Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void Read online

  An hour passes. One of the psychiatrists has stopped watching and turned his attention to the talk show. A young actor is being interviewed about his wedding and what kind of father he hopes to be. The candidates are bent over the table, working quietly. Applicant A, an orthopedist and aikido enthusiast, is in the lead with fourteen cranes. Most of the rest have managed seven or eight. The instructions are two pages long. My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane’s body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff beside an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense if you already know what to do. Otherwise, it’s wonderfully surreal: Put a cloud inside a bird.

  IT IS DIFFICULT, though delightful, to picture John Glenn or Alan Shepard applying his talents to the ancient art of paper-folding. America’s first astronauts were selected by balls and charisma. All seven Mercury astronauts, by requirement, were active or former test pilots. These were men whose nine-to-five involved breaking altitude records and sound barriers while nearly passing out and crashing in screaming-fast fighter jets. Up through Apollo 11, every mission included a major NASA first. First trip to space, first orbit, first spacewalk, first docking maneuver, first lunar landing. Seriously hairy shit was going down on a regular basis.

  With each successive mission, space exploration became a little more routine. To the point, incredibly, of boredom. “Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much,” wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. “Should have brought some crossword puzzles.” The close of the Apollo program marked a shift from exploration to experimentation. Astronauts traveled no farther than the fringes of the Earth’s atmosphere to assemble orbiting science labs—Skylab, Spacelab, Mir, ISS. They carried out zero-gravity experiments, launched communications and Defense Department satellites, installed new toilets. “Life on Mir was mostly mundane,” says astronaut Norm Thagard in the space history journal Quest. “Boredom was the most common problem I had.” Mike Mullane summed up his first Space Shuttle mission as “throwing a few toggle switches to release a couple comms satellites.” There are still firsts, and NASA proudly lists them, but they don’t make headlines. Firsts for shuttle mission STS-110, for instance, include “first time that all of a shuttle crew’s spacewalks were based from the station’s Quest Airlock.” “Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low Levels of Stimulation” is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle–era document drafted by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychological Selection of Astronauts.

  These days the astronaut job title has been split into two categories. (Three, counting payload specialist, the category into which teachers, boondoggling senators,* and junketing Saudi princes fall.) Pilot astronauts are the ones at the controls. Mission specialist astronauts carry out the science experiments, make the repairs, launch the satellites. They’re still the best and the brightest, but not by necessity the boldest. They’re doctors, biologists, engineers. Astronauts these days are as likely to be nerds as heroes. (JAXA astronauts on the ISS thus far have been classified as NASA mission specialists. The ISS includes a JAXA-built laboratory module, called Kibo.) The most stressful part of being an astronaut, Tachibana told me, is not getting to be an astronaut—not knowing whether or when you’ll get a flight assignment.

  The first time I spoke to an astronaut, I didn’t know about the pilot–mission specialist split. I pictured astronauts, all of them, as they were in the Apollo footage: faceless icons behind gold visors, bounding like antelopes in the moon’s weak gravity. The astronaut was Lee Morin. Mission Specialist Morin is a big, soft-spoken man. One foot turns in slightly as he walks. He was dressed in chinos and brown shoes the day we met. There were sailboats and hibiscus flowers on his shirt. He told me a story about how he helped test the lubricant for a launch-pad escape slide on the Space Shuttle. “They had us bend over and they brushed our butts with it. And then we jumped on the slide. And it passed, so [the shuttle mission] could go forward and the space station could be built. I was proud,” he deadpanned, “to do my part for the mission.”

  I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, “Oh my god, they’re just people.”

  NASA funding has depended in no small part upon the larger-than-life mythology. The imagery forged during Mercury and Apollo remains largely intact. In official NASA 8-by-10 astronaut glossies, many still wear spacesuits, still hold their helmets in their laps, as though at any moment the Johnson Space Center photography studio might inexplicably depressurize. In reality, maybe 1 percent of an astronaut’s career takes place in space, and 1 percent of that is done in a pressure suit. Morin was on hand that day as a member of the Cockpit Working Group for the Orion space capsule. He was helping figure out sight lines and optimal placement of computer displays. Between flights, astronauts spend their days in meetings and on committees, speaking at schools and Rotary clubs, evaluating software and hardware, working at Mission Control, and otherwise, as they say, flying a desk.

  Not that bravery has been entirely phased out. Those recommended astronaut attributes also include “Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.” If something goes wrong, everyone’s clarity of mind is needed. Some selection committees—the Canadian Space Agency’s, for instance—appear to put greater emphasis on disaster coping skills. Highlights of CSA’s 2009 astronaut selection testing were posted in installments on the Web site home page. It was reality television. The candidates were sent to a damage-control training facility, where they learned to escape burning space capsules and sinking helicopters. They leapt feetfirst into swimming pools from terrifying heights while wave generators pushed 5-foot swells. A percussive action-movie soundtrack ramped up the drama. (It is possible the footage had more to do with attracting media coverage than with the realities of choosing Canada’s next astronaut.)

