Sol 12 - Lost in time and space
Exactly one year ago, in a climate of profound sadness and incredulity, all the world’s media
channels suddenly changed their programs to announce the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian
army.
A few weeks before this happened, I was in Antarctica, on the French station Dumont d’Urville.
It is literally the other side of the world, but the setting is in fact very similar in terms of
isolation, confinement, and exposure to an extreme environment. A white desert that looks like
our red desert more than you can imagine.
In such a context, the relationship that you have with the “outside world” is ambiguous. Actually,
it might be a kind of survival mechanism, but it almost feels like the outside world no longer
exists, like nothing happening there could impact your life.
I remember very well that, while Russia was starting to gather soldiers at the border with
Ukraine, I was naive enough to think that it was just a strategic move and that it would not end
badly. As I used to be a student in Moscow and was traveling there very often, my fellow
Antarctic crewmates were very interested in my point of view. I extensively described what I
knew about this country and easily managed to convince them that we were still very far from a
war. How wrong was I! It only made the following events more shocking than there were! And
shocking they were...
At that time, all the information I had was based on a two-page newsletter that arrived every day
on our intranet and included topics from politics to soccer results. Of course, this context gives a
lot of distance to the events, which adds up to the geographic distance. Without newscasts and
with only a handful of words to describe a situation, it is much more difficult to feel the exact
atmosphere and to fully apprehend a topic. With no access to details, chances are that you will
underestimate or overestimate the scale of an event and its consequences. For this very reason, it
is not always trivial to decide to communicate some information to a crew living in an isolated
environment. It represents an additional stress, whose impact on the psychological state of the
crewmembers cannot always be predicted. The questions of “What to communicate?” as well as
“When and how to communicate it?” are then absolutely fundamental in this context.
For instance, last year, there was an ISAE-Supaero crew onboard the Mars Desert Research
Station when the invasion of Ukraine started. It took about a week for the crew support team,
based “on Earth”, to decide exactly how to communicate this information. During longer
missions, like a trip to Mars for instance, you increase even more the probability of a major event
happening while the crew is away from civilization. The example of Sergei Krikalev is very
interesting: he was on a long-duration mission onboard the Mir space station when the Soviet
Union collapsed. Following the chaos of this event, he was almost abandoned there, and his stay
had to be prolonged to 311 days (twice as long as originally planned). This made him the last
Soviet citizen when he landed in Kazakhstan, a place that used to be part of his country, dressed
in a spacesuit proudly displaying a USSR flag. You know in which state you leave the world
when you start your mission, but you never know exactly how you will find it when you come
back.
Here, we all discussed, together and with our relatives, to decide what kind of news we would
like to receive, should something happen. Each of us has its own preferences. Some refuse to
receive any kind of news from the world but get regular updates from their families. On my side,
I am a bit ashamed to say that the situation is a bit the opposite. I did not really take the time to
write to my loved ones so far, but I subscribed to a service to get a daily news review on my
mailbox. Yes, I know. I already mentioned that I was ashamed of this…
I thought that reading some information about what happens in the world would help me escape
our routine here at the Mars Desert Research Station, at least for a few minutes. I actually ended
up integrating this lecture in my daily routine, which had the opposite effect. Even though every
Sol (the Martian “day”) is very different here, the way they are scheduled and the way our work
is organized make it difficult to differentiate one day from another. In the absence of the external
references that usually provide your brain with the stimuli that you need to help you
contextualize events of your daily life, you quickly get lost. Lost in a microcosm out of time and
space.
Per aspera, ad astra!
Jeremy Rabineau
Commander of Crew 275