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Would you be able to spend 378 days and nights in a dark space lit only by strip lights and a window with a fake planet in it, accompanied only by three coworkers? A week? Um, even a night?
The first four members of NASA Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analogue (Chapea) The mission continued until the end, finally emerging last week. They spent more than a year in a hangar in Houston simulating a mission to Mars. The crew’s main concern wasn’t how to maintain their equipment or their physical health, but how to live with their colleagues while isolated from their families and friends.
The bravery of the space mission should be celebrated. The crew didn’t risk their lives, but they did risk their sanity. There could be a 22-minute delay in communications on Mars, resulting in a loss of timely contact with friends and partners. Imagine how painful it would be to wait nearly 45 minutes for a response to a colleague’s complaint.
As a space expert, having watched all four seasons of Apple TV, For All MankindWhen I watched Star Wars: Episode I: The Last Jedi, a sci-fi drama about the race to Mars, I worried about the mental health of the crew, but as a Londoner, I balked at the description of Chapea’s living quarters as cramped. 1,700 square feet? Luxury.
On top of that AppearMission commander Kelly Haston’s joy was palpable, not just from the freedom but, as she put it, to be “part of the work being done on Earth to prepare humans to one day explore and live on Mars.” Another joked that it felt like the time had “gone by so quickly.”
Some of the downsides of such a trip are no doubt mitigated by the common bond of a scientific mission, but even lofty goals can’t eliminate all frustration. Astronaut’s Diary: 211 Days in Space, Russian cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev described his tense relationship with fellow crew member Anatoly Berezovoi while aboard the Salyut 7 space station in 1982: “July 11: Today was a hard day. I don’t think we understand what is happening to us. We passed each other in silence, I felt bad.”
The end of the journey can be the hardest part: Researchers who study long-distance space and ocean voyages have described a third-quarter phenomenon in which workers’ moods drop once they reach the halfway point, something I experienced just two weeks into the coronavirus lockdown.
Long-term missions are interesting because they show how people work in extreme conditions, which is crucial in preventing accidents, but they also highlight universal features of the job, such as minor irritations with coworkers.
Science journalist Kate Green said: I have written Living in a white geodesic dome on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa in 2013, part of the first Hi-Seas project to recreate conditions on a Mars mission, was a testament to the “remarkably consistent rhythm of my crewmates’ hard-soled sandals running down the stairs, always so loud. It was also strange how at every meal one of my crewmates would cross his legs under the table and very gently tap my shins with his fluffy slippers.” One of the same residents “complained about the frequent throat-clearing by others.”
During the year-long Hi-Seas mission in 2015, health science officer Shayna Gifford described how the shrunken world had become highly materialistic: “There’s no money, no place to spend it. Value is based almost entirely on utility.”
The extreme coworker experiment shows that success depends not only on talent and hard work, but also on good workplace relationships. Planetary exploration may require scientific expertise, but knowing when to tune out your coworkers’ endless anecdotes should help.