  Earlier, I asked Tachibana whether he was planning to pull any surprises on his candidates, to see how they cope under the stress of a sudden emergency. He told me he had given thought to disabling the isolation chamber toilet. Again, not the answer I was expecting, but genius in its way. The footage might not play as well with a kettledrum soundtrack (and then again it might), but it’s a more apt scenario. A broken toilet is not only more representative of the challenges of space travel, but—as we’ll see in chapter 14—stressful in its own right.

  “Before you arrived yesterday,” Tachibana added, “we delayed lunch by one hour.” The little things can be big tells. Unaware that a late lunch or a malfunctioning toilet is part of the test, the applicants behave truer to character. When I first began this book, I applied to be a subject in a simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the month. The call came at 4:30 A.M., and I did not take care to hide my irritation. I realized later that it had probably been a test, and I had failed it.

  NASA uses similar tactics. They’ll call an applicant and tell her that they need to redo a couple tests on her physical and that they need to do it the following day. “What they’re really doing is saying, ‘Let’s see if they’ll drop everything to be one of us,’” says planetary geologist Ralph Harvey, whose Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program personnel sometimes apply for astronaut openings. (Antarctica is a useful analog for space, and people who thrive there are thought to be psychologically well equipped for the isolation and confinement of space travel.) Harvey recently got a call about one such applicant. “They said, ‘We’re going to give him a T-38 to fly for the first time tomorrow. And we’d like you to go along with him as an observer and tell us how you think he’s doing.’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. What they were doing was assessing my confidence level in the person.”

  Another reason to see how would-be astronauts handle stress is that options for reducing it are limited on board a spaceship. “Shopping, let’s say,�
� says Tachibana. “You cannot do such a thing.” Or drinking. “Or a long bath,” adds Kumiko Tanabe, who handles press and publicity for JAXA and thus, I suspect, takes lots of long baths.

  LUNCH HAS ARRIVED, and all ten candidates get up to unpack the containers and set out plates. They sit down again, but no one picks up chopsticks. You can tell they’re strategizing. Does taking the first bite show leadership, or does it suggest impatience and self-indulgence? Applicant A, the physician, comes up with what seems an ideal solution. “Bon appétit,” he says to the group. He picks up his chopsticks as the others do, but then waits for someone else to take the first bite. Canny. I’ve got my money on A.

  Here’s the other thing that’s changed since the heyday of space exploration. Crews aboard space shuttles and orbiting science labs are two or three times the size of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo crews, and the missions span weeks or months, not days. This makes the Mercury-era “right stuff” the wrong stuff. Astronauts have to be people who play well with others. NASA’s recommended astronaut attribute list includes an Ability to Relate to Others with Sensitivity, Regard, and Empathy. Adaptability, Flexibility, Fairness. Sense of Humor. An Ability to Form Stable and Quality Interpersonal Relationships. Today’s space agency doesn’t want guts and swagger. They want Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe.* Assertiveness has to be “Appropriate” and Risk-Taking Behavior has to be “Healthy.” The right stuff is no longer bravado, aggressiveness, and virility. Or as Patricia Santy, NASA’s first staff psychiatrist, put it in Choosing the Right Stuff, “narcissism, arrogance, and interpersonal insensitivity.” “Who,” she asks, “would want to work with a person like that?”

  As a gross overgeneralization, the Japanese are well suited to life on a space station. They’re accustomed to small spaces and limited privacy. They’re a lighter, more compact payload than the average American. Perhaps most important, they’re raised to be polite and to keep their emotions in check. My interpreter, Sayuri, a woman so considerate she wipes the lipstick off the edge of her teacup before handing it to the JAXA cafeteria dishwashers, says her parents used to tell her, “Don’t make waves on the quiet surface of the pond.” Being an astronaut, she noted, is “an extension of everyday life.” “They make excellent astronauts,” agreed Space Shuttle crew member Roger Crouch, whom I had been emailing during my stay in Japan.

  I ran my theory by Tachibana. We had gone down to the lobby to chat. We sat on low sofas arranged beneath portraits of the JAXA astronaut corps. “What you say is true,” he said, one knee bobbing up and down. (His boss told me when I’d visited earlier in the year that leg-bobbing is viewed as a red flag during astronaut selection interviews, along with failure to make eye contact. For the remainder of the conversation, the boss and I stared intently at each other across the table, both refusing to look away.) “We Japanese have a tendency to suppress emotion and try to cooperate, try to adapt, too much. I worry that some of our astronauts behave too much well.” Suppressing one’s feelings too tightly for too long takes a toll. You either explode or implode. “Most Japanese will become depressive rather than explosive,” says Tachibana. Fortunately, he adds, JAXA astronauts train with NASA astronauts for several years, and during those years “their character becomes somewhat more aggressive and like Americans.”

