Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Laveikin listens, then amends his statement: “Not necessarily married.”

“That’s right,” says Lena. “There would be a different ethic there. When you come back to Earth, your wife should understand that at that time it was like different dimension, different rules, different you.”

Laveikin laughs. “My wife is a clever person. She would understand. She’d say, ‘You’re not completely faithful even on Earth. Let it be in space as well.’”

Kraft would agree. He told me he advocates sending nonmonogamous couples—straight and/or gay—to Mars. “[Space agencies] are going to have to be more liberal and open about that. Mix and match or whatever.” Andy Thomas imagines that happening naturally on a Mars mission—as it tends to in Antarctica. “It’s very common for people there to pair off and form sexual relationships that last through the duration of their stay—to gravitate to a support structure to help them get through the experience. And then at the end of the season, it’s all over.”

For seventeen years, only men worked the research bases in Antarctica. Women, the excuses went, mean trouble: distraction, promiscuity, jealousy. It wasn’t until 1974 that the McMurdo Station winter-over personnel included women. One was a spinster biologist in her fifties who appears in photographs wearing a gold cross over her turtleneck. The other was a nun.

These days, a third of U.S. Antarctic personnel are women. They are credited with a rise in productivity and emotional stability. Mixed-gender crews are, as Ralph Harvey puts it, more “middle-of-the-bell curve.” There are fewer fistfights and fart jokes. “No one hurts his back lifting too big of a box.” Norbert Kraft told me about a teamwork study he ran at NASA Ames that compared all-male, all-female, and mixed-gender teams. The mixed-gender groups performed best. (The lowest scores belonged to the all-woman teams. “You can’t have all the chitchatting,” Kraft said bravely.)

Laveikin: “Can you imagine six men on the way to Mars, what will happen?”

“I know,” I say, though I’m not entirely sure we’re imagining the same thing. “Look what happens in prisons.”

“And on submarines. And geologists in the field.”

I make a note to ask Ralph Harvey about this. Laveikin quickly adds that he cannot recall hearing of any instances of “man-on-man love” in the Russian cosmonaut corps. [9] Yuri Gagarin loved Soviet rocketry mastermind Sergei Korolev, though not in a space food tube sort of way. When searchers found Gagarin’s wallet after the fighter jet crash that killed him, there was just one photo inside (now on display beside the mangled wallet in the Star City museum). The photo is of Korolev—not Gagarin’s wife or child, not his beloved mother. Not even Gina Lollobrigida. “She kissed him!” said our ebullient museum guide Elena while fanning herself with a plastic fan as though overcome by the thought of it. In the end, the least problematic Mars crew might be the kind Apollo astronaut Michael Collins (jokingly) suggests in his memoir: a “cadre of eunuchs.”

THE FIRST AEROSPACE isolation chambers held just one man. The Mercury and Vostok psychiatrists didn’t worry about crew members getting along with one another; the flights were a few hours or, at most, a couple days long, and the astronauts flew solo. What the psychiatrists worried about was space itself. What happens to a man alone in a silent, black, endless vacuum? To find out, they tried to approximate space here on Earth. Researchers at the Aero-medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base soundproofed a 6-by-10-foot commercial walk-in freezer, put a cot, some snacks, and an enamel chamber pot inside, and turned off the lights. A three-hour stint in the isolation chamber became one of the Mercury astronaut qualifying tests. One account I read, by a Mercury aspirant named Ruth Nichols, described it as the toughest test the candidates endured. Some male pilots, Nichols said, “responded violently” after only a few hours.

Colonel Dan Fulgham was in charge of the Wright-Patterson tests. He doesn’t recall any Mercury candidates becoming violent or otherwise “losing it” during their isolation test. He recalls them using it to catch up on sleep.

The researchers soon began to realize that sensory deprivation was a poor approximation of spaceflight. Space is black, but there’s plenty of sunlight, and the capsules would be lighted. Radio contact would be possible much of the time. Claustrophobia and solitude were the more salient concerns, especially on a longer mission. That is why, in 1958, an airman from the Bronx, named Donald Farrell, undertook a two-week pretend moon mission in the One-Man Space Cabin Simulator at the School of Aviation Medicine, at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. A Time magazine article described his (sadly long-lost) diary as being increasingly obscenity-laden, but in newspaper interviews he complained only that he missed cigarettes and forgot his comb. Farrell’s greatest hardship, by my reckoning, was the recording of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and other “soft music” piped into the simulator.

In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer.

To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.

Yuri Gagarin stands on a pedestal two stories high, in a patch of grass by a Moscow thoroughfare. You can tell at a distance that it’s him by the way his arms are posed—out away from his sides, fingers pressed together, in the manner of the flying superhero. From the base of the monument, looking up, you cannot see the head of the first man in space, just the heroic chest and the tip of the nose protruding beyond it. I’m joined by a man in a black shirt with a bottle of Pepsi under one arm. His head is lowered, which I take to be a gesture of respect until I see that he is clipping his fingernails.

Nationalist glory aside, Gagarin’s 1961 flight was primarily a psychological achievement. His task was simple, though by no means easy: Climb inside this capsule and let us blast you, alone and at great peril, past the borderline of space. Let us catapult you into an airless, lethal nothingness, where no man has ever been. Whip around the planet, and then come down and tell us what it was like for you.

There was a great deal of conjecture at the time—both at the Soviet space agency and at NASA—about the unique psychological consequences of breaching the cosmos. Would hurtling into “the black,” as pilots used to call it, blow the astronaut’s mind? Hear the ominous words of psychiatrist Eugene Brody, speaking at the 1959 Symposium on Space Psychiatry: “Separation from the earth with all of its unconscious symbolic significance for man,…might in theory at least be expected…to produce—even in a well-selected and trained pilot—something akin to the panic of schizophrenia.”

There was worry that Gagarin might come unhinged and sabotage the history-making mission. It was enough of a worry that the powers-that-be locked the manual controls of the Vostok capsule before liftoff. What if something went awry and communications went dead and Pilot-Cosmonaut #1 needed to take control of the capsule? His superiors had thought about that too, and seemingly turned to game show hosts for advice. Gagarin was given a sealed envelope containing the secret combination to unlock the controls.