Packing For Mars Read Online Free PDF Page A

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