Mary Roach: Packing for Mars

H is saying: “I can ride a bike without holding the handle-bars.” Now he cups his hands together and puts his lips to his bent thumbs. After a few tries, he produces a low, dry, unmusical whistle. “I don’t have a skill like yours,” H says to B glumly. B just finished telling us about the badminton championship his team won and then pulling up the legs of his shorts to show off his thigh muscles.

H sits down, and F stands up. F is one of three pilots in the group. “What is important in a pilot is communication.” After a solid start, the presentation takes an unexpected turn. F tells us that he often goes out drinking with his pals. “We go to places where ladies entertain. That helps to communicate and help break the ice with the guys.” F opens his mouth wide. He’s doing something with his tongue. The psychiatrists lean toward the TVs. Sayuri’s eyebrows shoot up. “I do this for the ladies,” says F. Wha? Inoue pulls the zoom. F’s tongue is double-curled, like a pair of tacos. “For me it is an ice-breaking technique.”

My guy A is up next. He tells us he is going to demonstrate an aikido technique and asks for a volunteer. D stands up. His pinnie is partly slipping off his shoulder like a bra strap. A says that when he was in college, the younger students would get so drunk they couldn’t move. “So I twist their arm to help them get up.” He grabs D’s wrist. D yelps, and everyone laughs.

“They’re like frat boys,” I say to Sayuri. Tachibana is sitting beside Sayuri, who explains “frat boy” to him.

“To tell you the truth,” Tachibana says, “astronaut is a kind of college student.” He is given assignments. Decisions are made for him. Going into space is like attending a very small, very elite military boarding school. Instead of sergeants and deans, there is space agency management. It’s hard work, and you better stick to the rules. Don’t talk about other astronauts. Don’t use cuss words. [4] I read an unedited draft of an oral history last week that had the “dangs” and “hells” inked out like operatives in a CIA dossier. When Gene Cernan responded to an Apollo 10 close call with “more than a few goddams, fucks and shits,” the president of Miami Bible College wrote to President Nixon demanding public repentance. NASA made Cernan comply. He got the last word in his memoir: “Bunch of goddam hogwash.” Never complain. As in the military, wave-makers are leaned on hard or sent away.

All through the space station era, the ideal astronaut has been an exceptionally high-achieving adult who takes direction and follows rules like an exceptionally well-behaved child. Japan cranks them out. This is a culture where almost no one jaywalks or litters. People don’t tend to confront authority. My seatmate on the flight to Tokyo told me that her mother had forbidden her to get her ears pierced. It wasn’t until she was thirty-seven that she summoned the courage to do it anyway. “I’m just now learning to stand up to her,” she confided. She was forty-seven, and her mother was eighty-six.

“Of course, exploration to Mars will be a different story,” says Tachibana. “You need someone aggressive, creative. Because they’ll have to do everything by themselves.” With a twenty-minute radio transmission lag time, you can’t rely on advice from ground control in an emergency. “You need again a brave man.”

A FEW WEEKS after I left Tokyo, an email arrived from the JAXA Public Affairs Office, informing me that candidates E and G had been selected. E is a pilot with All Nippon Airways and a fan of Japanese musicals. For his self-merits presentation, he acted out a scene from his favorite musical. The scene required E to pretend to weep and wrap his arms around his invisible mother. It was brave, though not in an astronaut sort of way. G is also a pilot—with the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. Military pilots have always been a good fit for the astronaut corps, and not just because of their aviation background and skills. They’re used to taking risks and operating under pressure, used to bunking in cramped quarters with no privacy, used to following orders and enduring long separations from their families. Also, as one JAXA staffer pointed out, astronaut selection is political. Air forces have always had ties to space agencies.

The week after I left Japan, all ten candidates flew to Johnson Space Center for interviews with NASA astronauts and selection committee members. Tachibana and Inoue conceded that the applicants’ English skills were an important factor in the decision, as was, I imagine, how well they click with the NASA crews. “The most important part of all this, the heart of the process,” says ANSMET’s Ralph Harvey, “is the interview where they sit you down with a couple astronauts and you just talk. You’re someone they may end up stuck in the equivalent of a tent in Antarctica with, for not just six weeks or six months in the space station, but maybe ten years as you’re waiting to fly, working at Mission Control or elsewhere. They’re picking a buddy as much as they’re picking a work partner.” A Japanese pilot has an advantage over a doctor in that he has something in common with a lot of NASA astronauts. The military and aviation are global fraternities, and E and G are members.

THE FIRST TIME I visited JAXA, I traveled with a different interpreter. As we drove along the route from the train station, Manami translated some of the signs. One welcomed us to TSUKUBA, CITY OF SCIENCE AND NATURE. I had always heard it called Tsukuba Science City. Not only JAXA is here, but also the Agricultural Research Institutes, the National Institute for Materials Science, the Building Research Institute, the Forestry and Forest Products Institute, the National Institute for Rural Engineering, and the Central Research Institute for Feed and Livestock. There are so many research institutes here that they have their own institute: the Tsukuba Center for Institutes. So what’s with the “and Nature” in the city’s name? Manami explained that when people first moved to Tsukuba, there weren’t any trees or parks or anything to do other than work. No major roads or express trains led into or out of the city. People just worked and worked. There were a lot of suicides, she said, a lot of people jumping off the institute roofs. So the government built a mall and some parks and planted trees and grass, and changed the name to Tsukuba, City of Science and Nature. It seemed to help.

The story made me think about a trip to Mars and what it would be like to spend two years trapped inside sterile, man-made structures with no way to escape one’s work and colleagues and no flowers or trees or sex and nothing to look at outside the window but empty space or, at best, reddish dirt. The astronaut’s job is stressful for all the same reasons yours or mine is—overwork, lack of sleep, anxiety, other people—but two things compound the usual stresses: the deprivations of the environment and one’s inability to escape it. Isolation and confinement are issues of no small concern to space agencies. The Canadian, Russian, European, and U.S. space agencies are spending $15 million on an elaborate psychology experiment that puts six men in a simulated spaceship on a pretend mission to Mars. The hatch opens tomorrow.

Mars is upstairs on the left. The Martian Surface Simulator is one of five locked, interconnected modules that comprise the mission simulation known as Mars500—the number referring to the days needed for a round-trip spin and a four-month stay on Mars. The simulation is taking place on the ground floor of Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP), Russia’s main aerospace medicine research facility. The crew have been paid 15,000 euros each to be subjects in a battery of psychology experiments aimed at understanding and counteracting the baneful effects of being trapped in a small, artificial environment with roommates you did not choose.