Going to Mars (not quite)
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 12:00 am
WHEN Alexei Sitev, a cosmonaut trainer, got married last month there was no time for a honeymoon. He was too busy preparing to board a mock spacecraft where he is to spend 520 days in a bizarre experiment to discover how astronauts will cope on the first flight to Mars.
Next week Sitev, 38, will kiss his bride Ekaterina Golubeva, a 35-year-old doctor, goodbye, knowing it will be nearly 18 months before they meet again. Soon afterwards he will join five other men selected from thousands of applicants for a project called Mars 500, set up by the Russian and European space agencies to study the effects of a long space flight on the mind and body.
The crew members — three Russians, a Chinese, a Frenchman and an Italian — will spend much of their time cooped up in living quarters the size of a double-decker bus.
Sitev is candid about the prospect. “Not being able to communicate with my wife and giving up sex for such a long time will be very tough, but it won’t be the most difficult aspect,” he said. “The most stressful thing over such a long period will be coping with the monotony of each day.”
As for his wife, she is determined to look on the bright side of separation only four weeks after tying the knot.
“I was pretty surprised when Alexei told me he’d volunteered to take part,” she conceded. “Being without him for such a long time will be very hard. But for me it’s very important that he fulfils his ambitions.
“I said I’d wait for him but first I wanted to know how important our relationship is. He married me before leaving as a sign of his love.”
The crew will have no direct contact with loved ones while confined to the module, which will never leave its gloomy hangar at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems.
Any communication between the craft and mission control will include a 20-minute delay to simulate the time taken for signals to travel to Earth. It will take two days to send a message home and receive a reply. The men will have no access to telephones, internet or natural light and will breathe only recycled air.
Their mock craft affords each participant the privacy of a tiny cabin and a shower they are permitted to use once every 10 days. Everywhere else, the men will be watched by cameras around the clock.
Eight hours a day will be spent on tests to monitor each other’s physical and psychological condition and on a series of scientific experiments. Eight hours will be for sleep and eight for leisure.
Mikhail Sinelnikov, 38, who will leave behind his wife and his 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, is taking a digital archive of his family photograph album. “Finally, I’ll have the time to go through thousands of pictures and mark the ones I want to have printed when I get out,” he said.
A trainer at Star City, the birthplace of the Soviet space programme near Moscow, he has always dreamt of flying into space but lacks the qualifications.
“This project is the next best thing,” he said. “It’s an important scientific study which will pave the way for a real flight to Mars some time in the future.”
Sinelnikov knows that the monotony will get to him after six months. “I’ll miss the sun, fresh air, the sea, but most of all my wife and kids,” he said.
“A year and a half is a very long time not to see them. As for the sex, I’ve never tried so long without it. I’ll have to get used to it.”
The crew will eat cosmonauts’ meals and will also grow their own lettuces, radishes and cabbages in a mini-greenhouse attached to their pod.
They will earn £85 a day and will be allowed to abandon ship if the psychological pressure becomes intolerable.
The first 250 days will represent the trip from Earth to Mars — a distance of up to 250m miles. The crew will then simulate a 30-day stay on the Red Planet by carrying out missions in a gigantic sealed sandpit fitted with hundreds of tiny roof lights to imitate a star-studded view of space.
The third phase of 240 days will cover the long journey home. The Americans, Russians and Europeans do not envisage a Mars mission for at least two decades.
Diego Urbina, 26, the Italian participant, is packing a laptop with thousands of books, films and songs. “Thank God I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment,” he said.
The crew recently bought a Nintendo Wii video game console to help to fight boredom. The module has a small living room decorated with pictures of famous cosmonauts and portraits of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and General Charles de Gaulle, the former French president.
Wang Yue, 27, the Chinese candidate, said it was a “huge honour” to take part but he hoped mission control would transmit videos of next month’s football World Cup.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 127804.ece
