If that isn't applying our ethos, I don't know what is. The very skills needed to survive at Burning Man are the skills needed to respond to a disaster.
Ultimately what they are planning is a Chinese space station in about 2008 or so. To do that they will need to learn about how to survive on longer missions.
The irony is we went way out of the world and had to learn worldly skills to survive out there. What people who understand us discover is we have experts is every field of human endeavor.