Making Cash as a Lab Rat!

If you are a healthy American citizen, get prepared to loll about in bed for 10 weeks! You can earn $18,000 from NASA, but hold on! Don’t jump at it! You will be hired as their human guinea pig. Yes, NASA will put you through a gruelling regime of tests for more than three months, and that’s not all. Read the small print to see what NASA is saying.

Those who are selected will be examined for 70 days and go through a variety of tests. Research will check how effective exercise is on astronauts. In fact, you will lose cardiovascular, bone and muscle function as a result of living in zero-gravity conditions. Now, that doesn’t sound too pretty to you, does it?

Volunteers will be split into two groups: those who exercise and those who don’t. During stage one, they will spend up to three weeks in a bed rest facility where they can get up and move around, performing everyday tasks. For the second step, the volunteers will be sent to NASA’s Flight Analog Research Unit in Houston, Texas. That’s where they’ll lie in bed for 10 weeks with their bodies tilted slightly backwards, their heads down and their feet up. Very little movement will be allowed and the volunteers will only be able to use a plastic bedpan to go to the bathroom in. They can only clean themselves lying down with a handheld shower head. The third stage puts the volunteers through 14 days of reconditioning activities that include regular exercise to see how well their body bounces back from lying almost completely motionless.

‘Okay, what exactly is the point of all of this?’ you might ask. Scientists - and those are the men who are subjecting you to it all – want to simulate in you the weightlessness of a space flight. In other words, the experiment is done to get a sense of what an astronaut goes through in the weightless environment in space. So check it out. Sit down and think about it. Is it worth earning $18,000 for so much rigour?