Flying with Strangers: Postmission Reflections of Multinational Space Crewsforeign colleagues sometimes considered them to be reluctant to do work that was
not within the pay-for-action agreement and to do anything that might foil the
completion of an agreed-upon paid task.^23
Although it is certainly likely that cultural “root causes” (especially those stem-
ming from differences between Russian and Western cultures) may underlie some of
the frictions between majority and minority crewmembers, the host-guest dichot-
omy may have caused more problems than cultural or national diversity per se. If
so, a completely different picture may emerge within a truly international facility
such as the ISS when it becomes fully operational.
There is another possible explanation. Valentin Lebedev, a long-duration Mir
cosmonaut, recognized a difference between his reactions to foreign and to com-
patriot visitors. Concerning one of the former, he wrote, “It’s nice to have guests,
but they make you tired,” even though most of his comments about his French col-
league were positive; commenting on an upcoming visit by fellow Russian cosmo-
nauts, he wrote, “I think it will be easier with this visiting crew; they won’t disturb
us as much . . . .”^24 It may be that it is not nationality but familiarity that makes a
visitor more welcome, so that more extensive pre-mission training and joint activ-
ities might erase or at least diminish the invidious difference.
Self-Report StudiesKanas and Manzey summarized the few studies using self-report measures by
space voyagers who had flown in foreign company.^25 Although there have been sev-
eral simulation and analog studies (respectively, group isolation experiments in spe-
cially designed settings and field studies in isolated areas such as the polar regions
and undersea habitats), data from actual spaceflight are scarce. Participants have
reported miscommunications due to both spoken and nonverbal interaction styles,
abrasive differences in leadership decision-making, differences in work patterns,
- Ibid.
- Lebedev, Diary of a Cosmonaut, pp. 101 and 189, respectively.
- Kanas and Manzey, Space Psychology and Psychiatry.