The Perilous Psychology of Isolation and Confinement
Mars is upstairs on the left. The Martian Surface Simulator is one of five locked, interconnected modules that comprise the mission simulation known as Mars500—the number referring to the days needed for a round-trip spin and a four-month stay on Mars. The simulation is taking place on the ground floor of Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP), Russia’s main aerospace medicine research facility. The crew have been paid 15,000 euros each to be subjects in a battery of psychology experiments aimed at understanding and counteracting the baneful effects of being trapped in a small, artificial environment with roommates you did not choose.
Today they “land.” Television crews are running up and down the stairs, looking for the best place to plant their tripods. “At first they are all down there,” says a bemused IBMP staffer who has been posted on the mezzanine above the Habitable Module. “And now you see the small anthill here.”
A recording of military fanfare and some last-minute reportorial elbowing heralds the opening of the hatch. The six men step outside and smile at the cameras. They are accustomed to being filmed. They’ve been monitored day and night for the past three months. (The shorter isolation served as a practice run for the 500-day simulation scheduled to start in 2010.) The crewmen wave until it begins to seem silly and one by one they drop their arms. They are dressed in blue “flight suits.” Walking back to the subway later, I pass the grounds staff of a neighboring apartment complex dressed in the same blue coveralls, bestowing the fleeting impression that cosmonauts are moonlighting as gardeners and handymen.
Isolation-chamber experiments have been a lucrative cottage industry at IBMP for decades. I came across a paper from 1969, detailing a yearlong simulated mission to an unstated destination. The setup was similar to Mars500, though with small, entrancing exceptions, like the “self-massage” that ended each day. The article ran in an academic journal, but you felt as though you were paging through a sort of homosexual Ladies’ Home Journal. Photographs show the three men preparing dinner, tending plants in the greenhouse, listening to the radio in their turtlenecks and sweater vests, and cutting one another’s hair. The journal paper made no mention of spats or maladaptive symptomology, of Bozhko going after Ulybyshev with the barber scissors. The papers rarely include these details. Press conferences don’t either. Press conferences are a time for canned speeches and upbeat generalities.
Like this: “We had no problems, no conflicts,” Mars500 Commander Sergei Ryazansky is saying. The press conference is being held in a room on the second floor, meaning that most of the camera crews had to fold up their tripods and charge back up the stairwell, affording yet more glee for IBMP staff. There are maybe 200 chairs for 300 bottoms.
“Everyone was supporting each other.” After ten minutes of fluff from Ryazansky, a reporter lays it out: “We in the media would like to have some gossip. Can you give some examples of personal tensions?”
They cannot. Pretend astronauts have to be discreet because many of them want to be real astronauts. The Mars500 crew includes one aspiring European astronaut, one aspiring cosmonaut, and two cosmonauts awaiting flight assignments. Volunteering for a simulated mission is a way to show the space agencies you’ve got at least some of what it takes: A willingness to adapt to a situation, rather than trying to change it. Tolerance for confinement and stripped-down living conditions. Emotional stability. An accommodating family.
Another reason Ryazansky won’t gossip about his crewmates is that, like most isolation chamber volunteers, he signed a confidentiality agreement. Space agencies want to know what happens when you lock people in a box with no privacy and not enough sleep and depressing food, but they are wary of letting the rest of us know. “If a space agency comes out and says, ‘Oh, all of these problems happen,’ then people say, ‘Oh, all of these problems happen! Why do we go to space? It’s too risky!’” says Norbert Kraft, a physician who now researches group psychology and productivity on long-duration missions for NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. “The agencies try to keep the best image up, otherwise they don’t get funded anymore.” What happens in the Habitable Module stays in the Habitable Module.
Unless someone blabs, as happened the last time IBMP hosted an isolation. SFINCSS (Simulated Flight of International Crew on Space Station) made minor headlines in 1999 when stories of drunken brawling and sexual assault were leaked to the press. The current crew has obviously been coached for discretion.
“Our personal training allowed us to avoid any conflicts,” Ryazansky continues. “Reactions to emotions were really respectful and really, really polite.” All around the room, journalists begin to realize they’ve traveled hundreds of miles for a nonstory. Soon there are enough chairs for everyone.
