“In space, no one can hear you scream.”
“In space, no one can hear you scream.”
— Ad slogan for the movie “Alien,” 1979
As it turns out, that’s not entirely true. In space, we imagine, everyone can hear you scream.
That’s the lesson we’d draw from several previous space colonization experiments here on Earth in which an elite crew of scientists was cooped up for months without the chance of escape to, say, a Starbucks down the street.
Oh, the horror.
Now there’s a new NASA-funded mission to explore this treacherous psychological terrain. NASA plunked a crew of four men and two women into a tiny, vinyl-covered opaque dome on Mauna Loa. The scientists will spend the next eight months inside the 1,200-square-foot dome as part of a human-behavior (or, we imagine, human misbehavior) study to help NASA plan for how to help astronauts survive long space flights.
“We’re hoping to figure out how best to select individual astronauts, how to compose a crew and how to support that crew on long-duration space missions,” said principal investigator Kim Binsted, a science professor at the University of Hawaii, which operates the dome called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS.
The crew will eat mostly freeze-dried foods, canned goods and snacks shipped in, the Associated Press reports. Crew members won’t be confined to the dome but will wear spacesuits when they venture outside. Their food will be delivered at a distance, and they’ll send a robot to retrieve the bundles. Most important: These scientists will wear instruments around their necks that gauge their moods and their proximity to other team members. The crew will have virtual reality devices to create familiar and comforting surroundings to help them escape the tedium of … reality.
We wish these crew members luck. We hope they get along. But if the history of similar projects is any guide, we don’t expect them to emerge eight months from now singing “Kumbaya.”
Major case in point: The early 1990s experiment known as Biosphere 2. It was a prototype for a space colony. Among its problems, oxygen ran low and so did food. Then, like an episode of “Survivor,” the “Biospherians” split into two rival tribes.
The Chicago Tribune reported in 2005: At their lowest point, the scientists inside were gasping for breath between every sentence, squabbling about dwindling food supplies and frantically chasing the cockroaches so they could feed them to their emaciated chickens. By the end, the Biospherians lost an average of 13.5 percent of their body weight. “We were all starving and suffocating, so it was hard not to be crabby,” said Linda Leigh, 53, one of the original Biospherians who is now an administrator at Central Arizona College.
We love the idea of colonizing Mars. But NASA officials or anyone else recruiting a corps of astronauts need to anticipate the inevitable personality conflicts that will emerge in a long isolation. As a researcher on a similar Russian long-duration spaceflight project said in 2011: “ … flies can turn into elephants in space … ”
Suggestion: Send along a psychologist-astronaut. Or a kindergarten teacher. Someone who’s good with people, not just tools, to keep the screaming down.
— Chicago Tribune