“NASA has selected a new crew of four volunteers to participate in a simulated mission to Mars within a habitat at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Jason Lee, Stephanie Navarro, Shareef Al Romaithi, and Piyumi Wijesekara will step into the agency’s Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA, on Friday, May 10. Once inside, the team will live and work like astronauts for 45 days. The crew will exit the facility on June 24 after they ‘return’ to Earth. Jose Baca and Brandon Kent are this mission’s alternate crew members,” says a NASA press release issued Monday.

“HERA enables scientists to study how crew members adapt to isolation, confinement, and remote conditions before NASA sends astronauts on deep space missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Crew members will carry out scientific research and operational tasks throughout their simulated mission to the Red Planet, including a ‘walk’ on Mars’s surface using virtual reality. They will also experience increasing communication delays lasting up to five minutes each way with Mission Control Center as they ‘near’ Mars,” the press release continued. This is not the BIG simulated mission where the guinea pigs have to live in the confined simulation space for a year.

Still the four picked are definitely not the average schmucks a fictionalized, PR-hungry version of NASA were seeking in the classic 1994 The Simpsons episode “Deep Space Homer.” They’re definitely more the “clean-cut, athletic go-getters” that got the public bored with spaceflight.