Becoming an astronaut is a common dream for most people. While this aspiration might be widely shared, not everyone might be ready to go to the moon. As such, NASA has released a new exercise that tests people's moon survival skills.
Moon Survival Skills
NASA released a new test that aims to allow people to test out their moon survival skills. How people perform on the test would be NASA's gauge to know whether or not that person has a high survival chance.
The test was developed by a professor from the University of Texas and was called the NASA Moon Survival test. It was designed to examine a person's team-building skills and other factors when a person gets a new job.
Once people participate in the challenge, they are then asked to imagine themselves among the spaceship crew, getting ready to head to the moon. Basically, the test involves 15 items that the participant may or may not take to the moon.
The participants then need to rank the items from 1 to 15 depending on their importance with one as the highest score and 15 as the lowest score, or least important. This test is often used by employers with the help of social psychology research aiming to make the team building exercise more enjoyable.
Creation of the Test
The test was created by Jay Hall, who was a social psychology lecturer in the 1970s. The test was designed to reduce issues in terms of confusion, frustration, as well as time-loss, while also claiming to encouraging discussions among a group to make decisions.
The test included items like a box of matches, food concentrate, nylon rope, and others. Of the list of items, a box of matches was ranked with "15," and this is because NASA says bringing it on the moon would be worthless since the moon doesn't have oxygen for humans, meaning it won't be able to sustain combustion.
However, the moon does have oxygen on certain minerals like silica, aluminum, magnesium oxides, and iron, which still aren't in the form of oxygen accessible to human lungs.
Food concentrate was given a rating of "4" since it was an efficient energy requirement supply. Nylon rope got a rating of "6" due to it being useful when it comes to scaling cliffs or tying injured.
The most important item on the list with a rating of "1" was the two 100-pound tanks of oxygen, which are obviously important to sustain human life. Luckily, due to gravity changing its weight, the tanks would only weigh 17 pounds on the moon.
Aside from answering the questions individually, participants can also be asked to discuss their answers in a group in order to repeat the scoring. The group should arrive at a consensus, which would then be compared to the correct answers.
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