Mars is upstairs on the left. The Martian Surface Simulator is one of five locked, interconnected modules that comprise the mission simulation known as Mars500—the number referring to the days needed for a round-trip spin and a four-month stay on Mars. The simulation is taking place on the ground floor of Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP), Russia’s main aerospace medicine research facility. The crew have been paid 15,000 euros each to be subjects in a battery of psychology experiments aimed at understanding and counteracting the baneful effects of being trapped in a small, artificial environment with roommates you did not choose.

Today they “land.” Television crews are running up and down the stairs, looking for the best place to plant their tripods. “At first they are all down there,” says a bemused IBMP staffer who has been posted on the mezzanine above the Habitable Module. “And now you see the small anthill here.”

A recording of military fanfare and some last-minute reportorial elbowing heralds the opening of the hatch. The six men step outside and smile at the cameras. They are accustomed to being filmed. They’ve been monitored day and night for the past three months. (The shorter isolation served as a practice run for the 500-day simulation scheduled to start in 2010.) The crewmen wave until it begins to seem silly and one by one they drop their arms. They are dressed in blue “flight suits.” Walking back to the subway later, I pass the grounds staff of a neighboring apartment complex dressed in the same blue coveralls, bestowing the fleeting impression that cosmonauts are moonlighting as gardeners and handymen.

Isolation-chamber experiments have been a lucrative cottage industry at IBMP for decades. I came across a paper from 1969, detailing a yearlong simulated mission to an unstated destination. The setup was similar to Mars500, though with small, entrancing exceptions, like the “self-massage” that ended each day. The article ran in an academic journal, but you felt as though you were paging through a sort of homosexual Ladies’ Home Journal. Photographs show the three men preparing dinner, tending plants in the greenhouse, listening to the radio in their turtlenecks and sweater vests, and cutting one another’s hair. The journal paper made no mention of spats or maladaptive symptomology, of Bozhko going after Ulybyshev with the barber scissors. The papers rarely include these details. Press conferences don’t either. Press conferences are a time for canned speeches and upbeat generalities.

Like this: “We had no problems, no conflicts,” Mars500 Commander Sergei Ryazansky is saying. The press conference is being held in a room on the second floor, meaning that most of the camera crews had to fold up their tripods and charge back up the stairwell, affording yet more glee for IBMP staff. There are maybe 200 chairs for 300 bottoms.

“Everyone was supporting each other.” After ten minutes of fluff from Ryazansky, a reporter lays it out: “We in the media would like to have some gossip. Can you give some examples of personal tensions?”

They cannot. Pretend astronauts have to be discreet because many of them want to be real astronauts. The Mars500 crew includes one aspiring European astronaut, one aspiring cosmonaut, and two cosmonauts awaiting flight assignments. Volunteering for a simulated mission is a way to show the space agencies you’ve got at least some of what it takes: A willingness to adapt to a situation, rather than trying to change it. Tolerance for confinement and stripped-down living conditions. Emotional stability. An accommodating family.

Another reason Ryazansky won’t gossip about his crewmates is that, like most isolation chamber volunteers, he signed a confidentiality agreement. Space agencies want to know what happens when you lock people in a box with no privacy and not enough sleep and depressing food, but they are wary of letting the rest of us know. “If a space agency comes out and says, ‘Oh, all of these problems happen,’ then people say, ‘Oh, all of these problems happen! Why do we go to space? It’s too risky!’” says Norbert Kraft, a physician who now researches group psychology and productivity on long-duration missions for NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. “The agencies try to keep the best image up, otherwise they don’t get funded anymore.” What happens in the Habitable Module stays in the Habitable Module.

Unless someone blabs, as happened the last time IBMP hosted an isolation. SFINCSS (Simulated Flight of International Crew on Space Station) made minor headlines in 1999 when stories of drunken brawling and sexual assault were leaked to the press. The current crew has obviously been coached for discretion.

“Our personal training allowed us to avoid any conflicts,” Ryazansky continues. “Reactions to emotions were really respectful and really, really polite.” All around the room, journalists begin to realize they’ve traveled hundreds of miles for a nonstory. Soon there are enough chairs for everyone.

