Packing For Mars (4 page)

A SPACE STATION is a rangy monstrosity, a giant Erector Set assembled by a madman. But the living area inside the Mir core module, where cosmonauts Alexandr Laveikin and Yuri Romanenko spent six months together, would fit in a Greyhound bus. The sleep chambers are less like bedrooms than like phone booths. They have no doors. My interpreter Lena and I are inside a mock-up of the module, in the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, in Moscow. With us is Laveikin, who now runs the museum. Yuri Romanenko is on his way. I thought it would be interesting to talk with them inside the room that nearly drove them mad.

Laveikin looks little changed from his official portrait, where he conveys an impression of guileless good cheer. He kisses our hands as though we’re royalty. It’s neither affectation nor flirtation, just something that Russian men of his era were taught to do. He wears beige linen pants, a splash of cologne, and the cream-colored summer footwear I’ve been seeing all week on the feet of the men across from me in the Metro.

Laveikin waves hello to a narrow-girdled, suntanned man in jeans, with sunglasses hooked in the V of his shirt collar. It’s Romanenko. He is cordial, but not a hand-kisser. Cigarette smoke has roughed up his vocal cords. The two embrace. I count the seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three. Whatever happened between them, it’s forgotten or forgiven.

Sitting inside the mock-up, it is easy to imagine how a room this size, for that long, could set two men against each other. Romanenko points out that enclosed spaces are not a necessary ingredient for feeling trapped with someone. “Siberia is a big, big space here in Russia. But our hunters who go to taiga [forest] for half year, they’re trying to go on their own, just with a dog.” Romanenko sits where he used to sit on Mir, in the left-hand spot at the control console, on a backless seat with a bar for hooking one’s feet. (Later space stations dispensed with seats, because zero gravity dispenses with sitting.) “Because if there are two or three of you go, it will be conflict.”

“And this way,” Laveikin grins, “you can eat the dog at the end.”

Psychologists use the term “irrational antagonism” to describe what happens between people isolated together for more than about six weeks. A 1961 Aerospace Medicine paper included a fine example, from the diary of a French anthropologist who spent four months in the Arctic with a Hudson’s Bay fur trader:

I liked Gibson as soon as I saw him…. He was a man of poise and order, he took life calmly and philosophically…. But as winter closed in around us, and week after week our world narrowed until it was reduced to the dimensions of a trap…I began to rage inwardly and the very traits…which in the beginning had struck me as admirable, ultimately seemed to me detestable. The time came when I could no longer bear the sight of this man who was unfailingly kind to me. That calm which I had once admired I now called laziness, that philosophic imperturbability became in my eyes insensitiveness. The meticulous organization of his existence was maniacal old-manliness. I could have murdered him.

Likewise, Admiral Richard Byrd preferred to carry out his winter-long weather observations in Antarctica by himself, in perilous conditions and twenty-four-hour darkness, rather than face, as he put it in Alone, the moment when “one has nothing left to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool, and the way he blows out a pressure lamp or drops his boots on the floor or eats his food becomes a rasping annoyance.”

Other people are just one of the psychological hardships that space serves up. Norbert Kraft summed it up nicely. I had asked him if he thought being an astronaut was the best or the worst job in the world. “You’re sleep-deprived, and you have to perform perfectly or else you don’t fly anymore. As soon as you’re done with something, ground control is telling you something else to do. The bathroom stinks, and you have noise all the time. You can’t open a window. You can’t go home, you can’t be with your family, you can’t relax. And you’re not well paid. Can you get a worse job than that?”

Laveikin says his 1987 stint on Mir was a hundred times harder than what he had expected. “It’s hard work, dirty work. Very noisy, very hot.” He had motion sickness for more than a week and no drugs to help him through it. He recalls turning to his commander during the first few days, saying, “Yuri. And we will stay here for half year?” To which Romanenko, using Laveikin’s nickname, replied, “Sasha, but people stay in prisons for ten years or more.”

