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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Could you spend 378 days and nights in a darkened space, illuminated only by strip lighting and a window looking out on a fake planet, with just three colleagues for company? A week? OK, a night?
The four members of Nasa’s first Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (Chapea) mission lasted the full stretch, finally reappearing last week. They had 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 their co-workers, isolated from family and friends.
Space missions are rightly applauded for their bravery. While this crew did not endanger their lives, they certainly risked their sanity. By experiencing the 22-minute delay in communications that might occur on Mars, they were robbed of rapid connection with friends and partners. How excruciating to wait almost three-quarters of an hour for a response to your whinge about a co-worker’s huffing.
As a seasoned space expert, having watched all four seasons of Apple TV’s For All Mankind, a science fiction drama about the race to Mars, I worried for the crew’s mental fortitude. But as a Londoner, I baulked at descriptions of the Chapea habitation as cramped. Seventeen hundred square feet? Luxury.
Upon emerging, mission commander Kelly Haston’s delight was visible, not just because she was free but because, as she said, she had been “part of the work being done here on Earth that will one day enable humans to explore and live on Mars”. Another joked the time seemed to “fly by”.
Some of the downsides of such a trip were undoubtedly mitigated by the shared bonds of a scientific mission. But even a high-minded goal cannot stave off every grievance. In Diary of a Cosmonaut: 211 Days in Space, Russian astronaut Valentin Lebedev described the strained relations with crewmate Anatoly Berezovoy while they were aboard the Salyut-7 space station in 1982: “July 11: Today was difficult. I don’t think we understand what is going on with us. We silently pass each other, feeling offended.”
The end of a journey can be the hardest part. Researchers who study long voyages in space and at sea have described a third-quarter phenomenon in which workers feel their mood lowering as they pass the halfway mark — something I experienced in only week two of the Covid lockdown.
Lengthy missions are interesting because they show how people cope with working in extreme conditions — which is crucial in preventing accidents. But they also illuminate the universal features of work, including petty irritations with colleagues.
Kate Greene, a science journalist, wrote of 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 conditions of a Mars mission. “The cadence of a crewmate’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs, 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 so as to ever-so-gently tap me in the shin with her fuzzy slipper.” A fellow inhabitant “complained of another’s frequent throat clearing”.
In another year-long Hi-Seas mission in 2015, Sheyna Gifford, the health science officer, described the way her shrunken world became stridently utilitarian: “There is neither money nor anywhere to spend it, value is based almost solely on usefulness.”
Extreme colleaguing experiments show that success depends not just on talent and effort but also on good workplace relations. Planetary exploration might require scientific expertise but knowing when to zone out of a co-worker’s interminable anecdote must count for something.
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