1 small space for test crew, 1 giant leap to Mars

They must endure 500 days of isolation

Few endeavors can poke holes in the soft underbelly of the human psyche like long-duration spaceflight.

Hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour is disquieting enough. But other catalysts for stress abound. Tedium and isolation wear away willpower. Crew squabbles can balloon into intramodule civil war. The faces never change, and the smells only get worse.

At a research laboratory in northwest Moscow, scientists are readying an experiment that they hope will lead to a list of psychological do's and don't's for what would be the world's most ambitious long-duration spaceflight: a manned flight to Mars in the next 30 years.

Sometime in 2009, a crew of six will climb into simulation modules at the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The hatch doors will lock behind them, and for 500 days psychologists will study their behavior, their body language, their hang-ups -- and their ability to keep from cracking up.

Russian and European researchers are expected to pick a crew by the middle of next year.

"It's your task to avoid nervous breakdowns," said Haider Khobikhozhin, who took part in a nine-month simulated flight at the institute in 1999. "You force yourself to control your emotions. You stop yourself from wishing to see the sun."

As humankind's ability to fly longer and more distant missions into space increases, so does its need to brace for the psychological risks associated with those missions.

Russia is the ideal place to perform that research.

Two-thirds of manned space travel has been logged by cosmonauts. The Soviet Salyut space station mission in the 1970s was followed by Mir, which was manned for nearly 10 years and set a record for continuous human presence in space. Over the years, Russian mission control specialists have become experts at studying cosmonauts' facial cues and speech patterns for signs of psychological hiccups.

The ability to coexist with others in a cocoon of isolation for long stretches also has been probed in other settings.

On U.S. naval submarines, psychologists have assessed sleep patterns and adaptation to the undersea environment.

In 1991, Biosphere 2 enclosed a crew of eight inside a 3.15-acre terrarium of rain forest, coral reef, savanna and wetland for two years in an effort to study life within an artificial ecosystem. Infighting and low morale split the crew, and when the team's term was over, the two sides didn't speak for 10 years.

Isolation in space is fraught with similar pressure points. Personality clashes among crew members can lead to the creation of rival subgroups. In international crews, cultural differences can worsen matters.

An unwelcome kiss

Khobikhozhin's crew in the 1999 simulated flight included four Russians, a German, an Austrian, a Japanese man and a Canadian woman.

When the crew celebrated New Year's Eve, one of the Russian men tried to kiss the Canadian woman, Khobikhozhin said.

The Russians chalked it up to revelry; the Canadian woman called it sexual harassment. To resolve the matter, the door handle to the Russian side of the hatch was removed to keep the Russian men from entering the woman's module.

The crew also lost sense of the passage of time, said Khobikhozhin, 56, now an engineer at the institute.

"There's no day or night," he said. "So you've got to make calculations in your head as to how much time has passed, and this creates stress."

In his book, "Diary of a Cosmonaut," Soviet cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev talked of stifling boredom, insomnia, spats with mission control and a crewmate with whom he rarely conversed during a 211-day Salyut 7 space station mission in 1982.

"I feel alarmed, uneasy and tired," Lebedev's Sept. 16, 1982, entry read. "I fell asleep but then woke up because of the sense of alarm I felt. We talk very little now. It's just silence on board."

A 17-month flight to Mars would more than double Lebedev's stay on Salyut 7 and surpass cosmonaut Valery Polyakov's record of 438 days on Mir. The European Space Agency has said it envisions sending a crew to Mars by 2030, while Russia's space agency, Roskosmos, has talked of a possible manned flight to Mars by 2035. NASA has said it wants to send a manned mission to Mars by 2037.

Re-creating the real thing

Organizers of the simulated 500-day Mars flight in Moscow will re-create almost every aspect of the real thing. Communication with mission control will be delayed by the same 40 minutes it would take transmissions to travel between Earth and a Mars-orbiting vehicle. For 500 days, the crew will be locked inside a set of four cylinder-shaped modules.

A 775-square-foot module will serve as living quarters. Another segment will house a workout room, sauna and storage space. A third will serve as a medical clinic. Cameras will monitor all areas except bedrooms and toilets.

A doctor will be selected as one of the crew. If the need for simple surgery arises, that physician will have the right instruments and be called on to perform the operation. The crew will eat the same dehydrated food used on space station missions and take on the same regimen of tasks and experiments envisioned for a flight to Mars.

The only characteristics of a Mars mission that the simulated flight won't re-create are weightlessness and space-borne radiation.

At least 4,800 people have applied for the experiment. Organizers are seeking those with backgrounds in medicine, biology and engineering. Gender makeup hasn't been decided.

"We're being very careful about this," said Albert Nechayev, an institute department chief involved in the experiment's preparations. "It could be an all-male crew, or it could be a combination."

Organizers are poring over applications, separating serious candidates from people solely out for a reality show experience and the experiment's $78,450 paycheck.

"Many of these people simply don't realize how much hard work they would face," said Viktor Baranov, the institute's first deputy director. "We thought that many of the institute's employees would apply. But they didn't, because they indeed do realize what's in store."

Alex Rodriguez

Chicagotribune.com, 29.10.2007
www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-space_rodriguezoct29,1,7746364.story