The answer to that question is essential to whether or not the Space Frontier will ever be opened, and that answer is happening now. On August 23, 2010, the newspapers reported that the thirty-three miners trapped deep in the San Jose Mine in Chile for seventeen days had found an emergency shelter and all of them were alive. A fifteen-centimeter (ten-inch) wide borehole drilled from the surface down to the sheltering chamber became a lifeline for sending capsules, called palomas (doves), of food and water as well as oxygen down to the men. The mining company is now digging an escape tunnel less than a meter in diameter down to the trapped miners. It will be at least four months before the escape tunnel is completed.
Unlike this unplanned test of human survival in isolated confinement, another test of human endurance in isolation began last June 3, 2010 at the Moscow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems in Russia. This planned experiment—a Mars Mission simulation—involves six men living in a confined space on canned food and recycled water and air for five hundred twenty days.
Besides the fact of unplanned versus planned and the time frame—one hundred twenty days versus five hundred twenty days--, there are additional differences between the two situations. In the Russian experiment, the test subjects were selected from a large field of applicants, presumably for their psychological stability. In the San Jose Mine, the trapped men are ordinary miners, trained to do demanding labor in a hazardous environment. While they were aware of the possibility of lethally dangerous accidents happening, the collapsed shaft that trapped them was unexpected. They probably had not been trained for living in isolated confinement for a long period of time.
The physical conditions in the Mars Mission Simulation are clean, sanitary and air-conditioned with assigned mental and maintenance tasks and Internet connections with the outside world and their families. In the emergency shelter of the San Jose Mine deep underground, the men have to cope with unrelenting heat, dust and grime for days to come and very limited audio contact with their families and no Internet. Most of us can endure an extended work shift of sweat, dust and grime as long as we know a hot shower and a clean bed will be available when the shift is over. No such luxury is in store for the trapped miners. Clean laundry is probably impossible as well. How can they possibly stay healthy in those conditions?
Even more difficult than coping with the physical conditions will be the long hours of waiting and waiting for the completion of the escape tunnel. Unlike the men in the Mars Mission Simulation who have assigned duty lists five days of each week, the trapped miners have to create activities from very limited resources to keep themselves occupied day after day for an undefined length of time. Nearly everyone else on the planet who works and lives in artificial environments for extended periods of time—like US Navy submariners on “boomers”—can count down on the calendar to the last day of the mission. The trapped miners cannot do that; they can only hope to get out “some day in the future.” Like submariners, they have to watch the clock to know when one day ends and another begins. Also, like submariners, they have next to no personal communication with their wives and families. What’s happening at home day by day? They have no way to answer that question. Unlike submariners whose daily schedule always keeps them busy except during sleep periods, the trapped miners have to wrestle constantly with boredom without getting on each other’s nerves to the point of conflict and violence. If depression eventually overcomes hope, anger may erupt and cause havoc. How can each one in the group maintain their individual sanity for four months or longer?
Then there is the pressing need to stay physically fit and become slim. Unless the miners achieve an eighty-seven centimeter (thirty-five inch) waist, they will be too fat to move through the escape tunnel. Most of us find it difficult to motivate ourselves to exercise and lose weight while living well on the surface of the Earth. Knowing that you have to do that in order to escape being buried for the rest of your life is motivational. However, as the seemingly interminable hours of hot, dusty, grimy confinement creep by day after day for months on end, can that motivation be maintained?
Finally, the biggest difference between the test subjects of the Mars Mission Simulation or submariners on a duty mission and the men trapped in the San Jose Mine is the element that materially separates them from the rest of the world. In the Russian experiment, it is only a heavy door locked from the outside. If a lethal emergency happens inside the simulation, the confined men only have to call for help and the door will be opened. In a “boomer” submarine, the barrier that isolates the crew is hundreds of meters of ocean. The captain, however, can give the order to surface at any time. For the trapped miners, there are over seven hundred twenty meters (two thousand, two hundred fifty-seven feet) of solid rock between them and the cold, dry Atacama Desert on the Earth’s surface. It will take four months, or longer, of constant drilling with diamond-tipped drills to open an escape tunnel. This is no simulation. There is the real possibility of failure to get the trapped men out alive. That realization--in addition to the fragile lifelines of oxygen, water, food, limited communication with their families and the outside world as well as the struggles to stay healthy, fit and slim, to overcome boredom and depression and to maintain social peace and sanity—means extraordinary courage is required for months of survival and eventually an escape from the mine. The psychological weight of that rock barrier is immense. If their courage fails, they lose everything. If their courage sustains them until they reach the surface, then we will know that opening the Space Frontier is possible because that will take the same kind of courage.
