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in a risky business and you depend on each other to stay alive. So you don’t antagonize the other guy.”
    Laveikin and Romanenko say they managed to avoid frictions because of the clear hierarchy afforded by age and rank. “Yuri is older than me and had experience of spaceflight,” Laveikin is saying. “So naturally he was the leader, the psychological leader. I was following him. And I accepted this role. Our flight was calm.”
    This is difficult to believe. “You never got mad?”
    “Of course,” says Romanenko. “But mainly it was flight control center’s fault.” Romanenko went with option 2. Venting your frustration at Mission Control personnel is a time-honored astronaut tradition, known in psychology circles as “displacement.” Sometime around the sixth week of a mission, says University of California, San Francisco, space psychiatrist Nick Kanas, astronauts begin to withdraw from their crewmates, become territorial, and displace their hostility for each other onto Mission Control.
    Jim Lovell seemed to do most of his displacing on the Gemini VII nutritionist. “Note to Dr. Chance,” says Lovell to Mission Control at one point in the mission transcript. “It looks like we’re in a snow storm with crumbs from the beef sandwiches. At 300 dollars a meal! I think you can do better than this.” Seven hours later, he gets back on the mic: “Another memo to Dr. Chance: Chicken with vegetables, Serial Number FC680, neck is almost sealed shut. You can’t even squeeze it out…. Continuing same memo to Dr. Chance: Just opened the seals; chicken with vegetables all over window at this time.”
    Lovell’s mission was only two weeks long. Was the capsule’s tiny size accelerating the effects of confinement? Kanas knew of no formal studies, but he confirmed that the smaller the craft, generally speaking, the tenser the astronauts.
    Displacement perhaps explains why Judith Lapierre’s anger was directed more at IBMP and the Canadian Space Agency than at the Russian commander, whose actions she put down to cross-cultural misunderstanding and “natural man-woman situations.” Though it’s also easy to believe she directed her anger toward IBMP because they were being popkas.
    Romanenko retains some residual steam to this day. “People who prepared tasks for us, they have no idea what on board is like. Say you are running something here”—he turns to indicate the Mir control console—“and somebody gives you an order to switch on something else. They don’t understand it’s over on the other side, and I can’t leave what I do here and go there.” (This is why space agencies tend to use astronauts as “cap coms”—capsule communicators.) According to Robert Zimmerman’s history of the Soviet space stations, Romanenko had, by the final stages of the mission (after Laveikin left), grown so “testy” with the flight control center that his crewmates took over all communications with the ground.
    Alexandr Laveikin took the third option. He turned the hostility inward. The result, familiar to any psychologist who deals with isolated, confined populations, is depression. Later, after Romanenko leaves, Laveikin confides that there were moments when he thought about suicide. “I wanted to hang myself. Of course, it’s impossible because of weightlessness.”
    Romanenko predicts trouble on a Mars mission. “Five hundred days,” he says with evident horror. Romanenko remained for another four months after Laveikin left. Zimmerman writes that he became increasingly unstable and uncooperative, “devoting his time to writing poems and songs” and exercising. I ask Lena to ask him about this phase of the mission. Earlier, I had told her I’d like to hear some of the songs Romanenko composed in space, and this is what she asks about.
    “You want us to sing?” Romanenko laughs his grainy laugh. “We would need fifty grams of whiskey!” I apologize for not having brought any.
    “I have it,”