Most of us would panic if we were stranded in space without a firm return date. But Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore aren’t like most of us.1xbet
Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore, two NASA astronauts, left for the International Space Station on June 5 for what was intended to be an eight-day mission. They have now spent six months and counting in space. Technical issues on their spacecraft, involving thruster malfunctions and helium leaks in the propulsion system, rendered its return ride too risky for human flight. Last week NASA announced that the retrieval mission — originally set for February — is again up in the air.
And yet I suspect that Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore aren’t about to lose their cool, even with this latest twist in plans. When I spoke to them at a news conference in September, they seemed remarkably at ease with the situation. These trials “make you stronger,” he said, even as he described missing his youngest daughter’s senior year of high school.
For decades, NASA has been working hard to identify and mitigate the countless hazards that might emerge during crewed missions to deep space. But as space missions get longer, the protagonists of these journeys are one thing that cannot be precisely assessed. Their vulnerabilities, terrestrial needs and ability to live together in small spaces for years are only a few of the considerations that make up what the agency calls the human factor of spaceflight.
Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.
Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.
Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore’s predicament, as unfortunate and troubling as it is, serves as an important test for the space agency’s efforts. How well the two are able to adapt to their changing circumstances will reflect not only their own mettle but also NASA’s ability to select astronauts who can handle this type of unexpected setback. The future of interplanetary space exploration — by NASA, other countries and private companies like SpaceX — will depend on astronauts adjusting to wildly unpredictable circumstances like these.
For a long time, NASA’s strong engineering culture gave little thought to the psychological challenges facing the humans inside its precisely designed spacecrafts. (“These soft, squishy humans are completely unfathomable to engineers,” Jack Stuster, an anthropologist who studied life on the International Space Station, once told me.) The Soviet Union’s launch in 1986 of Mir, the first modular low-Earth-orbit space station, transformed that mind-set. Suddenly astronauts not only flew to space but also had to live in space for long periods. A Mir-stationed astronaut in 1995 described his extreme isolation, warning that he might not “make it” if his mission got extended to six months.
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