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Could you spend 378 days and nights in a darkened room, lit only by fluorescent lights and a window looking out onto a fake planet, with just three coworkers for company? A week? Okay, a night?
The four members of NASA’s first Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (Chapea) mission persevered, finally emerging last week. They had spent more than a year in a hangar in Houston, simulating a mission to Mars. The crew’s primary focus was not on maintaining equipment and physical health, but on how to live with their colleagues, isolated from family and friends.
Space missions are rightly praised for their courage. While this crew did not risk their lives, they certainly risked their sanity. The 22-minute delay in communications that could occur on Mars deprived them of quick connections to friends and partners. How unbearable to have to wait nearly 45 minutes for a response to your complaints about a colleague’s panting.
As a seasoned space expert, I’ve watched all four seasons of Apple TV For all of humanitya science fiction drama about the race to Mars, I was concerned about the mental strength of the crew. But as a Londoner, I was taken aback by the descriptions of the Chapea home as cramped. Seventeen hundred square feet? Luxury.
As she emerged, mission commander Kelly Haston’s joy was visible, not just for being free, but also for, as she said, “being part of the work that is being done here on Earth that will one day allow people to explore and live on Mars.” Another joked that the time “seemed to fly by.”
Some of the drawbacks of such a journey were undoubtedly mitigated by the shared bonds of a scientific mission. But even a lofty goal cannot avert all grievances. In Diary of a Cosmonaut: 211 Days in Space, Russian astronaut Valentin Lebedev described the tense relationship with crew member Anatoly Berezovoy when they were aboard the Salyut-7 space station in 1982: “July 11: Today was difficult. I don’t think we understand what’s happening to us. We pass each other by silently, feeling insulted.”
The end of a journey can be the hardest part. Researchers studying long voyages in space and at sea have described a Q3 phenomenon where workers feel their mood plummet as they pass the halfway point — something I experienced in just week two of the Covid lockdown.
Long missions are interesting because they show how people cope with working in extreme conditions — which is crucial to preventing accidents. But they also highlight the universal characteristics of work, including minor irritations with colleagues.
Kate Greene, a science writer, wrote about her stay in a white geodesic dome on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano in 2013 as part of the first Hi-Seas project, which simulated some of the conditions of a Mars mission. “The cadence of one crew member’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs was remarkably consistent and always so loud. I also wondered why one of my crewmates kept swinging her crossed leg under the table at every meal to tap me ever so gently on the shin with her furry slipper.” A fellow resident “complained that another was frequently clearing his throat.”
During another year-long Hi-Seas mission in 2015, health scientist Sheyna Gifford described how her shrunken world became downright utilitarian: “There’s no money and nowhere to spend it, the value is based almost exclusively on usefulness.”
Extreme colleaguing experiments show that success depends not only on talent and effort, but also on good working relationships. Planetary exploration may require scientific expertise, but knowing when to shut down a colleague’s endless anecdotes has to count for something.
emma.jacobs@ft.com