The SFINCSS “incidents” took place three months into the isolation, when crews in separate modules “docked.” One crew consisted of four Russians; the other was (intentionally) a cross-cultural grab bag: a Canadian woman, a Japanese man, a Russian man, and their commander, Austrian-born Norbert Kraft. At 2:30 A.M. on New Year’s Day, 2000, the Russian crew commander, Vasily Lukyanyuk, pushed Canadian crew member Judith Lapierre out of range of the cameras and French-kissed her twice, against her protestations. Shortly before the kissing incident, two other Russian subjects got into a fistfight that left the walls spattered with blood. In the aftermath, the hatch between the two modules was shut, the Japanese crew member quit, and Lapierre complained to IBMP and to the Canadian Space Agency. IBMP psychologists, she says, were unsupportive, accusing her of overreacting. Despite having signed a confidentiality agreement and aspiring to become an astronaut, Lapierre told her story to the press. To quote IBMP psychologist Valery Gushin, she “washed her dirty clothes in public.”

By the time I contacted Lapierre, she was done with her laundry. She confirmed the basic facts and referred me to her SFINCSS commander, Norbert Kraft. Kraft has spent time on both sides of the closed-circuit TVs—as a consultant on an isolation test at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and doing time in SFINCSS. He volunteered, he said, out of a desire to know what it’s like for the subjects he monitors. Kraft possesses a delightful, free-range curiosity. His SFINCSS bio states that he enjoys waltzing, scuba-diving, cooking black cherry cake, and tending a Japanese stone garden. He was happy to drive all the way up to Oakland from Mountain View to talk with me, because, he said, “it’s something different.”

Kraft’s portrayal of the events was more nuanced than those in the newspapers. Lapierre was less a victim of sexual harassment than of institutional sexism. To paraphrase Gushin, Russian men prefer that women act like women, not equals—even if they’re astronauts. According to Soviet/Russian space program historian Peter Pesavento, U.S. astronaut Helen Sherman was criticized by her crewmates on Mir for what was perceived as an overly professional demeanor—i.e., she didn’t flirt. In the decades after Valentina Tereshkova snagged the “First Woman in Space” title for the Soviet Union, in 1963, only two women have flown as cosmonauts. The first, Svetlana Savitskaya, was handed a floral-print apron when she floated through the Salyut hatch.

From the beginning, the IBMP staff and psychologists had been dismissive of Lapierre. They didn’t take her seriously as a researcher, because, Kraft says, she’s a woman. Not helping: language barriers. Lapierre spoke little Russian and “ground control” spoke little English.^* Inside the Russian module, only the commander could converse easily in English. He was kind to Lapierre, and Kraft believes she saw him as a potential ally in her efforts to gain the Russians’ respect. Thus she did what she could to foster the bond. She was friendly, says Kraft, in a way that Russian women are usually not: sitting on his lap, kissing him on the cheek. “She was sending the wrong signal, but she didn’t see it.”

Kraft says Lapierre was unjustly blamed for the Japanese participant quitting. The man, Masataka Umeda, claimed to have acted out of solidarity with Lapierre. Kraft says Umeda shut the hatch because he was bothered by the Russian crew watching porn and that he had been looking for an excuse to bail.

I might have looked for one too. Along with the 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 publicity and diminished funding. The danger is that an organization invested in downplaying psychological problems is unlikely to spend much time investigating solutions to those problems. “Until,” as Kraft puts it, “one of the astronauts goes with diapers^* across the U.S. Now they are people suddenly!” (Two days after astronaut Lisa Nowak’s infamous confrontation with love rival Colleen Shipman, NASA ordered a review of its psychological screening and evaluation processes for astronauts.)

Making things worse: Astronauts themselves try to hide emotional problems, out of fear they’ll be grounded. Access to psychologists is available during missions, but crew are reluctant to make use of it. “Every communication to them means a special notice in your flying book,” cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me. “So we were always trying not to ask for specialists’ help.” Laveikin’s Mir mission with Yuri Romanenko was mentioned in a Quest article by Peter Pesavento on the psychological effects of space travel. Pesavento says Laveikin returned early from the mission due to “interpersonal issues and cardiac irregularity.” (I was to meet with Laveikin and Romanenko the next day.)

