"I wasn't on the selection committee..."

"As a I had mentioned to my mom during the break, I wasn't on the project selection committee," Jonathan politely smiled, "so I don't know."

"So who would know the answer to that question then?" Julie inquired.

"Dr. Cheung would know," he replied with a smirk.

"Okay, then let's bring out Lauren and the rest of the crew of the Priapus Program!" Julie announced as stagehands hurried to bring out stools.

The studio audience gasped and then clapped as the twelve women, wearing their blue NASA flight suits, walked on stage smiling and waving at the audience like beauty pageant contestants.

"Jonathan, you knew they were here?" Iris slapped her son on the arm and glared at him. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"It was a surprise," he winked at her before greeting each of the crewmates with a salute and then a hug.

Iris warmly hugged each woman, complimenting each of them how beautiful they are, before they sat down on a stool.

"Welcome ladies!" Julie cheered.

The studio audience clapped.

"Lauren, you were on the selection committee?" Julie asked.

"Yes, and Hane as well," the young psychologist answered. "I'm the project manager and she's the deputy project manager."

"So was it a coincidence that the entire crew all happen to be Chinese-American?" Julie asked.

"Yes and no," Lauren replied with a smirk. "NASA obviously wants the best of the best from the thousands of applicants from various backgrounds for its programs and when we whittled down to a few dozen candidates we noticed that most of them were of East Asian descent."

"And as no means as an offense to Iris or any of our parents," Hane added with a gracious smile to Jonathan's mother, "of the stereotypical East Asian parents' high expectations of their kids to achieve high academically and professionally but as you can see from the crew, we are all high achievers in our fields."

The studio audience clapped.

"The other factor we took into consideration is a shared cultural background to ease possible tensions during the project's two year duration," Lauren explained. "Other psychosocial isolation experiments tend to be a mix of volunteers from different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities but they usually lasted only from a week to a couple of months, however, the third stage of the MARS-500 lasted 520 days and the crew consisted of six men -- three Russians, one French, one Italian, and one Chinese -- who only shared broken English with each other. Surprisingly, the cultural differences and language difficulties didn't cause any big issues overall. So one of the controlled variables of this particular psychosocial isolation experiment is how a group of people of the same ethnic group and cultural background could co-exist in a confined space for a long duration."

"You must be happy to hear that, Iris?" Julie chuckled.

"Yes!" Iris blurted excitedly but then quickly added, "I mean for science, of course!"

The crew and studio audience laughed.

"Now I'm sure there are plenty of questions the audience would like to ask the crew?" Julie asked.

The studio audience applauded and women anxiously lined up to a microphone.

Jonathan took a deep breath and smiled at his mother and the women of the Priapus Program, fully knowing he would have to endure the type of titillating questions that belonged more in a supermarket tabloid than in a scientific journal.