The SFINCSS “incidents” took place three months into the isolation, when crews in separate modules “docked.” One crew consisted of four Russians; the other was (intentionally) a cross-cultural grab bag: a Canadian woman, a Japanese man, a Russian man, and their commander, Austrian-born Norbert Kraft. At 2:30 A.M. on New Year’s Day, 2000, the Russian crew commander, Vasily Lukyanyuk, pushed Canadian crew member Judith Lapierre out of range of the cameras and French-kissed her twice, against her protestations. Shortly before the kissing incident, two other Russian subjects got into a fistfight that left the walls spattered with blood. In the aftermath, the hatch between the two modules was shut, the Japanese crew member quit, and Lapierre complained to IBMP and to the Canadian Space Agency. IBMP psychologists, she says, were unsupportive, accusing her of overreacting. Despite having signed a confidentiality agreement and aspiring to become an astronaut, Lapierre told her story to the press. To quote IBMP psychologist Valery Gushin, she “washed her dirty clothes in public.”
By the time I contacted Lapierre, she was done with her laundry. She confirmed the basic facts and referred me to her SFINCSS commander, Norbert Kraft. Kraft has spent time on both sides of the closed-circuit TVs—as a consultant on an isolation test at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and doing time in SFINCSS. He volunteered, he said, out of a desire to know what it’s like for the subjects he monitors. Kraft possesses a delightful, free-range curiosity. His SFINCSS bio states that he enjoys waltzing, scuba-diving, cooking black cherry cake, and tending a Japanese stone garden. He was happy to drive all the way up to Oakland from Mountain View to talk with me, because, he said, “it’s something different.”
Kraft’s portrayal of the events was more nuanced than those in the newspapers. Lapierre was less a victim of sexual harassment than of institutional sexism. To paraphrase Gushin, Russian men prefer that women act like women, not equals—even if they’re astronauts. According to Soviet/Russian space program historian Peter Pesavento, U.S. astronaut Helen Sherman was criticized by her crewmates on Mir for what was perceived as an overly professional demeanor—i.e., she didn’t flirt. In the decades after Valentina Tereshkova snagged the “First Woman in Space” title for the Soviet Union, in 1963, only two women have flown as cosmonauts. The first, Svetlana Savitskaya, was handed a floral-print apron when she floated through the Salyut hatch.
From the beginning, the IBMP staff and psychologists had been dismissive of Lapierre. They didn’t take her seriously as a researcher, because, Kraft says, she’s a woman. Not helping: language barriers. Lapierre spoke little Russian and “ground control” spoke little English.* Inside the Russian module, only the commander could converse easily in English. He was kind to Lapierre, and Kraft believes she saw him as a potential ally in her efforts to gain the Russians’ respect. Thus she did what she could to foster the bond. She was friendly, says Kraft, in a way that Russian women are usually not: sitting on his lap, kissing him on the cheek. “She was sending the wrong signal, but she didn’t see it.”
Kraft says Lapierre was unjustly blamed for the Japanese participant quitting. The man, Masataka Umeda, claimed to have acted out of solidarity with Lapierre. Kraft says Umeda shut the hatch because he was bothered by the Russian crew watching porn and that he had been looking for an excuse to bail.
I might have looked for one too. Along with the considerable stress of confinement, sleep deprivation, language and cultural gaps, and lack of privacy, more subtle torments plagued the crew. The shower room had cockroaches and no hot water. Night after night, dinner was kasha (“wheat gruel,” Lapierre called it). “Mice came through the floor and mold crawled up the conduits,” said Kraft in an email that included six photographs, one with the caption “Hairlice.” The lice outbreak didn’t bother Kraft—“It’s something new”—and the Russian crew calmly shaved their heads. Lapierre had to cope not only with the stress of lice, but with the IBMP staff’s response. “The Russians said, ‘Judy got a package from Canada that included the lice,’” Kraft recalls.
As producers of reality television know, there is no more reliable way to ignite smoldering frustrations than to douse them in alcohol. On the record, there was only one bottle of champagne, provided by IBMP for the 2000 Millennium Eve. In reality, there were many bottles, not just champagne, but vodka and cognac. Kraft says they find their way into isolation chambers as bribes. If you want the Russian volunteers to do a good job with your research, he says, you “better pack vodka and a salami with your experiment.”
