Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 28, 1995                   TAG: 9503280071
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

AFTER ALL, EXPLORERS ARE ONLY HUMAN

Panelists at Virginia Tech discussing human factors on long space flights orbited that question carefully Monday before rendezvousing with it.

``No doubt about it, if we do go to Mars, it's going to be a mixed crew,'' said Dwight Holland, who is teaching and doing research at Tech on human factors in systems engineering.

Such a round trip could take years, said NASA flight surgeon Patrick McGinnis, so it will be a challenge for engineers ``to design in the ability to have privacy.''

Centuries ago, explorers went ``sailing around the world on a small, closed ship, where you were told you were going to fall off the edge,'' McGinnis said. But they eased the stress by taking their families with them. That is not likely with early interplanetary space missions, he said.

Former astronaut Jon McBride said orbital shuttle missions are being planned for up to 30 days. ''But that's nothing ... You can do that standing on your head,'' especially in zero gravity, he said. But a long-term Mars mission would be different.

``It's going to be the most complicated thing we'll ever do in space flight'' because of the human factors, he said. ``We can design 'em, we can build 'em ... These crew interrelations are the things that are going to drive the success of the mission.''

Holland spent three months at the U.S. Antarctic research station in the 1980s with an all-male team. But competition among the men to spend time with female visitors caused stress, he said.

One of the first women to join an Antarctic team paired up with one of the men, he said. She told Holland that others actually resented that they were happy with each other.

No jealousy happened during the Biosphere II experiment, in which four men and four women spent two years in an enclosed ecosystem, even though two couples already were involved in relationships, said Taber MacCallum, one of the participants.

``Largely, I think it didn't become an issue because we had a lot of privacy ... It wasn't thrust in the face of everybody,'' he said. But he agreed that engineers must design privacy into spacecraft with couples aboard.