Editorial: Research ethics in space

Abstract

You may or may not be aware that a Dutch private organization is planning to send a manned mission to Mars as a one-way trip, funded in part by a reality TV show covering the selection of the participants, their training and then their experience on Mars. The organization advertised this on the internet, and thousands of volunteers have responded. It is a one-way trip because during the 8 month trip and stay on Mars the participants would lose sufficient muscle mass that they would be unlikely to be able to safely return to life on Earth. It is unknown whether they would be able to survive for the long term on Mars based on present technologies for self-sufficiency, although the company intends to send further colonists and supplies to help support the initial group.1 What I want to discuss in this editorial is whether this is the sort of thing that ought to be under the purview of research ethics committees – is this experimentation or something else, perhaps ‘pioneering’, which falls outside their remit? Now whether this sort of activity does receive any scrutiny is largely country dependent − in the US, for example, there would be no requirement for review because as a private organization it would presumably not be receiving federal funding. Likewise in the UK, because it is not research on patients, nor does it involve either tissue or those lacking mental capacity, it would not be formally regulated. As it is not institutionally related to a university it would not be likely to come under informal systems of review either. However, this is somewhat beside the point − I am not as interested in the question of whether this will receive independent ethical scrutiny, but rather whether it ought to. There is a relatively awkward question about why research warrants the very unusual form of regulation that it receives, and I am inclined to think that many of the standard responses to this question, such as appealing to past harms or the risks 511731 REA9410.1177/1747016113511731Research EthicsHunter 2013