[X] My Assistant

[ustrax]

Yes, the title says it all.
What would be the major benefits of a mission, let's say, to Mars, with a single crew member.
The reduce of weight would one major issue, I guess.
Of course it would have to be someone extremely ultra prepared to correspond to the mission demandings, someone covering areas such as geology, biology not to say the technical issues concerning a spaceflight...
Against? Isolation?...
Maybe by reducing the mission to the minimal accepted period and inducing long periods of sleep during the voyage...
Are there any available studies regarding this matter? All the things I've read point to a >1 crew, I would like to see something discussing the one man possibility.

[David]

Back to the original question:

The obvious upside of a one-person mission (the astronaut need not be a man) is that you can devote much more of the load to supplies, and those supplies will be consumed less quickly. There also won't be any problems with intra-crew disagreements, because there will be only one person. And if anything goes seriously wrong, well, it's "only" one person.

That's about all I can think of on the upside.

On the downside, you can get your one astronaut and a whole lot of equipment to Mars, but who's going to operate all that equipment once (s)he's there? Maintaining a Martian outpost isn't really a one-person job, and lacking at least a second person would greatly increase the likelihood of boneheaded (and possibly fatal) errors by an astronaut who has no one to second-guess his or her judgments.
The psychological stress of being alone for the duration of a voyage to Mars is not to be underestimated. I'm not saying the astronaut would go crazy; but a trip to Mars alone would be dreadfully boring. Imagine sitting in a waiting room full of magazines that you've already read and nothing to eat but yesterday's stale crackers. You'd get cranky pretty quick. And cranky astronauts, as we know from experience, as a big pain for mission controllers to deal with. You might expect, not insanity, but a sluggishness of response and a diminishing of enthusiasm. And do you really want to hear:
"Yeah, um. Ellis here. Uh, yeah, this is Mars. Looking out the window, well, it's mostly red. [Long silence.] I don't feel like going out today. And, uh, tomorrow's probably not going to be good either. By the way, you guys still haven't sent me the latest issue of Rod and Reel. So I say, screw Mars..."

If you were going for the smallest possible crew, I'd suggest sending a wife and husband team, who have already lived together in close quarters for 20 years.