The bottom line is that space is a frustrating, ungiving environment, and you are trapped in it. If you’re trapped long enough, frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim. An astronaut has three from which to choose: a crewmate, Mission Control, and himself. Astronauts try not to vent at each other because it makes a bad situation worse. There’s no front door to slam or driveway to speed out of. You’re soaking in it. “Also,” says Jim Lovell, who spent two weeks on a loveseat with Frank Borman during Gemini VII, “you’re in a risky business and you depend on each other to stay alive. So you don’t antagonize the other guy.”

Laveikin and Romanenko say they managed to avoid frictions because of the clear hierarchy afforded by age and rank. “Yuri is older than me and had experience of spaceflight,” Laveikin is saying. “So naturally he was the leader, the psychological leader. I was following him. And I accepted this role. Our flight was calm.”

This is difficult to believe. “You never got mad?”

“Of course,” says Romanenko. “But mainly it was flight control center’s fault.” Romanenko went with option 2. Venting your frustration at Mission Control personnel is a time-honored astronaut tradition, known in psychology circles as “displacement.” Sometime around the sixth week of a mission, says University of California, San Francisco, space psychiatrist Nick Kanas, astronauts begin to withdraw from their crewmates, become territorial, and displace their hostility for each other onto Mission Control.

Jim Lovell seemed to do most of his displacing on the Gemini VII nutritionist. “Note to Dr. Chance,” says Lovell to Mission Control at one point in the mission transcript. “It looks like we’re in a snow storm with crumbs from the beef sandwiches. At 300 dollars a meal! I think you can do better than this.” Seven hours later, he gets back on the mic: “Another memo to Dr. Chance: Chicken with vegetables, Serial Number FC680, neck is almost sealed shut. You can’t even squeeze it out…. Continuing same memo to Dr. Chance: Just opened the seals; chicken with vegetables all over window at this time.”

Lovell’s mission was only two weeks long. Was the capsule’s tiny size accelerating the effects of confinement? Kanas knew of no formal studies, but he confirmed that the smaller the craft, generally speaking, the tenser the astronauts.

Displacement perhaps explains why Judith Lapierre’s anger was directed more at IBMP and the Canadian Space Agency than at the Russian commander, whose actions she put down to cross-cultural misunderstanding and “natural man-woman situations.” Though it’s also easy to believe she directed her anger toward IBMP because they were being popkas.

Romanenko retains some residual steam to this day. “People who prepared tasks for us, they have no idea what on board is like. Say you are running something here”—he turns to indicate the Mir control console—“and somebody gives you an order to switch on something else. They don’t understand it’s over on the other side, and I can’t leave what I do here and go there.” (This is why space agencies tend to use astronauts as “cap coms”—capsule communicators.) According to Robert Zimmerman’s history of the Soviet space stations, Romanenko had, by the final stages of the mission (after Laveikin left), grown so “testy” with the flight control center that his crewmates took over all communications with the ground.

Alexandr Laveikin took the third option. He turned the hostility inward. The result, familiar to any psychologist who deals with isolated, confined populations, is depression. Later, after Romanenko leaves, Laveikin confides that there were moments when he thought about suicide. “I wanted to hang myself. Of course, it’s impossible because of weightlessness.”

Romanenko predicts trouble on a Mars mission. “Five hundred days,” he says with evident horror. Romanenko remained for another four months after Laveikin left. Zimmerman writes that he became increasingly unstable and uncooperative, “devoting his time to writing poems and songs” and exercising. I ask Lena to ask him about this phase of the mission. Earlier, I had told her I’d like to hear some of the songs Romanenko composed in space, and this is what she asks about.

“You want us to sing?” Romanenko laughs his grainy laugh. “We would need fifty grams of whiskey!” I apologize for not having brought any.

“I have it,” Laveikin says. “In my office.”

It’s 11 A.M. But I am not Jerry Linenger.

Laveikin leads us through the museum, narrating as he walks. Here are the giants of Soviet rocketry, one per glass display case. Earlier today, I visited a Moscow natural history museum, and sections of it were arranged in this way—not by taxonomy or ecological niche, but by guy: field notebooks from expeditions, some prized specimens, honors from the tsar. The rocket engineers are represented largely by accessories: pens and wristwatches, eyeglasses and flasks.

