASA looking for people who would be willing to be sequestered away from society so that NASA can gauge what the effects would be on people who would be living on Mars.

According to the website, the opportunity is open to "healthy, motivated U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are non-smokers, age 30 to 55 years old, and proficient in English..." Then the last line says, "Crew selection will follow standard NASA criteria for astronaut candidate applicants." Ya, I'm probably out.

And this isn't some vacation from the real world. If you get selected, you and three others are going to live together and spend all of your time pretending like things are going wrong on Mars.

You'll have resource limitations. (There are no Ace Hardware stores in space.) Your equipment is going to break down. You'll be doing scientific research.

I had to read quite a ways to find something at this space camp that looked appealing. But I knew that I had found it when I got to the part about simulated spacewalks and using virtual reality. Now we're talking.

The first of three of these types of training starts in the fall of next year.

Does anybody else wish that they hadn't seen any of the space movies where something goes terribly wrong?

And finally, if it pays anything, I couldn't find out how much.

Credit: NASA