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Can you spend 378 days and nights in a dark place, illuminated only by strip lighting and a window, looking out at a fake planet, with three colleagues for company? A week? Well, one night?
The first four members of NASA Group Health and Performance Study Analogue (Chapia) work lasted the entire length and finally reappeared last week. They spent more than a year in a Houston hangar simulating a mission to Mars. The crew’s primary focus was not how to maintain equipment and physical health, but how to live with colleagues isolated from family and friends.
Space missions are rightly praised for their daring. Although this group did not risk their lives, they certainly risked their sanity. By experiencing a 22-minute delay in communications that would have occurred on Mars, they were deprived of quick communication with friends and partners. How painful it is to wait almost three-quarters of an hour for a response to a colleague’s outcry.
As a seasoned astronaut, he has watched all four seasons of Apple TV For all mankind, a sci-fi drama about the race to Mars, I worried about the morale of the crew. But as a Londoner, I was dismayed to find Sappéa’s abode cramped. Seventeen hundred square feet? luxury
On that day emerges, mission commander Kelly Haston’s joy was palpable, not only because she was free, but because, as she put it, she was „part of the work being done here on Earth that will one day help humans explore and live on Mars.” Another joked that time „seems to fly”.
Some of the disadvantages of such a journey were undoubtedly mitigated by the shared bonds of a scientific mission. But even a lofty intention cannot prevent every flaw. In Diary of an Astronaut: 211 Days in Space, Russian cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev described a rift in his relationship with crew member Anatoly Berezovoi while aboard the Salyut-7 space station in 1982: “July 11: Today was difficult. I don’t think we understand what is happening to us. We pass each other in silence, feeling offended.
The end of the journey can be the hardest part. Researchers studying long journeys in space and at sea have described a third-trimester phenomenon in which workers feel their mood drop as they pass the halfway mark — something I experienced in the second week of the Covid lockdown.
Long trips are interesting because they show how people cope with working in extreme conditions – which is important in preventing accidents. But they also shed light on universal aspects of work, including minor annoyances with colleagues.
Kate Greene, a science journalist, wrote Part of the first Hi-Seas project was to inhabit a white geodesic dome on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa in 2013, which recreated some of the conditions of a trip to Mars. „A servant’s stiff foot slides down the stairs with a slipper, remarkably steady and always very loud. I wondered why one of my servants used to swing her cross-legged under the table at every meal, so that she gently patted him on the jaw with a fuzzy slipper. A fellow-citizen „frequently throated another. Complaint of exploding”.
On another yearlong high-seas mission in 2015, Shayna Gifford, a health science officer, described how her shrunken world became fiercely utilitarian: „There’s no money or anywhere to spend it, value is almost solely based on utility.”
Intensive peer tests show that success depends not only on talent and effort, but also on good workplace relationships. Planetary exploration may require scientific expertise, but knowing when to zone in on a colleague’s incessant story counts for something.
„Oddany rozwiązywacz problemów. Przyjazny hipsterom praktykant bekonu. Miłośnik kawy. Nieuleczalny introwertyk. Student.