Astronaut reveals the hidden danger of space travel most people never see coming

Michael Foale brings the kind of perspective few people can match.

A veteran of six space missions, he spent more than 374 days in orbit and built a career at the sharp end of human spaceflight, from shuttle missions and spacewalks to long-duration life aboard Mir and the International Space Station.

That is what makes him stand out among astronaut and aerospace speakers. Foale is not speaking in abstractions. He has lived through the technical pressure, the psychological strain and the split-second decision-making that come with working in space, giving his views real authority.

In this exclusive interview with the Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, Michael Foale reflects on what nearly a year in orbit taught him about resilience, teamwork and risk, and why the realities of space travel are often far more demanding than people on Earth realise.

Q1. Most travellers can only imagine what it might be like to be away from Earth for months at a time. Having spent nearly a year in orbit across long-duration missions, what was daily life in space really like?

Michael Foale: “I should say I've flown six times in space, and the first three missions were for only 10 days at a time. So, my cumulative time in space in 1997 before me was about a month at the most.

“And I had done a spacewalk in that time frame and done two science missions, but they were what I would call military attack scenarios.

“They're where you have a mission, you go and do it, you've trained thousands of times and you do it pretty much formlessly, and you have a big team on the ground that's helping you and then you come back and you go that's over, done. And that was three missions about 10 days at a time.

“My first long-duration mission, and I've done two of those that add up to a year, to be relevant to your question, was on my fourth space shuttle flight, where they dropped me off at the Russian Mir space station.

“The Russian Mir space station was already in space for about 13 years at that time and was quite in a state of decay, I would say disrepair. There are all kinds of political things going on in Russia at that time, and the support for the Russian space programme was weak monetarily within Russia.

“NASA, and well, actually, the United States President Clinton, came up with a programme to help pay the Russian space programme. And you think, why would it do that?

“That was to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons that were present all throughout the Soviet Union being distributed, and the knowledge on how to use those and the knowledge on how to throw those with rockets.

“They came up with this programme called the International Space Station, which, by the way, was my second long-duration flight. And the International Space Station, I think, was a great, great result out of this rather prosaic geopolitical motivation to send money to Russia for the Russian space programme.

“So anyway, I was part of this programme. A lot of my colleagues in the astronaut office who are military, I'm not military, didn't really agree with it, but they go along with it because they want to fly in space, and I went along with it because it was my fourth flight.

“I didn't know when I was going to fly again in space. There's always a queue of people trying to fly as a government astronaut anyway.

“And I arrived at the Mir and there was a real calamity, and we'll get to that in another question, where a cargo ship collided with us, crashed into us, caused a leak, caused us to lose a module, actually three modules, the use of them, lose power, completely dead station, and then we had to recover.

“On the Mir, I was living with two Russians. They didn't speak English. So, the first point you have to deal with when you're living in space for a long time, unlike those short missions, is that you don't know what's coming the next week. You are not prepared for it. 

“You've got general skills. You've got general scientific knowledge about the experiments you're doing. You've got general knowledge about the systems you need to repair, but you don't know what's coming the next week. And you don't know what's going to need to be repaired the next week.

“And so, the big key to living a long time in space, and this was emphasised on my space station flight. So last flight I did a repair of the Hubble telescope in between, but my last flight, I was launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. And I was the commander, of one person, a Russian.

“We only spoke Russian. I'd learned Russian well on the Mir. And there we were, a maintenance crew, the janitors, you know. And it was right after the second space shuttle accident, Columbia, and the space shuttle was grounded.

“No more big American crews could come up and do all these construction activities that were going on the ISS.

“Instead, I was launched on this Russian rocket with Alexander Kaleri, called him Sasha, to live for 6 months. So that's where it adds up to a year in orbit.

“That year in orbit was all about making sure I got along with Sasha. Even though I'm the commander, we have to get along for half a year in space. So that was the first thing. 

“Respecting your crew members. We did have a visiting crew a couple of times. And then working well with the ground teams who are going home on the weekends, they've got their families to visit, etc. But you're in space on your own.

