What Can We Learn About Life in Space from the Ground?

Archived Update from IEEPI Study

For this update, I am going to be talking about validity–does research on the ground really help inform us about journeys in space? To do that, I’m going to break this question down into two interpretations: 1) what knowledge is transferable to conditions in space? and 2) what can we learn about analogue missions all on their own?

Part I

If this is the first post that you are reading, it’s worth reviewing what analogue missions are. It would be incredibly costly and dangerous to send astronauts into space every time they had to train for a mission or test a new procedure or hardware. Luckily, depending on what tests and training are needed, many of these scenarios can be simulated on Earth. On one hand, it is easy to see how training in geological sample collection or low gravity scenarios might transfer into missions in space.

Space Health Research, on the other hand, runs simulations that are designed to test prolonged medical care in space. For example, what happens if hardware injures an astronaut when they are 250,000 miles from the nearest hospital? This can be simulated with a great level of fidelity by introducing an unexpected medical emergency in the middle of the mission, and keeping the simulation running for eight hours on end. In eight hours, caretakers have to deal with complications, relapses, and upkeep care like food and cleanliness. While these emergencies are happening, the analogue astronauts will still have a mission to complete, for instance, scouting for secondary landing sites. They will also be testing new technology, conducting geological surveys, and more.

However, the goal of an analogue mission isn’t to create the visual illusion that astronauts are on another planet. Rather, the aim is to make them feel like they are. This is done by dropping the astronauts on an unknown, deserted island with limited supplies and infrequent contact. Communication with mission control has a 17-minute delay, just as it would going to Mars and back. Shelter, navigation, rations, and orientation are completely their own. They are, in effect, on their own.

The answer to the first question, ‘what knowledge is transferable to conditions in space?’ seems to be answered: In this mission, we are trying to replicate emergencies and prolonged medical care in extremely isolated conditions. For my own part of the mission, I will comprehend what impact these emergencies have on identity, not just in isolated conditions, but completely alienated conditions.

Part II

This leads to the second question, ‘what can we learn about analogue missions all on their own?’ Let’s set aside the benefits for understanding travel into outer space for just a moment, and just focus on the analogue mission as its own entity. While we often gain heaps of knowledge from analogue missions, that knowledge is almost always tied to something else. It is, after all, a simulation–we are trying to study something else through the simulation by its very nature.

My study is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first ethnographic study of an analogue mission. While I am drawing from research on migration routes, community rituals, emergency disasters, and nature writing, there has never been a study with analogue missions as its focus. If those topics are anything to go by, I predict that the emergency scenarios that the astronauts face will force them to set identity-defining values to the side in an effort to accomplish an immediate goal. The impact of not only being isolated (that is, physically separated) from civilization, but also of being alienated (that is, mentally separated) from it, will allow freedom to restructure those identity-defining rules. Going through this transformative process together will invite collaboration in reconstructing a new set of rules, and the intensity of the shared experience will inspire a new shared set of rules. Because these rules are identity-defining, the impact will not only be felt in the way that the group behaves with one another, but internally to each astronaut as well. Their perspectives and understandings of themselves and their place in the world will shift.

Debora Battaglia writes about cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev and his feeling decades ago. He described a feeling of being ‘untranslatable, even to [himself].’ Another astronaut described a feeling of being “no longer an earthling”. Again, to “ground” these experiences, my own research in forced migration implies the same stripping of social context, and the sharing of that experience providing a common experience for travellers to reconstruct themselves together. It stands to reason that analogue missions would follow a similar pattern, but of course there is absolutely no research in this line of inquiry. Thus, we have everything to learn about it.

Final thoughts

To answer the title question, research on the ground can tell us a great deal about space. With a high level of fidelity and targeted lines of inquiry, we can simulate the conditions that we are curious about. By observing how analogue astronauts react to (and are changed by) these conditions, we can get a sense for what happens to astronauts in space. Of course, as with all studies in analogue missions, the goal is to take this research into space itself…