It’s a dangerous state of affairs. If someone on board a spacecraft is reaching the breaking point, it’s important for ground control to know about it. People’s lives depend on them knowing that. This perhaps explains why so many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it. If technologies being tested on Mars500 pan out, spacecraft—and other high-stress, high-risk workplaces like air-traffic control towers—will be outfitted with microphones and cameras hooked up to automated optical and speech-monitoring technology. The robotic spies can detect telltale changes in facial expressions or speech patterns and, hopefully, help those in command to avert a crisis.

The stigma of psychological problems also makes them difficult to study. Astronauts are reluctant to sign on as study subjects, lest the researchers uncover something unflattering. The last time I spoke to NASA consulting psychologist Pam Baskins, she was about to begin an experiment comparing different sleep medications and dosages. The astronauts were to be woken from a sound sleep to see how the drugs affected their ability to function in a simulated middle-of-the-night emergency. It appealed to my sense of fun, and I asked if I could come watch. “Absolutely not,” replied Baskins. “It took me a year to convince these guys to participate.”

A SPACE STATION is a rangy monstrosity, a giant Erector Set assembled by a madman. But the living area inside the Mir core module, where cosmonauts Alexandr Laveikin and Yuri Romanenko spent six months together, would fit in a Greyhound bus. The sleep chambers are less like bedrooms than like phone booths. They have no doors. My interpreter Lena and I are inside a mock-up of the module, in the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, in Moscow. With us is Laveikin, who now runs the museum. Yuri Romanenko is on his way. I thought it would be interesting to talk with them inside the room that nearly drove them mad.

Laveikin looks little changed from his official portrait, where he conveys an impression of guileless good cheer. He kisses our hands as though we’re royalty. It’s neither affectation nor flirtation, just something that Russian men of his era were taught to do. He wears beige linen pants, a splash of cologne, and the cream-colored summer footwear I’ve been seeing all week on the feet of the men across from me in the Metro.

Laveikin waves hello to a narrow-girdled, suntanned man in jeans, with sunglasses hooked in the V of his shirt collar. It’s Romanenko. He is cordial, but not a hand-kisser. Cigarette smoke has roughed up his vocal cords. The two embrace. I count the seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three. Whatever happened between them, it’s forgotten or forgiven.

Sitting inside the mock-up, it is easy to imagine how a room this size, for that long, could set two men against each other. Romanenko points out that enclosed spaces are not a necessary ingredient for feeling trapped with someone. “Siberia is a big, big space here in Russia. But our hunters who go to taiga [forest] for half year, they’re trying to go on their own, just with a dog.” Romanenko sits where he used to sit on Mir, in the left-hand spot at the control console, on a backless seat with a bar for hooking one’s feet. (Later space stations dispensed with seats, because zero gravity dispenses with sitting.) “Because if there are two or three of you go, it will be conflict.”

“And this way,” Laveikin grins, “you can eat the dog at the end.”

Psychologists use the term “irrational antagonism” to describe what happens between people isolated together for more than about six weeks. A 1961 Aerospace Medicine paper included a fine example, from the diary of a French anthropologist who spent four months in the Arctic with a Hudson’s Bay fur trader:

Likewise, Admiral Richard Byrd preferred to carry out his winter-long weather observations in Antarctica by himself, in perilous conditions and twenty-four-hour darkness, rather than face, as he put it in Alone, the moment when “one has nothing left to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool, and the way he blows out a pressure lamp or drops his boots on the floor or eats his food becomes a rasping annoyance.”

Other people are just one of the psychological hardships that space serves up. Norbert Kraft summed it up nicely. I had asked him if he thought being an astronaut was the best or the worst job in the world. “You’re sleep-deprived, and you have to perform perfectly or else you don’t fly anymore. As soon as you’re done with something, ground control is telling you something else to do. The bathroom stinks, and you have noise all the time. You can’t open a window. You can’t go home, you can’t be with your family, you can’t relax. And you’re not well paid. Can you get a worse job than that?”

