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Can you spend 378 days and nights in a dark space, lit only by strip lighting and a window overlooking a fake planet, with only three colleagues for company? A week? Okay, one night?
The four members of NASA’s first Exploration Health and Performance Analogue (Chapea) mission extended the full stretch, finally re-emerging last week. They had spent more than a year in a Houston hangar, simulating a mission to Mars. The main focus of the crew was not how to maintain equipment and physical health, but how to live with their colleagues, isolated from family and friends.
Space missions are rightly applauded for their bravery. While this crew didn’t risk their lives, they certainly risked their sanity. Experiencing the 22-minute communication delay that could occur on Mars, they were deprived of quick connection with friends and partners. How excruciating to wait almost three-quarters of an hour for a response to your argument about a co-worker’s noise.
As a seasoned space expert, watching all four seasons of Apple TV For All Humanity, a sci-fi drama about the race to Mars, I worried about the mental stability of the crew. But, as a Londoner, I struggled with the descriptions of the Chapea settlement as cramped. Seventeen hundred square feet? Luxurious.
Upon taking the stage, mission commander Kelly Haston’s delight was palpable, not only because she was free, but because, as she put it, she had been “part of the work that was being done here on Earth that one day would enable humans to explore and live on Mars.” . Another joked that time seemed to “fly”.
Some of the downsides of such a journey were no doubt mitigated by the common bonds of a scientific mission. But even a high-minded goal cannot eliminate every complaint. IN Diary of a Cosmonaut: 211 Days in Space, Russian astronaut Valentin Lebedev described strained relations with crewmate Anatoly Berezovoy while they were on the Salyut-7 space station in 1982: “July 11: Today was difficult. I don’t think we understand what is happening to us. We silently pass each other, feeling offended.”
The end of a trip can be the hardest part. Researchers studying long space and sea journeys have described a third-trimester phenomenon in which workers feel their spirits drop as they pass the halfway point – something I experienced in just the second week of the Covid lockdown .
Long missions are interesting because they show how people cope with working in extreme conditions – which is essential in preventing accidents. But they also illuminate universal aspects of work, including petty irritations with colleagues.
Kate Greene, a science journalist, wrote about living in a white geodesic dome on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa in 2013 as part of the first Hi-Seas project, which recreated some of the conditions of a mission to Mars. The cadence of a crewmate’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs, extremely steady and ever so loud. I also wondered why one of my crewmates kept swinging her crossed leg under the table at every meal so she could tap me more and more gently on the leg with her fuzzy slipper.” A fellow resident “complained about frequently clearing the other’s throat.”
On another year-long Hi-Seas mission in 2015, Sheyna Gifford, the health science officer, described how her shrunken world became extremely utilitarian: “There’s no money and no place to spend it, value is almost only to the benefit”.
The extreme experiments of colleagues show that success depends not only on talent and effort, but also on good relationships in the workplace. Planetary exploration may require scientific expertise, but knowing when to break away from a colleague’s endless anecdote should be important.
emma.jacobs@ft.com