It is not complicated to practice social distancing at the Russian cosmodrome of Baikonur. Once away from the hangars, the launch pad and the railway that connects them, the position is almost bucolic: a giant green complex of low buildings, less an area complex than a kind of Camp David in Kazakhstan. This is a very smart thing for a team preparing to take off for the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, as they spend the last two weeks before launch in medical quarantine. living together, with their reinforcement team, in bungalow-like neighborhoods. The Baikonur members who come into contact with them are dressed, gloved and masked as surgeons, all with the aim of making sure that no disease is transported to the ISS.
One thing astronauts who aren’t really in space now have on all of us is that, given their experience of quarantine and isolation, they’re less likely to go crazy while stuck at home during the corona crisis. Therefore, they have a lot to teach us. One thing we told you is that staying busy helps.
“The time the astronauts back and forth were remote [missions lasting an average of two weeks] was less than our existing shelter will be in position and the maximum vital difference is that we were very busy,” retired astronaut Marsha Ivins, a veteran of five round-trip missions, wrote in an email to TIME. “We work 18 hours a day before and after the mission.
Watch TIME’s Year in Space documentary on Netflix here
This type of programming is also helping the long-term isolation of three-, six- and 12-month rotations aboard the area station.
“The key to the success of any expedition is to keep the team busy,” says Terry Virts, a former NASA astronaut and area station veteran. “A busy team is a satisfied team, and a boring team is a disaster. It’s the best time for other people to do the things they’ve been delaying for years: organize the house, start writing that novel, organize photos of your circle of relatives and digitize old photo albums, come up with a financial plan once the economy becomes widespread – and it will be.
Then there’s also the question of who you live with in such close neighborhoods, whether on the floor or in the hotel. While sheltering in one place may seem complicated to other people living alone, a situation that describes 28 percent of U. S. households, according to the U. S. Census Bureau. There’s something boring about coming face-to-face with the same faces every day.
“I don’t forget a lot of long-term teams that mentioned that seeing a new team after two or three months was wonderful because suddenly there were other people who weren’t them,” Ivins says. “On my short flights, I was also satisfied in some cases with projects to do with other people who were us. “
Stay up to date with our coronavirus newsletter by clicking here.
The lesson for other people who are now isolating themselves is not so much having new faces, as this is opposed to social distancing, but having time outdoors from those in their home. This can mean taking a walk or even an intentional separation: someone goes to the backyard while someone heads to the front yard and someone else takes the lair.
None of this works as well as it could, of course, if there are other annoying people in the litter, and each and every circle of relatives has them, other people prone to being angry or moody under stress. While it is the duty of those other sharper people to maintain their worst tendencies under the harness, it helps if the rest of the circle of relatives strives for greater tolerance.
The Gemini 7 project of 1965 is perhaps the most exhausting of all space isolation experiments. It only lasted two weeks, but it was a depressing two weeks. Astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were squeezed side by side into seats the length of a coach, with a wall on both sides (there are no aisle seats here) and the roof slightly 3 inches above their heads. Borman and Lovell ate, slept, and took care of other physical matters in those conditions for fifteen days. The two astronauts came here to describe the project as “two weeks in a men’s bathroom. “
They survived all this because NASA knew its astronauts well and was very skilled at bringing personalities together. Borman and is still a lovely guy, but he is also an incredibly serious astronaut, according to the rules of art. astronauts of the ancient body. ” If you can’t get along with Lovell,” Borman told me in 2015 while writing an e-book about Apollo 8, another project they did together, “you can’t get along with anyone. “The mixture of the strict Borman and the more flexible Lovell allowed for an airtight container and minimal friction.
However, despite the deep experience that Ivins, Virts, Lovell, and Borman share, there is perhaps no one better at helping Earth’s humans overcome difficult isolation situations than the veterans of the first three successful moon landings. Not only did they enter the medical quarantine before each project and then complete the project alone, but they also spent 3 more weeks in confinement after returning home, in case they were using lunar pathogens.
In a lovely story just published on Ars Technica, Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin shared the secret of how time passes while looking at himself from the coronavirus: “Lying on his butt and closing the door,” he simply said.
Intentional or not, Buzz’s message is a bit like Virts’ words about economics: Relax. It will get better; those times will pass. Viruses and bacteria have made their way with humanity since we emerged in the savannah and returned to it: first our immune system, then through the acquired wisdom of social distancing and smart hygiene, and later even through complex science, vaccination and pathogen drug. in submission
COVID-19 is, in a way, Apollo 13: it caught us off guard, demanded situations from us and, for now, it turns out that it is beating us. But we are smarter and more agile than an insensitive virus and there will be no doubt about who will win in the end. See you at the landing.
An edition of this article originally published in the TIME’s Space newsletter. Click here to register and get those stories sooner.