When building a team whose congruence, productivity, and adaptability are crucial to the success of a project in which you have invested heavily, such as a manned mission to Mars, Staff selection becomes much more complicated than simply selecting the most qualified people for the job. In a hypothetical, but not unrealistic, situation where eight people are to be selected to build a Mars mission team and nearly a hundred candidates meet the technical qualifications in terms of knowledge, skills and experience, a method for predicting which combination of individuals will constitute the most successful team would be an important factor in maximizing returns on the investment invested in the mission (Kanas et al, 2009). However, there is much debate about the usefulness and accuracy of the many “psychometric assessments” currently available. While they may provide perspective on the candidate's personality or interpersonal interaction style, they do not specifically evaluate the intrinsic or potential compatibility between specific individuals that underlies the formation of a small, synergistic team. This article will explain these “psychometrics” and then explore the algorithm-based methods that have been highlighted in the fields of matchmaking services and employee-employer matching. I will argue that these methods, alone or in conjunction with psychometrics, are more appropriate in the context of building a crew for a Mars mission than psychometrics alone. On the limited success of psychometric evaluations It has been hypothesized that groups or couples with high interpersonal compatibility perform better in collective tasks (Hill, 1975). However, as I will demonstrate later... halfway through the article... changes in mood or outlook on life (Howes 1979). This data could then be fed into the OkCupid algorithm to determine the match rates of each two-person combination, and a simple additional algorithm could be used to identify groups with the maximized average match rate. Beyond this, the FFM could be used to identify individuals with personality profiles more congruent with Canadian Space Psychology characteristics predictions of successful long-duration missions and give them further preference in personnel selection. This combination could represent an important safeguard, considering that two individuals with a high match percentage could still both be unsuitable for space travel. Finally, it would be important to train the finalists together over a long period of time, to test the predictions of algorithms and psychometrics (Kanas, 2009).