As NASA continues to plan for a future space mission to Mars, here's one thing the government agency should consider sending along with the spacecraft: a crew made up entirely of women.
That's what Kate Greene argues in a piece she recently wrote for Slate. Her reasoning? Simply put, it could be more economical.
Greene knows this firsthand because she participated in the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, known as HI-SEAS for short, last year. While taking part in this NASA-funded research project, Greene and five other crewmembers mimicked the experience of living on the surface of Mars for four months in a geodesic dome on the side of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano.
This first HI-SEAS mission was designed to research the types of food astronauts might eat while exploring the Red Planet. As such, Greene conducted a study using the wearable device BodyMedia, which gave estimates of daily and weekly caloric expenditure. She found that week after week, the three female crew members expended half as many calories as the male crewmembers, even though they all exercised roughly 45 minutes daily five consecutive days a week.
"During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000," Greene wrote.
