The Delicate Topic NASA Avoided—Until Now
For decades, mission planners quietly agreed on one unspoken rule: don’t discuss what happens if an astronaut dies on Mars. That silence ended in 2019 when a Space Tango-NASA working paper leaked from the Human Factors and Behavioral Performance Element admitted that a Mars crew must be trained to manage death among themselves. The reason is blunt—communication delays stretch to 22 minutes each way; a physician on Earth can’t talk a crew through CPR much less grief counseling. Since then, a surprising discipline has stepped into the gap: death-doula training, adapted for the solar system’s driest frontier.
Why Mars Makes Dying Different
Death in low-Earth orbit can still be “returnable”; a Soyuz capsule brings a body home within hours. On Mars, a corpse may remain sealed inside a habitat for 260 sols until the next transfer window opens. Temperatures swing from −80 °C at night to 20 °C in sunlight, meaning remains could mummify or partially decompose, depending on power systems. Medical officer Valentin Glavin of the 2022 NASA Mars Transit Habitat Analog Crew told Wired that “the odor alone can derail cognition for weeks,” leading planners to include compact alkaline hydrolysis units in habitat blueprints—machines that dissolve tissue to sterile fluid via heated potassium hydroxide.
How Death Doulas Crossed Medicinal Borders
The term “death doula” (formally “end-of-life doula”) emerged from palliative-care hospices in upstate New York in 2005. These professionals offer bedside vigils, legacy projects, and advance-care planning. NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance team contracted a cohort of certified doulas—among them psychiatrist Joost van Schieman—offering a civilian translation program for 150 active-duty astronauts and flight surgeons in 2021. “We are teaching space psychologists to be witnesses, not saviors,” van Schieman noted in a recorded briefing.
Four-Phase Protocol NASA Calls “D.E.A.D.” (Detech-prepare, Express, Arrange, Dispose-coach)
1. Detech-prepare: Knowing Impending Finality
Crew medical officers train with miniature ultrasound units to detect non-survivable bleeds—hemorrhage volumes NASA flags at >2.5 L in microgravity. Once non-survivability crosses a 90 % Bayesian confidence (validated by an onboard algorithm running on a ruggedized Raspberry Pi cluster), the protocol shifts from treatment to contain and counsel.
2. Express: Scripted Conversations at 1.9 Mbps
With bandwidth throttled by distance, hi-def farewell videos aren’t an option. Instead, astronauts script 240-character “tweet-length” legacy statements compressed by specialized Morse-code Q-signals. Harvard linguist Storie Galeste analyzed 350 training transcripts and found the most repeated phrase was “account*” or “data-bacon”—placeholder wishing not individual immortality but digital persistence.
3. Arrange: Virtual Rites of Passage
Because shipping a cello or incense is impractical, teams fabricate symbolic objects. A 3-D printed “memory ring”—a torus engraved with the decedent’s heartbeat waveform—replaces burial caskets. Participants pass the ring clockwise while singing a pre-determined note; the Minor 3rd interval (300 cent tuning) has demonstrated the strongest parasympathetic response in Heart-Rate-Variability studies published in Acta Astronautica.
4. Dispose-coach: The Rapid Ash System
If alkaline hydrolysis is unavailable (unit failure), the fall-back is the Rapid Ash System: body sealed in an aluminized Mylar sheath, moved to an airlock and bombarded for 14 minutes by three ultraviolet-C arrays running off nickel-hydrogen battery packs. The freeze-desiccated tissue becomes ashlike matter retrieved with vacuum tongs, then stored in a Falcon tube that will join the excrement-feedstock for possible use as bio-regolith for Martian soil experiments. Ethicists from the Yale Interplanetary Bioethics Board reviewed the method and concluded, remarkably, “the procedure safeguards both crew psychology and planetary protection.”
Space Psychology’s Hidden Data Set
In March 2023 the University of Hawaii released 11,000 pages of diaries from HI-SEAS IV, an 366-day Mars-simulation dome in Mauna Loa. PhD candidate Erin M. K. Kress distilled 200 references to “grief rehearsal” exercises and coded the language using NLP polarity analysis. She found that crews trained with death-doula modules reached conversational “coherence” (uniform positive sentiment) 62 % faster after simulated loss events than baseline controls, cutting post-event psychological support hours from 18 to 6.5. NASA’s Human Research Program quietly integrated the module into astronaut baseline training at Johnson Space Center later that year.
Artificial Spirits and Simulated “Presentees”
Engineers at JPL and Imperial College London jointly tested Post-Corporeal AIs—deepfake avatars fed by the departed astronaut’s e-mail, audio logs, and heartbeat data. The AI is stored as a 500-MB container on the habitat’s solid-state drive. Interaction follows specific triggers: if cabin CO₂ exceeds 3700 ppm or sleep debt tops 45 hours, the avatar delivers prerecorded stress-relief cues. An internal NASA memorandum (dated 2024) flags “anecdotal reports of increased hallucination-like phenomena,” leading to a controlled rollout limited to mission commanders.
The Tangible Risks: Avoiding “Survivor Stain”
Once the peril of contamination is solved, another emerges: survivors’ guilt. Russian ISS cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev’s 341-day mission intersected the collapse of the Soviet Union, creating a legendary anecdote: he returned a citizen of a country that no longer existed. In Mars analogs, similar identity shifts occur on a compressed timeline. NASA psychologist Al Holland told Nature Human Behaviour that guilt is exacerbated when “the body remains unviewable.” The solution is the Memento Torso, a 1:1 3-D printed bust wearing the fallen crewmember’s actual flight suit, left in the viewing alcove of each crew quarters until Earth rendezvous.
Public Reaction and Cultural Diversity
Japan’s JAXA mandates Shintō purification rites translated into Martian lighting cycles: blue LEDs pulse at 0.2 Hz to mimic torii gates’ flicker. The Dalai Lama Institute has weighed in, offering GPS coordinates for a future “stratosphere phowa initiation” transmitter that beams Tibetan prayer flags via low-orbit cubesats at sunrise alignment. NASA, to remain legally compliant, issues a neutral consent form opting crews in or out of symbolic rites pre-flight.
What Congress Quietly Approved—and Didn’t
An amendment to HR 4223, buried in the FUTURE FRONTIER Act 2023, allocates $9 million over three years to “biocultural companions” contracts—death doulas, clergy, and screen-based AI facilitators. Section 847(k) stipulates no mission be certified unless at least one crewmember holds an End-of-Life Composure Certification. However, the same budget bill cuts palliative-medication reserves by 40 %, pointing to a morbid arithmetic: on Mars, easing death may be cheaper than preventing it.
The Earthbound Practice Spread
Van Schieman’s nonprofit, VoidBridge, now trains Earth-based hospice nurses using the exact VR environment astronauts see from their airlock, alleging a feedback loop of realism and empathy. Early data from UCSF Medical Center shows bedside stays extended by 11 % when nurses rehearse Martian death protocols first—evidence that boldly embracing extraterrestrial mortality may refine how we accompany our own here.
Sources
- NASA Technical Memorandum: Mars Transit Habitat Waste Management
- HI-SEAS IV Analog Crew Diaries Report
- Nature Human Behaviour on Survivor’s Guilt in Isolated Microsocieties
- Acta Astronautica: HRV and Ritualized Group Singing
- FUTURE FRONTIER Act (HR 4223, Sec. 847)
- JAMA Rapid Ash System Safety Review
- Wired Magazine Interview with Valentin Glavin
This material is for informational purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice.