Journal of Experiments

Other people's experiments, and what they taught.

Easy to share: HumansTest.com

Going deeper on Four Million Minutes

The crew's calendar

The 520 days as the six lived them, from the diaries of Romain Charles and Diego Urbina and the institute's bulletins: the morning ballet, the barcode reader, the power cut, two New Years, the month on Mars, the week of silence and the dull August.

October 2026 » experiments

The entry follows the instruments. This piece follows the days, in the crew’s own words where they wrote them. Romain Charles and Diego Urbina sent nineteen written diaries and fifteen video diaries to ESA between June 2010 and October 2011; the institute posted a bulletin most weeks and answered eighteen questions from each man at the one-year mark. The quotations are theirs.

June and July 2010: the ballet

The hatch closed on 3 June 2010. For twelve days the ship was, in the scenario, docked to the space station, and anything forgotten could be asked for; on 15 June Sitev flew the undocking on a simulator and, Urbina wrote, “the transit of items from the outside was stopped.” The six unpacked into cabins of three square metres: “Posters, pictures and flags were all around the place in a heartbeat.” Urbina’s dreams, he noted, “are vivid and still involve people and situations from the outside, I can’t help but wonder if at some point they will be all set in a wooden walled room and involve mostly talking body electrodes.”

Charles described the morning. One corridor, the lavatory at one end and the kitchen at the other, the six cabins between; four or five tasks a man before breakfast, urine samples and the medical check among them; Sitev in room 1 and Kamolov in room 2 always up first, then Wang in 6, Smoleevskiy in 3, Urbina in 5 and Charles in 4 “come out of our small cocoons.” “After waking up, there is a rush hour in our narrow corridor.” Thirty minutes later all six were at the kitchen table. “If I tell you that there are no bumping accidents in the corridor, you can understand why I call it a ‘smooth routine’.”

On 12 July Charles turned thirty-one, the first birthday inside. Urbina had pasted his face onto a cosmonaut’s picture and the crew had signed it; the Russians sang; a friend from Moscow was put on the phone from the control room to speak French; dinner was “frozen cake and powder wine.” On 14 July Kamolov’s family came to the control room. On 25 July Wang’s parents sent greetings and the institute announced that “voice communication sessions will be completely ceased since the 26th of July.” Urbina: “We had our last phone calls right before the point where the delay in communication makes it impossible (or at least remarkably annoying) to talk on the phone.”

August to November 2010: the routine

Every sixth day each man had the duty, and went at night to the storage module with a barcode reader for the next day’s food: “we mercilessly ‘hunt’ the protein bars, dry fruit, dry pasta etc.” The menus were fixed, because “scientists study the reaction of our bodies to a specific diet.” Underwear every three days, shorts every ten. The exercise programme changed every two months: the MDS resistance machine, the static bicycle, bungee cords, a passive treadmill “which makes you sweat like there is no tomorrow.” The crew bet on the World Cup and discovered they had nothing to pay the winner, Sitev, until their ESA support, Elena Feichtinger, revealed she had hidden gifts in the modules for such a case.

In September Charles described one of the hundred experiments as a quality engineer would: an EEG with a green light on each electrode when the contact was good, cognitive games on an iPod Touch, everything in one suitcase with a place for everything. He sent a message, translated by Urbina into Spanish, to the thirty-three Chilean miners then trapped underground; the miners came up in October, and the crew said at the one-year mark that the story had marked them. On 31 October they kept Halloween in costumes, some of them all day, “which must have been quite strange to the fellows that monitor us through the omnipresent video cameras 24/7.” Wang Yue asked whether Westerners were always this excited about Halloween and was told no, “but in here, it is just a great excuse, as good as any other, to change the routine within these walls.” Urbina noted the same month that “the days get longer and more monotonous.”

1 and 2 December 2010: the dark

At about one in the afternoon on 1 December the power failed. The crew gathered in the kitchen; a message from the ground said the building’s main transformer was on fire. They unplugged everything, took bulbs out of the security lamps to save the batteries, and kept two lights, one in the kitchen and one by the bathroom. “The friendly humming of the ventilation disappeared at the same time as the electricity.” The taps gave two litres and stopped. Lunch was cereal, cake and juice. At four the ground said it could restart one big fridge, and the six carried every frozen thing into it as the others warmed towards zero. They ate bread, cheese and cake in the gym and went to bed in silent rooms; Sitev took the night watch. At 07:45 the lights came back, then at the medical module a kettle, then the ventilation, “after 20h of silence.” At four in the afternoon on 2 December a video message said all systems were nominal, and “This also when we learned that the event lasting 27 hours was a drill!” The institute’s account times it from 13:00 to 14:00 the next day, 22 hours 48 minutes, with carbon dioxide never above 0.85 percent and oxygen never below 19.5, and judges that it “showed good moral preparation of the crew.” Urbina ranked it among the best things that happened.

December and January: two New Years and a king

Christmas meant nothing to the three Russians and a great deal to the Frenchman, the Italian-Colombian and, by adoption, the rest. The tree was three cardboard branches cut and painted by Charles and Sitev, hung with a garland, balloons, cardboard figures and the electrodes of an experiment for lights, with a star found by Kamolov; the fireplace was a poster; six socks hung over it, and on 25 December held metal bottles from Russia, glasses from Colombia, cards from China and chocolates from France. The Russian New Year was learned by the others: Kamolov and Sitev up more than an hour early on 31 December from excitement, five hours of Russian comedies and talk, “C Novam Godam!” at midnight with paper ribbons, and a second toast at two for France and Italy. On 6 January Charles produced the nearest thing to a galette des rois with a porcelain figure hidden inside, Urbina as the youngest was sent to hide while Sitev pointed at slices, and Urbina got the figure and the paper crown. For the Chinese New Year, Wang Yue, who had practised calligraphy since the start, made lamps and six posters bearing six wishes, and the crew spent an evening learning their sentences; Charles’s was “Fu Ju Dong Hai”, “May your happiness be as vast as the Eastern Ocean.”

