How to get along in space – when you’re stuck on board with a Russian

When you’ve got to spend six months together on the ISS, it’s best not to mention the war – try ranting to family and friends instead

On Earth, co-operation and goodwill between Russia and the West has reached ground zero. But 250 miles up into space, it’s a different story. So could astronauts teach us a valuable lesson about how to get along? 
Last week, a fresh crew of three American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) in a SpaceX rocket. Nasa’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Eppsor and Roscosmos’s Alexander Grebenkin will spend a six-month stint working together on scientific research. They will replace a crew from the United States, Denmark, Japan and Russia, who have been on board the ISS since August. 
It has been two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. But aboard the ISS, which hurtles above us at 17,100 miles per hour, it is business as usual, and astronauts and cosmonauts (their Russian counterparts) must overcome political strife to work together in close quarters for months at a time.
That includes living together, sharing meals, celebrating Christmas, and even conversing in a Russian/English dialect the astronauts fondly refer to as “Runglish.” Today’s astronauts follow in the footsteps of Thomas Stafford, the late Nasa astronaut whose famed 1975 handshake with his Soviet counterpart (the first handshake in space between an astronaut and a cosmonaut) helped thaw the Cold War and laid the foundations for collaborative space missions to come. Stafford died earlier this month, aged 93.
Nick Kanas is a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of California and the author of a new book, Behavioral Health and Human Interactions in Space. Back in the late 1990s, Nasa assigned Kanas to research the psychosocial wellbeing of astronauts in the Shuttle-Mir programme, where American astronauts spent three to six months working alongside cosmonauts on a Russian space station. Space, Kanas says, is a “nice model for international co-operation, which we certainly need these days”.
Dinner party rules ban conversations about politics, sex and religion. So is the key to getting on in space simply not mentioning war on Earth? “I can’t imagine that it doesn’t come up sometimes,” says Kanas. “But I don’t believe they dwell on that or make that an issue causing any strife between them.”
Scott Kelly, an American astronaut, spent a year aboard the ISS with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko. “You feel like a representative of the whole planet, especially when you have an international crew. You work for all the different partner agencies: I’ll do a Japanese experiment. I’ll be fixing something in the European module. I’ve launched on the Russian Soyuz,” he said in a 2017 interview with Harvard Business Review. “There’s potential for conflict and challenges, particularly with the Russians; we’re not always the friendliest with them. But in space you set all that aside, because we rely on those cosmonauts, and they rely on us.
“Occasionally someone will do something to get on your nerves, but then you realise you’re probably doing stuff to get on their nerves, too. So you just move on. I’ve seen two cosmonauts who didn’t talk to each other for months. That’s not an ideal situation.” 
Kelly says he dealt with interpersonal conflict on his year-long mission by exercising – which astronauts do daily, sometimes for two hours at a time – and by “having a sounding board at home”.
It can be a challenge to get along with colleagues at the best of times. But in space, you’re in far closer proximity than in an open-plan office and for far longer durations. Kanas refers to Soviet cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev’s memoir, Diary of a Cosmonaut, where Lebedev cites examples of his irritation at colleagues. But rather than cause a scene, Lebedev would simply ignore it or retreat to a different part of the spacecraft – the extraterrestrial equivalent of an office coffee break.
The biggest psychological challenge of working in space is “being together with the same group of people for such a long period of time,” says Kanas. “The astronauts can be in space for six months to a year, or even longer now on orbit. They have to learn how to get along with each other and to deal with [interpersonal] issues as they come up.” 
Astronauts must undergo a psychological profile before they are selected, so those who make it will be fairly confident that they can already navigate conflict and get along. But all astronauts are still encouraged to speak to friends and family, which they can do “pretty much 24/7”, says Kanas. There is also access to a dedicated counselling staff available on the ground.
So what happens if a colleague is being infuriating, tetchy, or just slurping their noodles in an annoying way? Kanas says you just deal with this how you would on Earth – ignore it. Stay professional, and then complain to friends and family later.  
Prep for potential cross-cultural problems starts a year beforehand. Training is sometimes taught in the other party’s language and astronauts also “spend some time on the ground discussing different cultural factors,” says Kanas. 
But these differences are eased by a strong group identity: “Astronauts are a special group, and they often identify strongly with each other, perhaps even more than the specifics of their national origin,” he adds. 
There are Russian, American and European living “segments” on the ISS, but coming together for (freeze-dried) meals is key to extraterrestrial harmony. (The ISS has 13,696 cubic feet of living space in total, including two bathrooms, a gym, and a 360-degree viewing bay called the cupola.) 
“They are encouraged to eat meals together as a way of socialising, and they do have parties,” Kanas says. “For example, Christmas, or they might celebrate a Russian holiday – worker’s day I think was one that was celebrated – so they do acknowledge each other’s culture through little ceremonies and parties.” 
Astronaut Nicole Stott, who served as an engineer on two ISS missions, says shared dinners were a daily highlight. “You’re all floating around the dinner table, you’re sharing food, you have food from all the different countries [represented]. I don’t know what the secret sauce is,” she says, but astronauts have a “wonderful way of co-operating” no matter what is happening down below.
The next frontier is Mars, where missions are predicted to take around two and a half years. “The support strategies that work really well in orbit [such as regular contact with friends and family] will not be as available to a crew going to Mars,” Kanas says. 
But above all, astronauts draw strength from recognising that a successful mission is for the greater good. “It’s in the interests of both America and Russia right now to have the ISS continue, and to finish it you need everybody to properly operate the facility,” says Kanas. “I think they’re both getting enough out of it that they will excuse some of the political differences.” 
Kelly previously wrote that, “the [ISS] is a great symbol of co-operation between formerly warring countries. But it is also a real place where people live, work and form unbreakable friendships. 
“Misha [a Russian cosmonaut colleague] and I often joked that if we wanted our countries to get along, we should send our leaders to the space station, where they must co-operate and rely on each other for their lives,” he added. “Maybe we need only recognise that we already do.”