Laveikin says his 1987 stint on Mir was a hundred times harder than what he had expected. “It’s hard work, dirty work. Very noisy, very hot.” He had motion sickness for more than a week and no drugs to help him through it. He recalls turning to his commander during the first few days, saying, “Yuri. And we will stay here for half year?” To which Romanenko, using Laveikin’s nickname, replied, “Sasha, but people stay in prisons for ten years or more.”

The bottom line is that space is a frustrating, ungiving environment, and you are trapped in it. If you’re trapped long enough, frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim. An astronaut has three from which to choose: a crewmate, Mission Control, and himself. Astronauts try not to vent at each other because it makes a bad situation worse. There’s no front door to slam or driveway to speed out of. You’re soaking in it. “Also,” says Jim Lovell, who spent two weeks on a loveseat with Frank Borman during Gemini VII, “you’re in a risky business and you depend on each other to stay alive. So you don’t antagonize the other guy.”

Laveikin and Romanenko say they managed to avoid frictions because of the clear hierarchy afforded by age and rank. “Yuri is older than me and had experience of spaceflight,” Laveikin is saying. “So naturally he was the leader, the psychological leader. I was following him. And I accepted this role. Our flight was calm.”

This is difficult to believe. “You never got mad?”

“Of course,” says Romanenko. “But mainly it was flight control center’s fault.” Romanenko went with option 2. Venting your frustration at Mission Control personnel is a time-honored astronaut tradition, known in psychology circles as “displacement.” Sometime around the sixth week of a mission, says University of California, San Francisco, space psychiatrist Nick Kanas, astronauts begin to withdraw from their crewmates, become territorial, and displace their hostility for each other onto Mission Control.

Jim Lovell seemed to do most of his displacing on the Gemini VII nutritionist. “Note to Dr. Chance,” says Lovell to Mission Control at one point in the mission transcript. “It looks like we’re in a snow storm with crumbs from the beef sandwiches. At 300 dollars a meal! I think you can do better than this.” Seven hours later, he gets back on the mic: “Another memo to Dr. Chance: Chicken with vegetables, Serial Number FC680, neck is almost sealed shut. You can’t even squeeze it out…. Continuing same memo to Dr. Chance: Just opened the seals; chicken with vegetables all over window at this time.”

Lovell’s mission was only two weeks long. Was the capsule’s tiny size accelerating the effects of confinement? Kanas knew of no formal studies, but he confirmed that the smaller the craft, generally speaking, the tenser the astronauts.

Displacement perhaps explains why Judith Lapierre’s anger was directed more at IBMP and the Canadian Space Agency than at the Russian commander, whose actions she put down to cross-cultural misunderstanding and “natural man-woman situations.” Though it’s also easy to believe she directed her anger toward IBMP because they were being popkas.

Romanenko retains some residual steam to this day. “People who prepared tasks for us, they have no idea what on board is like. Say you are running something here”—he turns to indicate the Mir control console—“and somebody gives you an order to switch on something else. They don’t understand it’s over on the other side, and I can’t leave what I do here and go there.” (This is why space agencies tend to use astronauts as “cap coms”—capsule communicators.) According to Robert Zimmerman’s history of the Soviet space stations, Romanenko had, by the final stages of the mission (after Laveikin left), grown so “testy” with the flight control center that his crewmates took over all communications with the ground.

Alexandr Laveikin took the third option. He turned the hostility inward. The result, familiar to any psychologist who deals with isolated, confined populations, is depression. Later, after Romanenko leaves, Laveikin confides that there were moments when he thought about suicide. “I wanted to hang myself. Of course, it’s impossible because of weightlessness.”

Romanenko predicts trouble on a Mars mission. “Five hundred days,” he says with evident horror. Romanenko remained for another four months after Laveikin left. Zimmerman writes that he became increasingly unstable and uncooperative, “devoting his time to writing poems and songs” and exercising. I ask Lena to ask him about this phase of the mission. Earlier, I had told her I’d like to hear some of the songs Romanenko composed in space, and this is what she asks about.

“You want us to sing?” Romanenko laughs his grainy laugh. “We would need fifty grams of whiskey!” I apologize for not having brought any.

“I have it,” Laveikin says. “In my office.”

It’s 11 A.M. But I am not Jerry Linenger.

