Packing For Mars Read Online Free PDF

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