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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