JAXA Hiring Volunteers For Simulated Space Station Experiment

Have you ever wanted to contribute to space research but are held back by a lack of adequate scientific knowledge? If so, here’s your chance.

Japan’s space agency JAXA is recruiting volunteers for a simulated space station experiment, which will pay about $3,500 for two weeks of work. Eight chosen volunteers will spend 13 nights and 14 days in isolation at a “closed environment adaptation training facility” and the stated goal of the experiment is “improving the stress assessment method of astronauts staying in space for a long time in the future.”

According to the announcement on JAXA’s website, this would be the sixth experiment of its kind, and the agency is “looking for healthy male and female subjects aged 20 to 55” years for the tests. During this experiment, participants’ psychosomatic stress states will be studied.

The testing itself is outsourced to Japan Clinical Volunteer Network (JCVN), which said the tests will be carried out at the JAXA Tsukuba Space Center. Registrations for tests are open till Jan. 31, and the “cooperation fee” is 380,000 yen, to be paid about a month after the tests are over, dates for which have not been announced.

The application system on the JCVN website does not appear, at first glance, to explicitly bar non-Japanese people from applying, even though the text is entirely in Japanese. Since the pay averages to about $11 an hour (for all 24 hours of the day, not just the eight-nine hours of work done during a regular workday), it was obviously tempting for many, only for them to realize, once they began the actual application, that it was actually open only to Japanese nationals.

JAXA concluded the fifth test in this series Dec. 12, during which eight volunteers spent 14 nights and 15 days in an isolated environment.

There are no clear plans that Japan has for setting up a space station of its own, but simulating those conditions in tests makes sense for the space agency, which has sent seven of its astronauts to the International Space Station so far. The seventh of those, Norishige Kanai, is currently aboard ISS as part of Expedition 54.

Earlier in January, Kanai created quite a stir when he announced he had grown nine centimeters (about 3.5 inches) during his first three weeks in the Earth-orbiting space laboratory. While gaining a couple of centimeters is something experienced by all astronauts who leave Earth’s gravity, Kanai’s case was unusual for the sheer amount. It turned out he had, in fact, grown by two centimeters, and Kanai apologized for the “measurement error” that led to his initial erroneous announcement.

Understanding the psychological impact of spending long durations in space-like conditions — where interaction with other living beings is severely limited, and even what a person sees or hears through a day is very different from usual, even the meaning of a “day” changes — is important if humans are to embark on journeys to Mars and beyond. At the very least, it is important until such time as we have the technology for spacecraft that travel hundreds of times faster than what we have today.

A number of countries, including the United States, Russia, and China, have conducted or are conducting space simulation experiments. On Friday, China concluded the second phase — lasting 200 days — of a test which involves four student volunteers living inside a simulation of a lunar base. The third phase of that test, which began the same day, will go on for 105 days, for a total of 365 days of the experiment.