NASA officials are working with members of the US Navy submarine force to learn more about how people cope with month-long simulations of transportation into non-terrestrial environments such as space or the deep sea, according to media reports published on Monday.
According to The Washington Post, NASA and the Navy are collaborating at a Naval base in Groton, Connecticut in order to measure how personnel deal with stress during four-week mock space flights. Astronauts, like sailors traveling through ocean depths, are isolated for long periods of time and have to rely on their crew mates to survive.
Brandon Vessey, a scientist with NASA’s human research program, told the Associated Press that the organization has “a shared interest with the Navy in team resilience. The agencies started working together about five years ago when the submarine force extended an invitation to NASA to search for ways to help tactical team members work together better.
While working at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Groton, Navy scientists developed a way to evaluate the performance of those tactical teams. Their method focused on a series of essential team practices, including dialogue, critical thinking skills, and decision-making capabilities, and they devised a way to measure how well they were able to deal with setbacks.
New experiments scheduled to begin early next year
In January or February, NASA and the Navy will begin a new experiment designed to shed light on the potential behavior issues that crew members will experience while traveling on upcoming missions to an asteroid in 2025 and to Mars sometime in the 2030s, according to AP reports.
Using a capsule roughly the same size as a two-bedroom apartment, NASA will be monitoring the performance and behavior of astronauts participating in longer-term space missions during a series of experiments conducted at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Four volunteers are to live and work in the habitat for 30 day periods at any given time.
The habitat, which is called the Human Exploration Research Analog, will also feature a model airlock and will be supported by a miniature version of mission control. Audio and video records of the subjects will be kept and sent to Navy scientists at the Groton lab for analysis.
Former submarine commander Ronald Steed said that traveling on a space ship would be similar to being a member of a submarine crew. In particular, he said, just as a sub commander “can’t always call to shore, you can’t just call back to Earth for advice… [he/she must] have a set of tools that let him or her look at the crew and make a determination about where they are.”
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Feature Image: Bill Stafford/NASA/JSC
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