  In the previous isolation-chamber test, one applicant was eliminated because he expressed too much irritation and another because he was unable to express his irritation and acted it out passively. Tachibana and Inoue look for applicants who manage to achieve a balance. NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson strikes me as a good example. On NASA TV recently, I heard someone at NASA tell her that he could not find a series of photographs that she or some member of her crew had recently taken. If I’d spent the morning shooting photographs and the person I’d shot them for then misplaced them, I’d say, “Look again, lamb chop.” Whitson said, without a trace of irritation, “That’s not a problem. We can do them over.”

  Anything else to avoid should you wish to become an astronaut?

  Snoring, says Tachibana. If it’s loud enough, it can mean elimination from the selection process. “It wakes people up.”

  According to the Yangtse Evening Post, the medical screening for Chinese astronauts excludes candidates with bad breath. Not because it might suggest gum disease, but because, in the words of health screening official Shi Bing Bing, “the bad smell would affect their fellow colleagues in a narrow space.”

  LUNCH IS OVER, and two—now three, wait, four!—of the candidates are cleaning the surface of the table. I’m reminded of those brushless car washes where a small army of wiping employees descends on your vehicle as it exits the wash. But no one has to clean the dishes. The instructions are to put your dirty plates and utensils back inside the plastic tub labeled with your I.D. letter, and to put the tubs in the “airlock.” What the candidates don’t know is that the dirty dishes are then loaded onto a dolly and wheeled away to be photographed. The photos will be delivered to the psychiatrists and psychologists, along with the origami birds. I watched the photo shoot after last night’s meal. The photographer’s assistant opens each tub and holds a piece of cardboard printed with the candidate’s letter and the date just inside the bottom of the frame, as though the place setting had been picked up for a crime and was now being posed for a mug shot.

  Inoue was vague about the purpose. To see what they ate, he said. For what it’s worth, C didn’t eat her chicken skin, and G left the seaweed in his miso soup. E left half his soup and all his pickled vegetables. My man A ate everything and placed it back in the container in the same precise configuration in which it had arrived.

  “Look at G-san,” tutted the photographer. (“San” is a Japanese honorific, like our “Mr.” or “Ms.”) He lifted the pickle dish that G had placed on top of the dinner plate. “He’s hiding his skin.”

  I’m not sure I understand why it’s important that astronauts clean their plates and stack their dirty dishes. Tidiness is certainly important in a small space, but I think this is about something else. If I showed a stranger a list of the activities I’ve been observing these past few days and asked him to guess where I’d been, I doubt “space agency” would leap to mind. “Grade school” might. In addition to origami, the tests this week have involved building LEGO robots and making colored-pencil drawings of “Me and My Colleagues” (also destined for the mental health professionals’ in-boxes).

  Right now, H is on the TV screens, addressing his colleagues and the cameras. The activity is called “self-merits presentation.” I had expected something along the lines of a one-way job interview, a recitation of character strengths and job skills. This is more like a summer camp talent show act. C’s talent was singing songs in four languages. D did forty push-ups in thirty seconds.

  Adding to the overall schoolyard ambiance, the candidates wear pinnies. They’re the sort of thing kids used to wear during gym class to help them keep track of who’s on what team. These have candidates’ letters printed on them. They are for the observers. The lighting is poor and the camera rarely zooms in on faces, so it’s hard to figure out who’s talking. Before the pinnies went on, everyone was constantly leaning over and whispering to their neighbor. “Who’s that? E-san?” “I think it’s J-san.” “No, J-san is there, with the stripes.”

  H is saying: “I can ride a bike without holding the handle-bars.” Now he cups his hands together and puts his lips to his bent thumbs. After a few tries, he produces a low, dry, unmusical whistle. “I don’t have a skill like yours,” H says to B glumly. B just finished telling us about the badminton championship his team won and then pulling up the legs of his shorts to show off his thigh muscles.

  H sits down, and F stands up. F is one of three pilots in the group. “What is important in a pilot is communication.” After a solid start, the presentation takes an unexpected turn. F tells us that he often goes out drinking with his pals. “We go to places where ladies entertain. That helps to communicate and help break the
ice with the guys.” F opens his mouth wide. He’s doing something with his tongue. The psychiatrists lean toward the TVs. Sayuri’s eyebrows shoot up. “I do this for the ladies,” says F. Wha? Inoue pulls the zoom. F’s tongue is double-curled, like a pair of tacos. “For me it is an ice-breaking technique.”

  My guy A is up next. He tells us he is going to demonstrate an aikido technique and asks for a volunteer. D stands up. His pinnie is partly slipping off his shoulder like a bra strap. A says that when he was in college, the younger students would get so drunk they couldn’t move. “So I twist their arm to help them get up.” He grabs D’s wrist. D yelps, and everyone laughs.

  “They’re like frat boys,” I say to Sayuri. Tachibana is sitting beside Sayuri, who explains “frat boy” to him.

  “To tell you the truth,” Tachibana says, “astronaut is a kind of college student.” He is given assignments. Decisions are made for him. Going into space is like attending a very small, very elite military boarding school. Instead of sergeants and deans, there is space agency management. It’s hard work, and you better stick to the rules. Don’t talk about other astronauts. Don’t use cuss words.* Never complain. As in the military, wave-makers are leaned on hard or sent away.