10 years of research on the ISS and Mir as-
tronauts. “You have a boss who tells you to
do something, you can’t tell him off. You
go home and yell at your spouse,” he says.
Aboard the ISS, you yell at Jim in Houston.
On a trip to Mars, Jim will get farther
and farther away, and this planet’s pale
blue point will grow smaller and smaller.
“Nobody knows what it will mean to an
astronaut to see Earth as an insignificant
dot,” Kanas says. Barring mission simu-
lations—sending astronauts to the moon
and pretending it’s Mars (which NASA has
no plans to invest in)—“we may just have to
wing it more than we’d like .”
Stuster thinks NASA is winging the
whole Mars thing more than it should. He
discovered a few years ago that the agency
didn’t even have a comprehensive list of
tasks the astronauts would perform on a
mission to the Red Planet, so they didn’t
know what kind of crew would do the best
job. One geologist or three? All or no Air
Force pilots? What would the spacesuits
be like? “Even the designers of yoga pants
and running shoes and hiking boots have
a firm understanding of the work that will
be performed,” he says. NASA had a proto-
type spacesuit, but no grasp of exactly what
astronauts will do while thusly attired.
That’s why, in December 2018, Stuster pro-
vided NASA with a report that identifies each
task, and assesses how hard it is to learn, how
often it needs to be done, and how important
it is. He based it on a mission that spends six
months in transit in each direction, and 18
months on the Martian surface, which until
recently had been NASA’s favored itinerary.
Now the agency leans toward a longercomplained about
chicken, since that
chicken may soon run
out!” a crewmember
food shortage.
travel time. More “are we there
yet?” moments and less time at
the destination would reduce en-
ergy and engineering expenses,
but Stuster believes those cuts
will have human costs. Based
on the rate of behavioral prob-
lems on earthly expeditions, he
estimates a 99 percent chance
that someone on a Mars mis-
sion will develop serious issues,
like depression so severe they
can no longer function as part
of the crew, or become a danger
to themselves. On Earth, you’d
send that someone to a hospi-
tal. Stuster and Kanas agree that
a Mars-bound ship should in-
clude restraints in its emergency
equipment. One of the required
tasks in Stuster’s 2018 report is
“Apply physical force and bind-
ing/duct tape, manually with the
help of another crewmember, to
restrain a crewmember experi-
encing a behavioral emergency.”
Even if everyone stays sane,
though, they won’t stay the
same. The longer the astro-
nauts spend together, absent
the influence of Earth, the more
they’ll form their own subcul-
ture. Stuster has noted that even
on the relatively short stays
aboard the ISS, crews morph
into communities with their
own social norms, such as fo-
cusing on overarching goals
rather than individual or na-
tional differences (something
we’re not great at down here).
Left without much outside in-
fluence, forced to get along in
a claustrophobic space, they
evolve new ways of interacting
that keep the peace and make
their mutual isolation tolerable.
Just imagine how much deeper
those conventions will become
when the community members
can no longer see their planet.
They’ll become Marslings.
Earthtians. No one knows, ex-
actly, what their private society
will endure to be among the first.THERE’S NO SPACE LIKE HOMEPG
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