In his office, Laveikin sits down to look on his computer for a recording of a song Romanenko wrote while on board Mir. The surface of his desk is mostly empty. An appendage like a gangplank protrudes from the front of it. Laveikin gets up to unlock a liquor cabinet and sets down a bottle of Grant’s whiskey and four crystal shot glasses on the plank. It’s a bar. In Russia you can buy a desk with a built-in bar!

Laveikin raises his glass. “To…” He searches for the words in English. “A nice psychological situation!”

We clink our glasses and empty them. Laveikin refills them. Romanenko’s song is playing, and Lena translates: “Sorry Earth, we say good-bye to you…our ship is going upwards…. But the time will come when we will drop into the blueness of the dawn, as a morning star.” And the chorus: “I will fall into the grass and fill my lungs with air. I will drink water from the river….” It’s a catchy pop tune, and I’m bopping in my seat until I notice that the lyrics are making Lena sad. “I will kiss the ground, I will hug my friends….” Lena wipes a tear as the song ends.

People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty”—a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines* and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.

Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend hours tending experimental greenhouses. “They are our love,” said cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov of the tiny flax plants* with which they shared the confines of Salyut 1, the first Soviet space station. At least in orbit, you can look out the window and see the natural world below. On a Mars mission, once astronauts lose sight of Earth, there’ll be nothing to see outside the window. “You’ll be bathed in permanent sunlight, so you won’t even see any stars,” astronaut Andy Thomas explained to me. “All you’ll see is black.”

Humans don’t belong in space. Everything about us evolved for life on Earth. Weightlessness is an exhilarating novelty, but floaters soon begin to dream of walking. Earlier Laveikin told us, “Only in space do you understand what incredible happiness it is just to walk. To walk on Earth.”

Romanenko missed the smells of Earth. “Can you imagine being even one week in a locked car? Smell of metal. Smell of paint, rubber. When girls were writing us letters, they were putting drops of French perfume on there. We loved those letters. If you smell a letter from a girl before you go to bed, you see good dreams.” Romanenko finishes his whiskey and excuses himself. He hugs Laveikin again and shakes our hands.

I’m trying to imagine NASA filling resupply vehicles with sacks of love letters. Laveikin says it’s true. “From all over the Soviet Union, girls were writing letters.”

“To girls,” I say. Glasses are raised.

“You really feel the absence of a woman,” Laveikin tells us. With Romanenko gone, he speaks more freely. “There are sexual dreams, as a substitute. It’s constant through the flight. We were even discussing that maybe we have to take something from the sex shops. It was discussed at IBMP.”

I turn to Lena. What does he mean? “An artificial vagina?”

“Vagine?” asks Lena. A discussion ensues. Lena turns back to me. “A mock-up.”

Laveikin breaks into English, as he does sometimes to tweak a translation: “A rubber woman.” A blow-up doll. Ground control, he says, nixed the idea. “They said, ‘If you would do that, then we would need to put it in your schedule for the day.’

“We have a joke. You know we have food in tubes.” I do. Tubes of space borscht are on sale in the museum gift shop. “There are white and black tubes. On the white is written BLONDE. On black one: BRUNETTE.

“But please understand, sexual concerns are far from being the dominant concerns in space. It’s down here on the list.” With his hand, he indicates a level down by his knee. “It would just be a nice supplement. But when we talk about five hundred days, it’s true, this problem starts to grow higher on the list.” He believes a Mars crew should be made up of couples, to help ease the tension that builds during a long mission. According to Norbert Kraft, NASA has considered sending married couples into space. When they asked his opinion on the matter, he discouraged it. His reasoning was that an astronaut might find himself with an untenable choice: jeopardizing his spouse or jeopardizing the mission. Astronaut Andy Thomas, who is married to astronaut Shannon Walker, told me another reason NASA shies away from flying married couples. In the event of a crash or explosion, they don’t want one family to have to endure a double loss, particularly if the couple has children.