Preparing for the 'Final Frontier': Lessons Learned from Earth Analogs

• Main Author: Bishop, Sheryl L.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: UND Scholarly Commons 2016
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://commons.und.edu/ss-colloquium/56; https://commons.und.edu/context/ss-colloquium/article/1062/type/native/viewcontent

To boldly go…! But with lots of preparation, planning, testing and educated guesswork. Yet, just how DO you prepare crews for an experience that has never been encountered in the history of humankind…leaving our entire world and every other member of our species unequivocally behind as we reach for the next stepping stone in our expansion to the stars? One approach is to try living and working in space from a nearby off-earth location. Our progress along this line has resulted in a couple of small orbiting space stations hosting 2-3 persons (hardly a ‘group’) with more ease of rescue and assistance than our Antarctic bases down below. Given the limited access to the space frontier and the investment in collective effort and resources, our ability to study individual and group functioning in the actual space environment has been, and will continue to be, severely limited. Until we can establish more permanent and larger facilities on the moon or in orbit, our knowledge of how to train groups for long duration missions will also be limited. The second approach is through analogs, i.e., locations here on Earth that are characterized by some of the critical features we expect to be a part of any long duration mission: isolation, confinement, and extreme environments with both known and unknown dangers. Studies on real-world groups situated in extreme environments here on Earth have provided us insight into many factors that impact group performance, health and well-being. Not only have we expanded our knowledge about the things we knew were problems but we’ve also discovered a number of issues that were not obvious. Thus, studying groups in terrestrial extreme environments as analogues has been a productive way to provide predictive insight into the things that we need to prepare for in long duration space missions. Analogs come in two broad categories: artificial situations called simulations that we construct and those that real world environments provide for us. Simulations provide a great deal of control over ...