Laveikin leads us through the museum, narrating as he walks. Here are the giants of Soviet rocketry, one per glass display case. Earlier today, I visited a Moscow natural history museum, and sections of it were arranged in this way—not by taxonomy or ecological niche, but by guy: field notebooks from expeditions, some prized specimens, honors from the tsar. The rocket engineers are represented largely by accessories: pens and wristwatches, eyeglasses and flasks.

In his office, Laveikin sits down to look on his computer for a recording of a song Romanenko wrote while on board Mir. The surface of his desk is mostly empty. An appendage like a gangplank protrudes from the front of it. Laveikin gets up to unlock a liquor cabinet and sets down a bottle of Grant’s whiskey and four crystal shot glasses on the plank. It’s a bar. In Russia you can buy a desk with a built-in bar!

Laveikin raises his glass. “To…” He searches for the words in English. “A nice psychological situation!”

We clink our glasses and empty them. Laveikin refills them. Romanenko’s song is playing, and Lena translates: “Sorry Earth, we say good-bye to you…our ship is going upwards…. But the time will come when we will drop into the blueness of the dawn, as a morning star.” And the chorus: “I will fall into the grass and fill my lungs with air. I will drink water from the river….” It’s a catchy pop tune, and I’m bopping in my seat until I notice that the lyrics are making Lena sad. “I will kiss the ground, I will hug my friends….” Lena wipes a tear as the song ends.

People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty”—a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines^* and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.

Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend hours tending experimental greenhouses. “They are our love,” said cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov of the tiny flax plants^* with which they shared the confines of Salyut 1, the first Soviet space station. At least in orbit, you can look out the window and see the natural world below. On a Mars mission, once astronauts lose sight of Earth, there’ll be nothing to see outside the window. “You’ll be bathed in permanent sunlight, so you won’t even see any stars,” astronaut Andy Thomas explained to me. “All you’ll see is black.”

Humans don’t belong in space. Everything about us evolved for life on Earth. Weightlessness is an exhilarating novelty, but floaters soon begin to dream of walking. Earlier Laveikin told us, “Only in space do you understand what incredible happiness it is just to walk. To walk on Earth.”

Romanenko missed the smells of Earth. “Can you imagine being even one week in a locked car? Smell of metal. Smell of paint, rubber. When girls were writing us letters, they were putting drops of French perfume on there. We loved those letters. If you smell a letter from a girl before you go to bed, you see good dreams.” Romanenko finishes his whiskey and excuses himself. He hugs Laveikin again and shakes our hands.

I’m trying to imagine NASA filling resupply vehicles with sacks of love letters. Laveikin says it’s true. “From all over the Soviet Union, girls were writing letters.”

“To girls,” I say. Glasses are raised.

“You really feel the absence of a woman,” Laveikin tells us. With Romanenko gone, he speaks more freely. “There are sexual dreams, as a substitute. It’s constant through the flight. We were even discussing that maybe we have to take something from the sex shops. It was discussed at IBMP.”

I turn to Lena. What does he mean? “An artificial vagina?”

“Vagine?” asks Lena. A discussion ensues. Lena turns back to me. “A mock-up.”

Laveikin breaks into English, as he does sometimes to tweak a translation: “A rubber woman.” A blow-up doll. Ground control, he says, nixed the idea. “They said, ‘If you would do that, then we would need to put it in your schedule for the day.’

“We have a joke. You know we have food in tubes.” I do. Tubes of space borscht are on sale in the museum gift shop. “There are white and black tubes. On the white is written BLONDE. On black one: BRUNETTE.

“But please understand, sexual concerns are far from being the dominant concerns in space. It’s down here on the list.” With his hand, he indicates a level down by his knee. “It would just be a nice supplement. But when we talk about five hundred days, it’s true, this problem starts to grow higher on the list.” He believes a Mars crew should be made up of couples, to help ease the tension that builds during a long mission. According to Norbert Kraft, NASA has considered sending married couples into space. When they asked his opinion on the matter, he discouraged it. His reasoning was that an astronaut might find himself with an untenable choice: jeopardizing his spouse or jeopardizing the mission. Astronaut Andy Thomas, who is married to astronaut Shannon Walker, told me another reason NASA shies away from flying married couples. In the event of a crash or explosion, they don’t want one family to have to endure a double loss, particularly if the couple has children.