“Sasha had to maintain most of the Russian parts of the station. I had to maintain all of the European, American, Japanese and Canadian parts of the space station. But it was mostly maintenance. There were experiments, but I would say 70 to 80% of my time on the International Space Station in that time frame was maintenance and about 20% were experiments.

“So, there was psychological fatigue. Sometimes you lost focus.

“We had a slow progressive leak that took me a week to try and figure out where it was. The ground teams, as I say, they go home on the weekends.

“I had failures of our comms on a Friday evening. And I know if I don't get these comms sorted out, I'm going to have to write down about 500 words or a thousand words of instructions on Monday morning. 

“So that's the sort of thing where I now have to go off and try and solve that comms problem without the team on the ground because they've gone home, and then they got all angry with me on the Monday morning because I went ahead and fixed it.

“The missions on the space shuttle are deployment missions. They're rapid missions. You've been trained. Going to the International Space Station, going to Mars, going to the moon, they're like going in a motor home, in an RV, that keeps breaking down. 

“And you have to deal with those problems as they come along. And you need resilience in your attitude, confidence in your colleagues, in your crew that are with you, and you need persistence. And basically, I think you have to be fairly optimistic because otherwise it'll get you down.”

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Q2. Spaceflight is often imagined as a dramatic all-or-nothing journey, but long stays away from Earth bring a different kind of pressure. In your view, what is the most misunderstood risk of long-duration space travel?

Michael Foale: “Risk in general is really, in the general public's view of space flight, misunderstood. They think of risk as an explosion, and that's what it comes down to.

“That's why people are scared when they come to watch you launch. That's why you're scared when you get to launch, is that you're thinking of the big explosion, the one big event.

“But most of the risk is a slow drift away from what you know is right to what is convenient now and you don't think is really wrong.

“The biggest risk is deviation from normal operations, and I think we use the word drift or normalization of deviants, and what that means is that slowly, in risk, and I know a lot about risk mitigation, there's almost always, even in the big blowups, a series of smaller events that have all occurred and the chance of each is quite small, and so the chance of all of them, if you multiply the probabilities, is even smaller, but nonetheless it's not zero.

“And it's this thing called the accident chain, and as you drift away from your originally planned, verified operational procedures, you start to increase the risk in each of those chain links until eventually an accident happens.

“The most common form of risk is where the human and the machine working together, like; think pilot in a cockpit, start to deviate from what was originally planned, and you get small anomalies starting to accumulate.

“Probably the Mir space station was the best example of this because it was ageing rather badly. You know, some people age well, some machines age well if they're maintained.

“You can fly airliners that are 50 years old if they're maintained and you haven't moved away from the original intention of how they were designed to be flown.

“But if you get this drift away from normal operations and you keep adding on systems that haven't been, we use the word integration in the space industry, haven't been properly integrated into the system, you get this normalisation of deviance, and the Mir had that happening. 

“I think the best example of it was the collision that happened to us because there on the ground, mission managers who wanted to make money, actually save money, wanted to stop paying Ukraine $2 million per radar box that was being used to allow the cargo ships to come into the Mir.

“They wanted to save that money. But why did they have the radar? They didn't want to buy the radar box. They had decided they needed the radar box 30 years before that, older men, because they knew they needed the radar to slow it down so it could come into the space station safely.

“But at this point, when I was on the Mir, the managers had decided that maybe we can do away with that and we'll have the crew take the place of the radar box, but without a radar.

“That led to the, I have to defend my crew here, my crew were told to try and measure the distance in place of the radar, looking at graph paper, looking at the TV screen and drawing lines on the screen and seeing how big the space station Mir looked and then go to a table and figure out what the distance was.

“All this happens in a matter of seconds. So, they couldn't keep up, and this vehicle hit us.

“So the decision to make that was the deviation from what the Russians had originally designed, a good system, and it worked well, but then they deviated from it progressively and because they didn't want to pay for the machine, they started to turn off the machine or not use the machine. And so that was a very good example of how drift and normalisation of deviance lead to a catastrophic event.

“It didn't kill us, but it was a very serious event for the Russian programme.”

This exclusive interview with Michael Foale was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.

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