Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Kraft says Lapierre was unjustly blamed for the Japanese participant quitting. The man, Masataka Umeda, claimed to have acted out of solidarity with Lapierre. Kraft says Umeda shut the hatch because he was bothered by the Russian crew watching porn and that he had been looking for an excuse to bail.

I might have looked for one too. Along with the considerable stress of confinement, sleep deprivation, language and cultural gaps, and lack of privacy, more subtle torments plagued the crew. The shower room had cockroaches and no hot water. Night after night, dinner was kasha (“wheat gruel,” Lapierre called it). “Mice came through the floor and mold crawled up the conduits,” said Kraft in an email that included six photographs, one with the caption “Hairlice.” The lice outbreak didn’t bother Kraft—“It’s something new”—and the Russian crew calmly shaved their heads. Lapierre had to cope not only with the stress of lice, but with the IBMP staff’s response. “The Russians said, ‘Judy got a package from Canada that included the lice,’” Kraft recalls.

As producers of reality television know, there is no more reliable way to ignite smoldering frustrations than to douse them in alcohol. On the record, there was only one bottle of champagne, provided by IBMP for the 2000 Millennium Eve. In reality, there were many bottles, not just champagne, but vodka and cognac. Kraft says they find their way into isolation chambers as bribes. If you want the Russian volunteers to do a good job with your research, he says, you “better pack vodka and a salami with your experiment.”

Apparently this was also the case on Soviet and Russian space labs. Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration: “I complied strictly with the NASA policy of no alcohol consumption on duty.”) On long Russian missions, Kraft says, “You better hide the disinfectant.” While I was in Russia, a cosmonaut, who requested anonymity, showed me one of his slides from space: two crew members with straws, floating on either side of a 5-liter tank of cognac like teenagers sharing a malt.

Though the press coverage of SFINCSS put IBMP and the space agencies on the defensive, the researchers were pleased to be, as JAXA psychologist Natsuhiko Inoue put it, “getting very unique results.” This was, after all, a study of group interactions on cross-cultural missions. “The incident,” Inoue told me in an email, “brought us very many valuable insights on future crew selection and training.” Mostly commonsense stuff. Make sure they speak a common language well enough to communicate. Check out how well they work as a team. Choose people with a resilient sense of humor. Give everyone a crash course in cross-cultural etiquette. Someone should have warned Lapierre, for example, that “it’s nothing” (Gushin’s words) for a Russian man to kiss a woman at a party. And that if you want him to stop, you slap him. That “no” means “maybe.” And that when Russian men bloody each other’s noses, it’s “a friendly fight.” (Kraft confirmed this surprising item. “It’s how they settle disputes. They did it on Mir.”)

No matter how thoroughly you try to anticipate cross-cultural clashes, something’s bound to be overlooked. Ralph Harvey, who oversees teams of meteorite hunters at remote field camps in Antarctica, told me about a Spanish team member with a habit of plucking hairs from his head and holding them in the flame of the camp stove. “In Spain,” the man explained, “the barbers burn the tips of your hair, and I like the smell.” For the first week, his tentmate was amused, but it soon became a source of friction. “It’s on the questionnaire now,” joked Harvey. “ Do you burn your own hair for fun? ”

Kraft believes the media coverage of SFINCSS was beneficial in that it provided a rare honest portrayal of the emotions that develop among men and women confined together in space. He takes issue with the way space agencies portray astronauts as superhuman. “As if they don’t have any hormones, they don’t have any feelings for anybody.” It comes back yet again to a fear of negative publicity and diminished funding. The danger is that an organization invested in downplaying psychological problems is unlikely to spend much time investigating solutions to those problems. “Until,” as Kraft puts it, “one of the astronauts goes with diapers [6] Did she or didn’t she? Arresting officer William Becton wrote in his affidavit that he found a trash bag containing two used diapers inside Lisa Nowak’s car. “I asked Mrs. Nowak why she had the diapers. Mrs. Nowak said that she did not want to stop and use the restroom, so she used the diapers to collect her urine.” That’s what astronauts do—you can’t take a bathroom break on a spacewalk, so you wear a diaper inside your spacesuit. Nowak later denied wearing diapers. She now says her family had used the diapers when Houston was evacuated during Hurricane Rita, two years earlier. If I were Nowak, I wouldn’t have worried about the diapers. I’d have worried about the buck knife, steel mallet, BB gun, gloves, rubber tubing, and large plastic garbage bags also found in her car. I’d be peeing my pants. across the U.S. Now they are people suddenly!” (Two days after astronaut Lisa Nowak’s infamous confrontation with love rival Colleen Shipman, NASA ordered a review of its psychological screening and evaluation processes for astronauts.)

Making things worse: Astronauts themselves try to hide emotional problems, out of fear they’ll be grounded. Access to psychologists is available during missions, but crew are reluctant to make use of it. “Every communication to them means a special notice in your flying book,” cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me. “So we were always trying not to ask for specialists’ help.” Laveikin’s Mir mission with Yuri Romanenko was mentioned in a Quest article by Peter Pesavento on the psychological effects of space travel. Pesavento says Laveikin returned early from the mission due to “interpersonal issues and cardiac irregularity.” (I was to meet with Laveikin and Romanenko the next day.)

It’s a dangerous state of affairs. If someone on board a spacecraft is reaching the breaking point, it’s important for ground control to know about it. People’s lives depend on them knowing that. This perhaps explains why so many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it. If technologies being tested on Mars500 pan out, spacecraft—and other high-stress, high-risk workplaces like air-traffic control towers—will be outfitted with microphones and cameras hooked up to automated optical and speech-monitoring technology. The robotic spies can detect telltale changes in facial expressions or speech patterns and, hopefully, help those in command to avert a crisis.

The stigma of psychological problems also makes them difficult to study. Astronauts are reluctant to sign on as study subjects, lest the researchers uncover something unflattering. The last time I spoke to NASA consulting psychologist Pam Baskins, she was about to begin an experiment comparing different sleep medications and dosages. The astronauts were to be woken from a sound sleep to see how the drugs affected their ability to function in a simulated middle-of-the-night emergency. It appealed to my sense of fun, and I asked if I could come watch. “Absolutely not,” replied Baskins. “It took me a year to convince these guys to participate.”

A SPACE STATION is a rangy monstrosity, a giant Erector Set assembled by a madman. But the living area inside the Mir core module, where cosmonauts Alexandr Laveikin and Yuri Romanenko spent six months together, would fit in a Greyhound bus. The sleep chambers are less like bedrooms than like phone booths. They have no doors. My interpreter Lena and I are inside a mock-up of the module, in the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, in Moscow. With us is Laveikin, who now runs the museum. Yuri Romanenko is on his way. I thought it would be interesting to talk with them inside the room that nearly drove them mad.