Americans Moped on Mir More Than Russians, Doctor Finds

Despite all the smiles and upbeat talk--for the cameras, anyway--American astronauts who lived aboard the Mir space station were unhappier than their Russian crewmates.

Americans assigned to Mission Control near Moscow during NASA’s shuttle-Mir program were also less content with the work environment than their Russian colleagues.

Those are the findings of a San Francisco psychiatrist, Dr. Nick Kanas, who spent more than two years monitoring the mood inside Mir and Russian Mission Control and is focused now on the international space station, Alpha.

NASA is confident Kanas will find a cheerier bunch aboard Alpha.

“It’s hard to hide depression, and I’m not sensing any of that,” flight director John Curry says.

“We learned a lot from Mir,” adds Curry, who is sympathetic to all seven Americans who lived on the Russian space station from 1995 through 1998, particularly Norman Thagard, the first. “I wish we had done better for Norm because he was really isolated.”

Alpha crews have a phone to call whomever they want, whenever they want, via laptop computer and satellite. It’s the latest addition to the 2 1/2-year-old orbiting complex. Mir crews had to settle for sporadic, choppy conversations over radio lines that were used mainly for business--Russian business.

Alpha crews have more visitors and, consequently, more deliveries than the Mir crews did. Coffee, for instance, went up on July’s space shuttle flight; the two Americans and one Russian aboard Alpha put in an order.

Alpha crews have newer, cleaner, brighter, fancier--in short, more uplifting--surroundings. And even though the space station has been hit with computer and robot-arm problems in recent weeks, they’re minor compared with the fire, collision, toxic leaks and other breakdowns that were endured by many of the astronauts and cosmonauts in Kanas’ Mir study.

In conducting the first-ever mood survey of space station crews and flight controllers, Kanas received written feedback from five of the NASA astronauts who lived in succession on Mir. Each astronaut had two Russian crewmates at any given time and was outranked by both. In fact, each astronaut, no matter how experienced, was treated as a visitor on a foreign ship.

On average, “the single American was feeling different and unhappier about his experience in space than the Russians were and one explanation might be this majority-minority,” Kanas says.

Even though Thagard may have voiced his complaints more loudly than the astronauts who followed him, “one could argue they all had the same experience” based on the results of this survey, Kanas says.

His NASA-funded study also included eight Russian cosmonauts who lived on Mir at various times with the five American astronauts, and 16 Russian and 42 U.S. flight controllers who worked on those missions.

All 71 participants voluntarily completed weekly questionnaires and were, for the most part, anonymous.

Kanas presented his findings at the American Psychiatric Assn.’s annual meeting in New Orleans in May, two months after the demise of Mir, and elaborated on them in an interview in June.

As a whole, Mir’s residents were happier than the controllers in charge of the flights, regardless of nationality, Kanas says. In times of turmoil, however, the astronauts and cosmonauts blamed flight controllers for not being supportive enough. Flight controllers, in turn, blamed management.

“It was all internal to how they perceived the world,” says Kanas, professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and associate chief of mental health at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Even with all the problems crippling Mir, both groups were still more content “than maybe you and me, or people in hospitals,” Kanas says.

To Kanas’ surprise, tension did not seem to increase among the space travelers during the second half of their four- to six-month missions. He says it’s possible the astronauts and cosmonauts hid their true feelings.

The astronauts and cosmonauts, nevertheless, felt their commanders offered less leader support in the second half.

Mir’s calamities rated high on everyone’s stress meter. For the American astronauts and flight controllers, though, problems with interpersonal relationships topped the complaint chart compiled by Kanas. (Only the most vocal people responded to his complaint log.)

For the Russians, equipment problems were the No. 1 source of tension, followed by money and salary concerns. Interpersonal problems barely rated.

NASA managers acknowledge they tend to be thinner-skinned than their Russian counterparts.

Take the space tourist flap. Some top NASA officials, including Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, are still smarting over the Russians’ refusal to put off sending California millionaire Dennis Tito on a one-week tour of the international space station, a visit he made in the spring.

“The Russians deal with all of that much easier than we do,” says space station program manager Tommy Holloway, who also led the shuttle-Mir effort. “Confrontations don’t faze them [as they do] us, to be blunt.”

U.S. astronauts’ dissatisfaction aboard Mir could have been the result of cultural isolation, minority status in general, or both, says Kanas. He notes: “Worse than being a minority, they were the only one of their kind.”

“One might argue based on our study, if we’re correct about the minority, the 2-to-1 ratio, that probably three crew members is not an ideal number,” Kanas says. “Where one of them is obviously different than the other two, it sets up kind of a majority-minority or scapegoating situation.”

Unfortunately, the Russian Soyuz escape capsule that is always attached to the space station can hold only three people. Until a bigger lifeboat comes along, NASA is stuck with three-person crews.

“Operational considerations sometimes take precedent,” Kanas says. “But everybody needs to be aware of the possibility that this will happen.”