First human crew to Mars should be all-female astronauts, new study claims

NASA is about to launch a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, and a new study suggests it should be an all-female crew because they’re more efficient.

Researchers at the European Space Agency (ESA) found that women consume less oxygen, produce less carbon dioxide and require less food than their male counterparts.

Simulating a 1,080-day mission with four female astronauts, the team found that they needed 3,736 pounds less food, saving more than $158 million.

Because Mars is about seven months from Earth, the study urges space agencies to consider the findings to reduce the mass and volume of food that must be launched and stored on the crew.

However, men and women are both vital in space and will be needed when humanity colonizes the Red Planet.

About 622 people have been launched into space, but only 72 are women.

NASA has sent a total of 355 people to space so far, of which about 55 are women — or 15 percent. It has also sent 24 people to the moon and 12 to walk on the lunar surface, all of them men.

Russian Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman ever to leave the Earth’s atmosphere – on her way back in 1937.

And it wasn’t until 1983, when Sally Ride was launched to the International Space Station, that American women first visited the final frontier.

However, NASA is committed to putting the first female astronaut on the moon in two years and will likely take women on the journey to Mars as well.

The new research suggests that NASA and other space agencies should focus on all-female astronaut crews when it comes to long space missions.

The all-female crew’s simulated 1,080-day mission shows that because of their smaller stature, the group would free up eight cubic feet of space in the capsule.

This is about four percent of a ‘Gateway’ HALO module in NASA’s proposed lunar orbiting space station.

Scientists have analyzed this with the ESA oxygen consumption, total energy expenditure, carbon dioxide, heat production and water requirements of males and females on longer spaceflight missions to see what the optimal astronaut would look like.

mAle astronauts had total energy expenditure increased by 30 percent, oxygen consumption by 60 percent, carbon dioxide production by 60 percent, and water requirements by 17 percent.

Female astronauts had much better stats across the board as their body size increased, with the numbers most affected amounting to a 30 percent reduction.

NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis has long believed that women are more suited to space.

In 2000 he said: ‘Women are on average smaller than men: women use less oxygen, consume less consumables, produce less carbon dioxide.

‘They have a lower mass and take up less volume. The argument for an all-female crew is simple: such a crew would require significantly less support…and allow for a smaller spacecraft.

‘This results in considerable cost savings.’

NASA astronaut Christina Koch was recently named the first woman to visit the moon when NASA’s Artemis II mission launches next year.

The 44-year-old resident of Grand Rapids, Michigan, already holds the record for the longest time a woman has spent in space, 328 days, and for participating in the first all-female spacewalk in 2019.

The Artemis II mission marks NASA’s first trip to the moon in half a century, which is truly a test of NASA’s ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars.

The agency sent an empty Orion capsule around the moon last year before returning to Earth in a much-anticipated dress rehearsal.

If this latest mission goes well, another flight will be sent in 2025 to land humans on the moon – as part of tests before taking humans to Mars.