Apparently this was also the case on Soviet and Russian space labs. Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration: “I complied strictly with the NASA policy of no alcohol consumption on duty.”) On long Russian missions, Kraft says, “You better hide the disinfectant.” While I was in Russia, a cosmonaut, who requested anonymity, showed me one of his slides from space: two crew members with straws, floating on either side of a 5-liter tank of cognac like teenagers sharing a malt.
Though the press coverage of SFINCSS put IBMP and the space agencies on the defensive, the researchers were pleased to be, as JAXA psychologist Natsuhiko Inoue put it, “getting very unique results.” This was, after all, a study of group interactions on cross-cultural missions. “The incident,” Inoue told me in an email, “brought us very many valuable insights on future crew selection and training.” Mostly commonsense stuff. Make sure they speak a common language well enough to communicate. Check out how well they work as a team. Choose people with a resilient sense of humor. Give everyone a crash course in cross-cultural etiquette. Someone should have warned Lapierre, for example, that “it’s nothing” (Gushin’s words) for a Russian man to kiss a woman at a party. And that if you want him to stop, you slap him. That “no” means “maybe.” And that when Russian men bloody each other’s noses, it’s “a friendly fight.” (Kraft confirmed this surprising item. “It’s how they settle disputes. They did it on Mir.”)
No matter how thoroughly you try to anticipate cross-cultural clashes, something’s bound to be overlooked. Ralph Harvey, who oversees teams of meteorite hunters at remote field camps in Antarctica, told me about a Spanish team member with a habit of plucking hairs from his head and holding them in the flame of the camp stove. “In Spain,” the man explained, “the barbers burn the tips of your hair, and I like the smell.” For the first week, his tentmate was amused, but it soon became a source of friction. “It’s on the questionnaire now,” joked Harvey. “Do you burn your own hair for fun?”
Kraft believes the media coverage of SFINCSS was beneficial in that it provided a rare honest portrayal of the emotions that develop among men and women confined together in space. He takes issue with the way space agencies portray astronauts as superhuman. “As if they don’t have any hormones, they don’t have any feelings for anybody.” It comes back yet again to a fear of negative publicity and diminished funding. The danger is that an organization invested in downplaying psychological problems is unlikely to spend much time investigating solutions to those problems. “Until,” as Kraft puts it, “one of the astronauts goes with diapers* across the U.S. Now they are people suddenly!” (Two days after astronaut Lisa Nowak’s infamous confrontation with love rival Colleen Shipman, NASA ordered a review of its psychological screening and evaluation processes for astronauts.)
Making things worse: Astronauts themselves try to hide emotional problems, out of fear they’ll be grounded. Access to psychologists is available during missions, but crew are reluctant to make use of it. “Every communication to them means a special notice in your flying book,” cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me. “So we were always trying not to ask for specialists’ help.” Laveikin’s Mir mission with Yuri Romanenko was mentioned in a Quest article by Peter Pesavento on the psychological effects of space travel. Pesavento says Laveikin returned early from the mission due to “interpersonal issues and cardiac irregularity.” (I was to meet with Laveikin and Romanenko the next day.)
It’s a dangerous state of affairs. If someone on board a spacecraft is reaching the breaking point, it’s important for ground control to know about it. People’s lives depend on them knowing that. This perhaps explains why so many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it. If technologies being tested on Mars500 pan out, spacecraft—and other high-stress, high-risk workplaces like air-traffic control towers—will be outfitted with microphones and cameras hooked up to automated optical and speech-monitoring technology. The robotic spies can detect telltale changes in facial expressions or speech patterns and, hopefully, help those in command to avert a crisis.
The stigma of psychological problems also makes them difficult to study. Astronauts are reluctant to sign on as study subjects, lest the researchers uncover something unflattering. The last time I spoke to NASA consulting psychologist Pam Baskins, she was about to begin an experiment comparing different sleep medications and dosages. The astronauts were to be woken from a sound sleep to see how the drugs affected their ability to function in a simulated middle-of-the-night emergency. It appealed to my sense of fun, and I asked if I could come watch. “Absolutely not,” replied Baskins. “It took me a year to convince these guys to participate.”