KEY POINTS:
Few endeavours can poke holes in the soft underbelly of the human psyche like long-duration space flight.
Hurtling through space at thousands of kilometres per hour is disquieting enough. But other catalysts for stress abound. Tedium and isolation wear away willpower. Crew squabbles can balloon into intra module civil war. The faces never change, and the smells only get worse.
At a Soviet-era research laboratory in northwest Moscow, scientists are readying an experiment that they hope will lead to a list of psychological do's and don'ts for what would be the world's most ambitious long-duration space flight: a manned flight to Mars in the next quarter-century.
Sometime in 2009, a crew of six will climb into simulation modules at the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The hatch doors will lock behind them, and for 500 days psychologists will study their behaviour, their body language, their hang-ups - and their ability to keep from cracking up.
Russian and European researchers are expected to select a crew by the middle of next year.
"It's your task to avoid nervous breakdowns," said Haider Khobikhozhin, who took part in a nine-month simulated flight at the institute in 1999. "You force yourself to control your emotions. You stop yourself from wishing to see the sun."
As mankind's ability to fly more distant missions into space increases, so does its need to brace for the psychological risks associated with those missions. Russia is the ideal place to perform that research.
Two-thirds of manned space travel has been logged by cosmonauts. Over the years, Russian mission control specialists have become experts at studying cosmonauts' facial cues and speech patterns for signs of psychological hiccups.
The ability to coexist with others in a cocoon of isolation for long stretches also has been probed in other settings. Psychologists have been assigned to US naval submarines to assess sleep patterns and adaptation to the undersea environment.
In 1991, Biosphere 2 enclosed a crew of eight inside a 3.15ha terrarium of rain forest, coral reef, savanna and wetland for two years in an effort to study life within an artificial ecosystem. Infighting and low morale split the crew, and when the team's term was over, the two sides didn't speak for 10 years.
Isolation in space is fraught with similar pressure points. Personality clashes among crew members can lead to the creation of rival subgroups. If the crew is international, cultural differences can make matters worse.
Khobikhozhin's crew in the 1999 simulated flight comprised four Russians, a German, an Austrian, a Japanese man and a Canadian woman. When the crew celebrated New Year's Eve, one of the Russian men tried to kiss the Canadian woman, Khobikhozhin said.
The Russians chalked it up to revelry; the Canadian woman called it sexual harassment. To resolve the matter, the door handle to the Russian side of the hatch was removed to keep the Russian men from entering the woman's module.
The crew also lost a sense of time, said Khobikhozhin, 56, now an engineer at the institute.
In his book, Diary of a Cosmonaut, Soviet cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev talked of stifling boredom, insomnia, spats with mission control and a crewmate with whom he rarely conversed during a 211-day Salyut 7 space station mission in 1982.
"I feel alarmed, uneasy and tired," Lebedev's September 16, 1982, entry read. "I fell asleep but then woke up because of the sense of alarm I felt. We talk very little now. It's just silence on board."
A 17-month flight to Mars would more than double Lebedev's stay on Salyut 7 and surpass cosmonaut Valery Polyakov's record of 438 days on Mir.
The European Space Agency has said it envisions sending a crew to Mars by 2030, while Russia's space agency, Roskosmos, has talked of a possible manned flight to Mars by 2035. Nasa has said it wants to send a manned mission to Mars by 2037.
Organisers of the simulated 500-day Mars flight in Moscow will recreate almost every aspect of the real thing. Communication with mission control will be delayed by the same 40 minutes it would take transmissions to travel between Earth and a Mars-orbiting vehicle. For 500 days, the crew will be locked inside a set of four cylinder-shaped modules.
A 236 square metre module will serve as living quarters. Cameras will monitor all areas except bedrooms and toilets.
The only characteristics of a Mars mission that the simulated flight won't re-create are weightlessness and space-borne radiation.
At least 4800 people have applied to take part in the experiment. Organisers are looking for people with backgrounds in medicine, biology and engineering. Gender makeup hasn't been decided yet.
Estate Agent On A Mission
A real estate agent whose sense of adventure was inspired by the travails of Apollo 13 hopes to be the first New Zealand woman in space.
Jackie Maw, from Christchurch, has booked her place on one of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic journeys. She will fly to Philadelphia on Monday for an intense two-day astronaut training course at the National Aerospace Training and Research (Nastar) centre in Philadelphia.
The trip, expected to be in late 2009 or early 2010, will take her 112km above the earth.
Virgin Galactic was launched in 2005, and it is expected its maiden voyage will take place in early 2009. The trips, costing around $300,000 a ticket, will launch six passengers and two crew from the Mojave desert, near Los Angeles, into space.
Ms Maw said she would be learning about the physiological effects of G-forces on the body, and getting used to weightlessness.
"I'm keen to see how going sub-orbital and getting back to earth again is going to impact on the body."
"I've always had a love of flight. I've flown in gliders, hang gliders, helicopters, and aerobatic planes. When I saw the movie Top Gun, I wanted to fly F14s. When I saw Apollo 13, I wanted to become an astronaut.
"I guess this is as close as I'm likely to get this lifetime."
- NZPA