February 2011: Mars

Urbina, who had no window, wrote a script for a planetarium programme that showed the ship’s calculated position each day: first “a reddish dot”, then “a little orange ball”, then Phobos and Deimos, “and then, in a matter of a couple of days, this little rusty red ball becomes a behemoth that occupies whole screen.” On 1 February at 11:30, after an ESA jump test and a wait that Sitev insisted on until the scheduled minute, the commander opened the two hatches to the lander and the crew found fifty cubic metres “filled with boxes from the floor to the ceiling.” They formed a line, Sitev in the lander passing boxes to Kamolov through the tunnel, Smoleevskiy and Wang along the corridor, Charles in the node, Urbina stacking in the gym; one box at a time through three hatches, two hours to empty the food, then lunch and the presents their families had left eight months before, “the merriest moment of our day.” The next afternoon Sitev lifted a floor panel and found more.

On 8 February Smoleevskiy, Urbina and Wang moved into the lander; on 12 February, at eleven by the institute’s news, the hatch was closed and at noon they “landed” in Gusev crater, where NASA’s rover Spirit had worked since 2004. For two weeks they drove a pressurised rover through sandstorms and dead batteries in the Virtu software, sheltered a virtual marsonaut from meteorites in a cave with a headset on, and drove the real rover Gulliver on the sand upstairs. On 14 February at one, Smoleevskiy and Urbina went out in Orlan suits lightened to thirty-five kilograms, watched from the mission control centre in Korolyov so that no footsteps would be heard through the thin walls, for an hour and twelve minutes; Smoleevskiy and Wang on 18 February; Smoleevskiy and Urbina again on 22 February. “The spacesuits were fantastic,” Urbina wrote, “after 8 months of not having used them, we could still remember how to work with them. Like riding a bike!” The lander lifted off on 23 February, docked on the 24th, sat in quarantine until the 26th; on 27 February the hatch opened. On 28 February the lander was filled with rubbish, on 1 March sealed and abandoned, and on 2 March the ship left orbit. Charles, in June: “Our month of February stands apart in my memories.”

April to June 2011: silence and a year

Between 18 and 25 April the controllers told the crew that the communication networks had failed, and sent nothing: no radiograms, no videos, no letters, no news, no telemedicine. Only the emergency line and the cameras stayed on. The crew wrote their own timeline for the week and, the institute reported, “worked this situation without difficulties.” The crew’s diaries do not mention it.

On 3 June 2011 the institute put its questions. Sitev, asked whether it was hard: “This trial is not difficult at this moment. We became accustomed to everything. Dropped into rhythm.” Asked what helped him hold on: “Everything is possible.” Asked what he missed: “Fried meat.” Kamolov: “if one compares with first 5 months it is easier now.” On friends: “we have become just a team.” Charles: “we didn’t have any conflict together.” Urbina: “There are many times when you wish you were in a nicer place, full of many people, maybe your friends, having a good time outdoors, but obviously the goal of the mission has been more important.” Wang Yue, asked what he dreamed of doing afterwards: “Free air, fresh food, et al…” The languages were English and Russian; Wang apologised for his Russian and said “Romain does a huge job compared with me.” The news bulletins, sent three times a week, had brought them the Japanese earthquake, the war in Libya and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Urbina wrote the same day: “Keeping steady is not simple; we as individuals have ups and downs and our mood may fluctuate, but as a group we keep level, moving forward like a flock of birds.”

July to November 2011: the dull months and the countdown

Three birthdays in July: Charles on the 12th, with a “companion cube” from the game Portal hung in the kitchen by Urbina, a video from the French embassy, and “an overwhelming wave of congratulations”; Kamolov on the 14th with a poster of himself as Atlas; Wang on the 25th with a giant box of instant noodles, the only Chinese-like food aboard, and a video of his parents, whom the Chinese agency had flown to Moscow. On 14 August the crew passed Valery Polyakov’s 437 days 17 hours 59 minutes aboard Mir. Then August: fewer letters because families were on holiday, the same experiments “with the same equipment and the same test subjects”, a menu on a one-week cycle from which the tuna in oil had vanished in the first month and the chocolate bars by the fourth. ESA’s Patrik Sundblad called it “the mental low point.” Charles: “dull.” In August, noting that journalists “almost all of them ask questions about negative feelings,” Charles wrote a diary of the best days instead.

On 15 September the delay ended and the crew could speak; the first guests came to the control room at the end of the month, and Charles found some French words “harder to find than their English counterpart.” On 13 October Smoleevskiy’s second birthday inside, the last of the mission, with a calligraphy poster from Wang and a pencil portrait by Urbina drawn on Mars. The crew had argued over when to start the countdown, a hundred days out or less, and had settled on ten. “Today, on 25 October 2011, 10 days before our egress, we’re ready to count!” Some were cleaning under their beds. “It’s amazing to realize the amount of bits and pieces which can end up below our beds… even when you’re in a closed environment!” On 4 November at two in the afternoon the hatch opened.

Sources

Also going deeper on Four Million Minutes