A keynote from Kaunertal

„Ahhhh – your playing a mission to Mars on a glacier. How fun!” 

I think, I’ve heard that sentence at least every second time, I’ve been telling people about the analogue mission to Mars I would participate in. 

The purpose of AMADEE15 was to simulate a real trip to Mars within two weeks. We focused on testing spacesuits in several experimental conditions in order to evaluate their usage regarding EVAs on Mars. We analyzed the environment – a glacier – in order to understand how life in extreme environment can s urvive. We simulated a real time communication to Mars, learning about the difficulties of a ten minutes time delayed communication. The aim of our mission was to target as much as possible a real manned mission to Mars and to prepare future astronauts, using our experiences, for the biggest journey mankind ever has conducted. 

 

After finishing the mission, my personal result looks like this: We arranged really careful and precise, but there are two things we can’t prepare in advance. The first aspect addresses the radiation and the second – the psychological factors of human spaceflight. 

Let us focus on the last aspect – the psychological human being in space. 

team communication

“You never listen to me!” “You have no idea about what I feel!” “- We all know these kinds of sentences, having experienced similar situations in our relationships to friends or partners. Let us assume that we solve most of these conflicts by talking about them. We might share a meet up, start talking – and at some point we find a common base again. 

Now – let us imagine we are travelling on a spaceship to Mars and need to solve a conflict. On earth, or even during an analogue mission, it’s not such a big problem: people can meet, have a beer, talk it through and continue their work. But on Mars we have a time delayed communication of 

approximate ten minutes – which forces us to improve the communication to that point, that not only information regarding the operation will be transmitted, but also clearness about the psychological aspects.

But – in order to have an efficient emotional and operational communication, people need to adapt good communication skills and rules – to learn HOW to state their own aspects and thoughts. 

Therefore I suppose that a future mission to Mars must prepare in a way that communication skills and rules are trained within the entire team (includes astronauts, ground, scientist). Intense communication training will – of course – teach methods of sharing ideas and thoughts, but moreover increase the awareness for the fact that communication is a subtle and sensitive mechanism – which brings me to my next point.

awareness and introspection

Everyone being involved in a working process might have experienced moments when you are caught in your own work, forgetting about everything else surrounding you. 

Regarding space missions: we need to create more transparency and exchange in our team. That could have helped to zoom out of everyone’s frog perspective and capture the whole mission more from an outside view.

We were divided into several teams, such as Flight Planning, Science Support, Astronauts, Field and Ground Control. To my opinion, one of the biggest issues we have to work on is the question how we can increase the awareness for each teams work in order to decrease the potential number of misunderstandings between them.

I would have loved to invent the position of a runner in each team during a mission such as AMADEE15. That means: each day a team member switches to another team – just to observe the way they work: the questions they have to deal with, the targets they have etc. 

One of the astronauts described a possible situation on a real Mars mission using a funny quote: “The Science team wants me to bring the results, the Flight Plan team wants me to follow the schedule, the Media team expects an interview while collecting the results and being in time – but they all forget that I am carrying a heavy suit.” 

pre-selection process

I realized that people set a high focus on the astronaut selection – also from the psychological point of view, but less on the selection process of people working on the ground. 

In a real mission to Mars it is important to change that. Selection process should include pre-trainings for everyone participating in the mission. That would also increase the awareness of the entire work, not only of someone’s specific position. We should check for someone’s resources and motivation.

Brings us to our next point….

decrease of motivation

During missions, it happens that plans fail. Experiments have to be shifted due to outside conditions etc. Astronauts experience boredom while the feeling of the first excitement disappears. That can decrease the astronaut’s motivation and provoke bad working results and conflicts. 

I suggest facing this aspect from a preventive perspective. We need to be really aware about everyone’s internal motivation to participate in a mission, to check his resources and use them. Internal motivation cues can be really tiny and invisible but can have a huge impact on someone’s psychological status.

and the last one – can we fake reality?

I have a conclusion about the factor of simulating a mission as well: I think, even though we call it a simulation, we act within reality and therefore we can’t fake reality, because we actually never leave it. AMADEE15 ended his daily simulations around 3pm but I think it never ended and still goes on, including the discussions, the following thoughts. The only thing we can’t test yet is the factor of being far away from earth.

photos (c) AMADEE15 (Claudia Stix&Paul Santek)