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Mars One is to be a mission unto death. It aims to land crews of four in multiple missions to Mars starting in 2024 in the knowledge they will not come home. So the study of small group dynamics offers key insights into its perils, which is partly why Mars One will be a reality television show long before it is an actual space mission, to reveal the quirks and characters of the potential interplanetary pioneers. The psychology of isolation and confinement, likewise, offers a glimpse of what could go wrong on the planned seven-month journey, and afterward on the Red Planet.

Karen Cumming, one of the Canadians on the short list, said it took a few minutes for the “gravity” of it to sink in.

“It felt like winning the lottery,” she said. “I think it’s very easy for people to criticize, for people to point to the latest study that says it’s a suicide mission, or there’s no way you’re going to survive.”

She said “98%” of her friends are supportive. The other 2% might be on to something, though. There are stories of Russian astronauts not speaking for months, and cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev’s diary was used to diagnose depression on his 211-day mission aboard Salyut 7.

“We don’t feel time anymore,” he wrote on one particularly dark day. “I don’t even want to look out the porthole any more.”

“Being confined with the same individuals for such a long period of time millions of miles from Earth might create psychological and interpersonal stress for the crew members and affect their ability to carry out mission goals,” according to a 2010 paper by Nick Kanas in Journal of Cosmology, called Expedition to Mars: Psychological, Interpersonal, and Psychiatric Issues. “People have been on-orbit for as long as 14 months with no apparent negative sequelae, but this duration was relatively brief compared to a Mars mission, the crew had real-time contact with mission control and family and friends on the ground, and the Earth was always in sight.”