Atlanta (CNN) -- Six astronauts lie motionless in a row of compartments with medical monitoring cables connected to their bodies, as their space ship cuts through the silent blackness that separates Earth from Mars. They're sound asleep and will be for the extent of their six-month trip, having been placed in an artificially induced state of hibernation called torpor. This is the way a NASA-funded study sees space explorers traveling to Mars -- unconscious, with their metabolism switched into slow motion. Sending astronauts that far into space would be too challenging, costly and grueling without it, says space engineer John Bradford, whose Atlanta-based company SpaceWorks wrote the study for NASA.
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A study done for NASA foresees astronauts being unconscious for Mars travel
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It would use a medical method called therapeutic hypothermia
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It is usually used to save trauma patients by inducing torpor, a type of hibernation
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The study says it would be better for the astronauts and deeply cut costs
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