On New Year’s Eve 1999, two drunk Russians had a fistfight that quickly became an international incident. The altercation took place inside a small spaceship simulator on the outskirts of Moscow, which the two men had been stuck inside for nearly a month as part of a 110-day isolation experiment for future Mars missions.
The 10-minute-long brawl was so intense that it left blood splatters on the walls, which one of the international members of the mission photographed to send to her colleagues. Judith Lapierre, a 32-year-old Canadian scientist who was one of three foreigners in the seven-person crew, also complained about the Russian commander forcibly kissing her. But when the Canadian Space Agency called for the offenders to be disciplined, Russian officials dismissed the complaint and prohibited them from making it public.
The fight caused a rift among the seven-person crew that would have jeopardised any real space mission. One Japanese participant even quit due to the hostile environment.
“There was a complete communication breakdown,” Khaidar Khobikhozhin, one of the experiment’s volunteers, told later said when the story finally became public a few years later. “We had to close the hatch between us and one of the other teams for a month.”
It was a demonstration of the difficulties that develop when living in close proximity with others for extended periods – something that is unavoidable on any mission to the Red Planet. With the journey taking six to seven months each way, plus around 500 days on the surface, any mission will likely take up to three years to complete.
This week, Nasa announced the four crew members of another isolation experiment – this time for 378 days. On 19 October, three men and one woman will enter the Mars Dune Alpha habitat at the US space agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Measuring just 1,700-square-feet (158m²), the capsule will be the setting for research experiments, attempts to grow vegetables under simulated Mars conditions, as well as another insight into how humans cope with long-duration confinement. No alcohol will be allowed – not even for a New Year’s party – but drunken brawls are not the only challenge that previous experiments have faced.
So what might Nasa volunteers Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthey Montgomery and James Spicer expect from their imminent seclusion – and what might we learn for future missions to Mars that Nasa plans to commence before 2040?
‘Mars time’
One of the biggest psychological strains discovered in previous studies concerned the length of a day on Mars. One Martian day – or sol – is about 39 minutes longer than an Earth day, and trying to stick to it can lead to serious sleep disruption.
Referred to as “Mars time”, it would theoretically mean a longer lie-in each morning for any astronauts residing on the Red Planet. However, efforts to try and replicate it on Earth have proved problematic.
In 2004, Nasa support teams for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers attempted to live on Mars time in order to operate in sync with the day/night cycles of the machines. Engineers and scientists reported feeling permanently exhausted, likening it to a constant sense of jet-lag. The US space agency eventually shifted back to Earth time after 90 days, suggesting that any future crewed missions to Mars would require a rotating team of support staff.
When tested on people taking part in confinement experiments, most people were able to adapt their circadian rhythms to 24.6 hour days, so long as the environment was controlled with appropriate light exposure levels.
Cabin fever
Next month’s Nasa experiment is actually the second one of its kind. The Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) mission series first began in 2023 with a four-person crew doing a 378-day stint inside the Mars Dune Alpha habitat in Texas.
One of the objectives was to see how they handled the day-to-day tedium of long-term space missions: eating the same prepackaged astronaut meals, not breathing fresh air, and being cooped up with the same people for months at a time.
It even replicated the same lag in communication of 44 minutes that astronauts would experience on Mars, as information was beamed hundreds of millions of miles in both directions.
Nasa is still investigating the impacts of the Mars simulation, but early impressions from those involved follow similar experiences of irritability and restlessness associated with cabin fever.
Between 2013 and 2017, Nasa conducted a series of isolation experiments in a domed structure on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano. Kate Greene, one of the civilian volunteers, wrote a memoir of her experience titled ‘Once upon a time I lived on Mars’, in which she described how “mental fatigue had become my baseline state”.
Greene reported a severe increase in irritability, becoming infuriated with her fellow volunteers for things as small as how they crossed their legs at dinner time, or the way their sandals slapped on the stairs. “Minor, finely detailed irritants snuck up on me and then kept flicking the back of my head,” she wrote.
The longest study of its kind took place between 2010 and 2011 when Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems – the same that oversaw the ill-fated 1999-2000 experiment – locked six men in a simulated space environment for 520 days.
Wang Yue, the only Chinese volunteer in the Mars-500 program, reported losing 10 kilograms and most of his hair during the confinement. “My physical and psychological conditions went up and down, like waves,” he told China Daily. “It’s impossible to stay happy all the time. After all, I’m human, not a robot.”
Medical emergencies
Yue’s experience demonstrated the impact such missions can have on physical health. Beyond hair and weight loss, there have also been instances where participants had to leave long-duration confinement studies in an ambulance.
In 2018, one of the volunteers of the Hawaii experiment accidentally electrocuted themselves during an exercise to switch the power systems from solar to a generator. After attempting basic first aid, fellow crew members decided to call 911.“We’ve learned all the ways that you can kill yourself on Mars,” Bill Wieking, the tech-support lead for the HI-SEAS Hawaii program, later recalled.
Confinement studies on Earth can only tell us so much. As soon as they’re past the Moon, the first astronauts to journey to Mars will be the most isolated humans in the history of the universe. Medical evacuations will not be an option.
Once all of the technical challenges of reaching our planetary neighbour have been overcome – and there are still many – it will take a real-life trip to Mars to finally know whether humans can withstand the psychological perils of long-distance space travel and Martian life.