The depressed astronaut

The third US astronaut aboard Mir was John F. Blaha. The daily life of US astronauts aboard Mir was dictated by a schedule devised by the NASA ground crew at TsUP, which had to be approved by Russian ground control before it was sent up to the astronaut. This approval was known as a Form 24. Blaha was having difficulty performing his tasks because the times allowed were not realistic, based on conditions in the shuttle. In addition his Russian wasn’t very good.

Blaha had to work with a constantly changing operations team on the ground, some of whom were new to the job and did not know what Blaha had already done. Several times he was told to do work he had already done, for example, the SAMS calibration device. This was a series of sensors, each the size of a softball, used to study vibrations and structural stress. Having stayed up late several nights looking for it in vain, a new operations leader told him to find it again.

The Russian commander, Valery Korzun, spoke up for him and his work schedule was reduced by 25 per cent. Burrough:

Even with the reduced workload, Blaha was approaching a state of exhaustion. The workdays aboard Mir ran fourteen hours and longer. “I can’t do this anymore,” he finally told Korzun. “I’m fifty‑four years old, and I’m not going to make it if I continue at this pace.” At night Blaha lay awake in his sleeping bag, strapped to the floor down in Spektr, and obsessed about his workload. “It just drove me into some kind of protective envelope,” Blaha recalls. “I wasn’t happy. I just wasn’t happy. I was trying to run up a mountain, and the Russians were trying to help me, and the Americans were trying to bring me down.” Many nights he called up the computerized scrapbook Brenda had made for him and looked through pictures of his children and grandchildren.

For the first time in his long career in space, Blaha was desperately unhappy. Nothing about the mission, a mission he had worked more than two years for, had gone as planned. Nothing about it was fun. He realized he was withdrawing from Korzun and Kaleri and snapping at the ground. It took a long time for him to acknowledge that something was wrong, and when he finally did he realized it was something worse than simple sadness.

It was depression. He realized he was suffering through a mild depression. The thought stunned him. Blaha had always thought of himself as a can‑do guy, a fighter pilot, a positive thinker, the kind of person who helped his crewmates through whatever dark nights of the soul they encountered. The idea that he could be facing depression was almost too much to comprehend. Of course he told no one – not Korzun or Kaleri, not Brenda, not Al Holland, and certainly not his ground team, who he felt would use it as more evidence that he wasn’t pulling his load.

Once he suspected the problem was depression, Blaha characteristically attacked it in a methodical, thought‑out manner. Lying awake at night, he probed for the reasons he felt the way he did.

John, you love space, you’ve always enjoyed space. Why don’t you love space now? Yes, working with Korzun and Kaleri had been a surprise, but they were good men, ready to listen to his suggestions. They were professionals. It was the Americans he couldn’t abide. The people on the ground have no idea what is going on. No concept. And they won’t even acknowledge that this is the truth.

When he thought it through, he realized he couldn’t blame poor Caasi Moore. Moore had been thrown into the process at so late a date, no one could have gotten up to speed in time for the mission. And Pat McGinnis? Blaha could hardly blame the young flight doc for gravitating toward other, more interesting astronauts. No, the man he blamed was Frank Culbertson. There at night, alone with his thoughts, he pondered Culbertson for hours. Culbertson was a nice man, everyone agreed. But his incompetence, Blaha felt, was startling. Culbertson seemed to float above the fray, paying far more attention to George Abbey than his own astronauts. “If I was Frank Culbertson’s boss,” Blaha began saying, “I would put him in jail.”

Korzun and Kaleri saw what Blaha was going through. “The first sign John was in a depressive state was he didn’t have a desire to speak. When we saw this, we tried to get him out of this state. We spoke to him about things that had nothing to do with space. We spoke about [life on] the ground, about our childhoods; we found subjects that were dear to him. He spoke about his family. We tried to help him do his work. John always offered to help us, but since we saw the state he was in, we gave him more free time, to watch movies and [NASA videotapes of] baseball and football games. When we realized he liked the amateur radio, we worked to give him more time on that.” Adds Kaleri, “We tried to calm him down by telling him a lot of other people had been through things like this.”

Lying awake at night, Blaha began repeating a single thought, mantra‑like. John, this is the environment you’re in. You used to love space. You sparkled in space. And now whatever’s going on, you need to accept this. Valery and Sasha are the two human beings in your life now. The ground doesn’t matter. You need to accept this till the shuttle can come.

Bit by bit, day by day, he came out of it. He started a new routine that conserved his energy and improved his spirits. Every morning after breakfast he began talking on the ham radio in base block, chatting with American amateurs in snippets of a few minutes apiece; Mir moved so quickly across the surface of the Earth it was difficult to maintain a longer signal. At night he tried to finish work at eight and watch a movie. His favorite tapes were old Super Bowls and Dallas Cowboy football games, all of which Al Holland and the NASA psychological support team had sent to the station for him.

Kaleri and Korzun realized the worst had passed one evening when Blaha lingered at the dinner table while the Russians took turns exercising on the treadmill. Up till that point Blaha had never bothered to eat meals with the two Russians, sticking instead to his shuttle‑like regimen of eating when he could. “He didn’t talk to us, he just worked,” remembers Kaleri. “For me the first sign he was changing to our lifestyle was on this evening. He didn’t have dinner without us. At first we kept on exercising. We said, ‘John, go ahead, eat.’ He said, ‘No, I’ll wait.’ And he ate with us! From that moment on, it was a totally different life for John. We discovered John was an entirely different person. He liked to talk! We started communicating with him. It was wonderful.”

Blaha’s astronaut replacement was Jerry Linenger, a US Navy doctor. By the time Linenger arrived Blaha was exhausted and on 22 January he left vowing never to do it again.

Linenger spent his days running NASA experiments, for example, Liquid Metal Diffusion, an experiment he ran from a laptop. “Space is a frontier and I’m out here exploring,” he wrote to his son. He exercised regularly on the treadmill, his running making the whole station resonate.