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Can We Go to Mars Without Going Crazy? Forget About the Technical Problems

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Can We Go to Mars Without Going Crazy? Forget About the Technical Problems Can We Go to Mars Without Going Crazy? Forget about the technical problems. What we really have to worry about is what seven astronauts will do to one another after being locked up in a tiny capsule for nine months By William Speed Weed DISCOVER Vol. 22 No. 05 | May 2001 Aboard the Belgica, off Antarctica, May 20, 1898: As the snow swirls and temperatures plummet below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, explorer Frederick Cook, stuck with his men on an icebound ship, writes in his log: "We are as tired of each other's company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience I know that this depression will increase." Space station Mir, June 25, 1997: As an unmanned Russian supply ship from Earth draws When John Glenn became the first astronaut to toward him, commander Vasily Tsibliyev floats orbit Earth on February 20, 1962, he had to endure before a set of remote controls, trying desperately the Mercury capsule's measly 36 cubic feet of to guide the incoming module to a safe docking. space for only four hours and 55 minutes. When he rode the space shuttle Discovery 36 years later— American astronaut Mike Foale and cosmonaut for eight days and 20 hours— each crew member Sasha Lazutkin peer anxiously from portholes. got 332 cubic feet of space. Their commander is exhausted. His mental health Photo courtesy of NASA has deteriorated under the stress of living in this bizarre miniature world for more than four months. He has already endured an onboard fire that nearly burned through Mir's hull; he has been overwhelmed by a grueling schedule of repairs; he has fought and bickered with Foale's predecessor, American astronaut Jerry Linenger; and he hasn't been sleeping well. Russian psychologists suspect he is exhausted, neurotic, and depressed. Suddenly, as the supply ship comes into view, everyone can see it's off course. Tsibliyev struggles with the controls, but within seconds the wayward rocket slams into Mir's Spektr module. Precious oxygen begins to hiss into the void of space. Foale lurches to power up Mir's escape module while Lazutkin rushes to seal off Spektr. Tsibliyev seems dazed at the controls, like the brokenhearted captain of a sinking ship. "I didn't manage to turn it away," he radios to ground control. "Everything was going on fine, but then, God knows why, [the supply ship] started to accelerate." Mars Flyer isolation chamber, Institute of Biomedical Problems, Moscow, Russia, December 31, 1999: During a New Year's Eve celebration held by the international crew, two Russian cosmonauts break into a fistfight, splattering blood on the module walls. Afterward, one of the cosmonauts presses unwelcome kisses on Canadian crew member Judith LaPierre. He brushes it off as a harmless moment; she sees it as a prelude to rape. The institute's mission control seals the hatches between the Russian crew's and the international crew's living quarters. Mir, as a supply ship might The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is 43 years old, see it on approach. but its mythology is already deep. The space program is built around Photo courtesy of NASA a concept called "the right stuff," which means that both astronauts and engineers have what it takes to handle any situation no matter how tricky it gets. NASA selects superheroes who never lose their cool to pilot spacecraft and hires the genius engineers who can design a carbon-dioxide filter out of spare parts to save the crew of Apollo 13. But NASA's experience putting more than three astronauts into space for longer than two weeks is limited. And with the agency looking at long-distance space travel like a trip to Mars, a new message has begun to emerge: The right stuff is not what we thought it was. Designing and building a sophisticated spacecraft capable of getting to Mars is just the beginning. The ultimate challenge NASA faces may be building a tiny computer that can psychoanalyze astronauts and keep them from going nuts. Most of the warnings about a Mars trip have come from astronauts who spent months aboard Mir. When the first Mir astronaut, Norm Thagard, returned to Earth in 1995, he told debriefers that psychological challenges were the toughest part of his mission. The last Mir astronaut, Andy Thomas, says that without intense efforts to solve the psychological problems of a group of astronauts confined to a small space for months, "the mission will fail." Russian cosmonaut Valery Ryumin says succinctly, "All the conditions necessary for murder are met if you shut two men in a cabin and leave them together for two months." "Imagine taking a trip