Laveikin listens, then amends his statement: “Not necessarily married.”

“That’s right,” says Lena. “There would be a different ethic there. When you come back to Earth, your wife should understand that at that time it was like different dimension, different rules, different you.”

Laveikin laughs. “My wife is a clever person. She would understand. She’d say, ‘You’re not completely faithful even on Earth. Let it be in space as well.’”

Kraft would agree. He told me he advocates sending nonmonogamous couples—straight and/or gay—to Mars. “[Space agencies] are going to have to be more liberal and open about that. Mix and match or whatever.” Andy Thomas imagines that happening naturally on a Mars mission—as it tends to in Antarctica. “It’s very common for people there to pair off and form sexual relationships that last through the duration of their stay—to gravitate to a support structure to help them get through the experience. And then at the end of the season, it’s all over.”

For seventeen years, only men worked the research bases in Antarctica. Women, the excuses went, mean trouble: distraction, promiscuity, jealousy. It wasn’t until 1974 that the McMurdo Station winter-over personnel included women. One was a spinster biologist in her fifties who appears in photographs wearing a gold cross over her turtleneck. The other was a nun.

These days, a third of U.S. Antarctic personnel are women. They are credited with a rise in productivity and emotional stability. Mixed-gender crews are, as Ralph Harvey puts it, more “middle-of-the-bell curve.” There are fewer fistfights and fart jokes. “No one hurts his back lifting too big of a box.” Norbert Kraft told me about a teamwork study he ran at NASA Ames that compared all-male, all-female, and mixed-gender teams. The mixed-gender groups performed best. (The lowest scores belonged to the all-woman teams. “You can’t have all the chitchatting,” Kraft said bravely.)

Laveikin: “Can you imagine six men on the way to Mars, what will happen?”

“I know,” I say, though I’m not entirely sure we’re imagining the same thing. “Look what happens in prisons.”

“And on submarines. And geologists in the field.”

I make a note to ask Ralph Harvey about this. Laveikin quickly adds that he cannot recall hearing of any instances of “man-on-man love” in the Russian cosmonaut corps.^* In the end, the least problematic Mars crew might be the kind Apollo astronaut Michael Collins (jokingly) suggests in his memoir: a “cadre of eunuchs.”

THE FIRST AEROSPACE isolation chambers held just one man. The Mercury and Vostok psychiatrists didn’t worry about crew members getting along with one another; the flights were a few hours or, at most, a couple days long, and the astronauts flew solo. What the psychiatrists worried about was space itself. What happens to a man alone in a silent, black, endless vacuum? To find out, they tried to approximate space here on Earth. Researchers at the Aero-medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base soundproofed a 6-by-10-foot commercial walk-in freezer, put a cot, some snacks, and an enamel chamber pot inside, and turned off the lights. A three-hour stint in the isolation chamber became one of the Mercury astronaut qualifying tests. One account I read, by a Mercury aspirant named Ruth Nichols, described it as the toughest test the candidates endured. Some male pilots, Nichols said, “responded violently” after only a few hours.

Colonel Dan Fulgham was in charge of the Wright-Patterson tests. He doesn’t recall any Mercury candidates becoming violent or otherwise “losing it” during their isolation test. He recalls them using it to catch up on sleep.

The researchers soon began to realize that sensory deprivation was a poor approximation of spaceflight. Space is black, but there’s plenty of sunlight, and the capsules would be lighted. Radio contact would be possible much of the time. Claustrophobia and solitude were the more salient concerns, especially on a longer mission. That is why, in 1958, an airman from the Bronx, named Donald Farrell, undertook a two-week pretend moon mission in the One-Man Space Cabin Simulator at the School of Aviation Medicine, at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. A Time magazine article described his (sadly long-lost) diary as being increasingly obscenity-laden, but in newspaper interviews he complained only that he missed cigarettes and forgot his comb. Farrell’s greatest hardship, by my reckoning, was the recording of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and other “soft music” piped into the simulator.

In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer.

To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.