cross-country with your family," says Mark Shepanek, a psychologist and NASA's manager of aerospace medicine. "Now imagine that it lasts for Mir, after a supply ship rammed it in June 1997. The United States paid the Russians months on end. And that you can't open the windows. You $400 million in 1994 to keep Mir aloft and can't even get out of the car. The bathroom and the meals allow astronauts aboard for lengthy stays. are in the car with you. Think there might be a problem It flew for 15 years. getting along?" Photo courtesy of NASA Of course, a trip to Mars will be considerably longer and more stressful. It will most likely take three years: nine months each way and a year and a half on the surface. And the "family" will be scientists and pilots in their forties and fifties, the average age range of astronauts in their prime. Seven is the most popular guess of how many will be in the crew. The craft will be larger than a car but probably not larger than a Boeing 747 airliner, much of it devoted to fuel and supplies. Once astronauts get to the Red Planet, they'll be able to stretch out a bit on the surface. But there will be no walks on the beach, no dinners out, no fresh air. And there will be no way for the astronauts to get away from one another. Thomas says each astronaut will "have to be strong enough to deal with what you perceive as"— he pauses here to be diplomatic— "not imperfections, but differences between you and them." As soon as the Mars astronauts pass the moon, they will be the farthest flung human beings ever. And at one point during their stay on the Red Planet, the Earth may be 249 million miles away. The distance from home will be obvious to the astronauts in ways no one has ever experienced before. To begin with, a Mars crew won't have what Thomas called his favorite pastime while on Mir: looking at the ever-changing face of Earth. "They'll just have a black void. There won't be any Earth to see. After a few days, they'll be so far away that it will just be a speck." Meanwhile, the time delay in communications will grow to more than 10 minutes long, and the astronauts will not be able to have a phone conversation with anyone back on Earth. E-mail and voice mail will be their only way of learning about the wife's new job, the daughter's college career, the son's new girlfriend. And their homesickness could be fraught with terror. "We knew on Mir that we could be down on the ground within hours." Thomas says. "They won't have that. " One key factor to surviving such stresses may be how different each crew member is from the others. Sociologist Marilyn Dudley- Rowley, chief research scientist at OPS- Alaska, an extreme- environments research firm, recently Boredom doesn't have a chance to set surveyed in on U.S. shuttle flights, which last no Antarctic and longer than a month. The crew, which Arctic can number eight, works intensely expeditions as throughout the mission. Above: Discovery's flight deck, where well as Russian astronauts pilot the ship. and American Photo courtesy of NASA spaceflights. In Reminders of loved ones on Earth will help her analysis, groups made up of similar people— keep Mars-bound travelers sane. Astronaut Charles Duke carried a photo of himself and white, military, American males, in one instance— had his family taken in their Houston backyard on more interpersonal problems than did heterogeneous his 1972 Apollo 16 flight to the moon— and groups. People of different backgrounds, she says, left it there. have more to teach one another over the long haul than Photo courtesy of NASA do people who are exactly alike. Thomas agrees: Even after months on Mir, he was still excited to learn Russian culture and language from crewmates. Gender, says JoAnna Wood, a Baylor College of Medicine psychologist, may be irrelevant: "We tend to think that men have this quality and women have that, but it's not true. There are nonaggressive men, and non-nurturing women. All-male teams have done well in the Antarctic, as have mixed groups." An all-female team, a group of German women who spent the austral winter of 1985 at Antarctica's Georg Von Neumayer station, got along famously. Wood studies groups at four Antarctic research stations each year. Crew members fill out a lengthy, standardized personality test and then answer a weekly questionnaire. Questions include: "To what extent do you think the rest of the team is listening to your ideas?" "To what extent have you felt tense or on edge?" "To what extent have you felt tired of some (or all) of the members of your team?" Wood is reluctant to draw conclusions until she gets more data, but so far her work suggests that an ideal Mars crew would have a range of personalities: "I'd want at least one person, but not more than one, who is really good at taking charge in a crisis.
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