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One day in the distant future, we might wake up to the news that a crew of riotous astronauts have commandeered a starship and are now blockading the solar system. Or that the admiral of USS Donald Trump – the Space Force's largest cruiser – has gone rogue and is now lasering satellite after telecommunications satellite out of existence. Or that the Moon Colony has declared independence. As of today, though, the most audacious act of rebellion astronauts have ever engaged in was to turn off the radio.
Shortly after inventing boats, humans invented mutinies. The spectre of rebellious crews, plank-walking, and gratuitous cruelty has been niggling navigators and military commanders ever since.
Infamous incidents, such as the rebellion-cum-shipwreck on the Dutch galleon Batavia, in 1628, or the 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty, went on to have a tremendous cultural impact. Mutinies abound in fiction, too: Homer had Odysseus constantly trying to fend off his seaman's insubordination; Robert Louis Stevenson made a mutiny the narrative axis of Treasure Island; Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean also got its fair share of cutlass-toting mutineers.
After the advent of the Space Age, writers and screenwriters started toying with the idea of mutinies taking place not on seafaring ships, but on spaceships roaming the universe. In 1965, a B-movie titled Mutiny in Outer Space told the story of a bunch of astronauts on a space station staging a mutiny against their captain, who has been driven insane by a space fungus. Three years later, Stanley Kubrick’s instant-classic 2001: A Space Odyssey regaled its audience with the tale of HAL 9000, a mutinous onboard computer prone to take out human astronauts.
As often happens with sci-fi, when it came to space mutinies fiction was way ahead of reality. The first – and, as far as we know, last – instance of outer space crew rebellion would not happen until 1973. On December 28, the three-man crew of Skylab 4, the third manned mission to US space station Skylab – Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Pogue – turned against their bosses at Nasa mission control, shutting off radio communications for several hours.
Reportedly, this was a reaction to a working schedule excessively crammed with tasks, experiments, and observations; the exhausted crew decided to simply take some time off, and spent the day relaxing and looking out of the window. After resuming contact with ground control, they completed the mission as normal, and safely returned to Earth in February 1974. (Some experts, including spaceflight historian David Hitt, dispute that the interruption in communications was intended as a protest.)
In the following years, the Skylab affair led to a rethinking of how astronauts’ workload was structured and apportioned. “Back then, astronauts had a rigid schedule, which prevented them from doing things flexibly,” explains DrIya Whiteley, a director at the Centre for Space Medicine at the University College London. Each task was supposed to be carried out at a specific time, no matter what. That was not always justified by practical reasons, such as the spacecraft's position relative to Earth. Today, Whiteley says, astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) have more discretion on when executing the less time-sensitive tasks.
Communication techniques were also fine-tuned to stave off conflict. “During the first decades [of human spaceflight], mission control operators were engineers, and they could be blunt,” Dr Anna Yusupova, a space psychologist, at Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems, says. “After Skylab 4, the focus on psychological training increased.”
For all its impact, Skylab 4’s impromptu spacecation was underwhelming, as mutinies go. It had nothing on the gruesome rampages that have taken place on seaborne vessels: there was no violence, no real intrigue, no captain trussed up in front of a disgruntled crew, and forced to face the music.
Would a more traditional mutiny even be conceivable in space ? Probably not. Life on the ISS – currently, the only active human spaceflight programme – is notoriously stressful: physiological issues such as “space sickness” and muscle atrophy conspire with monotony, close-quarters cohabitation, and air fans’ constant droning to wreak havoc on astronauts’ nerves. Cultural tensions between internationally diverse occupants are another risk factor, although these differences have never descended into open conflict during a mission. (Nasty incidents have occurred in simulated settings.) Still, the rigorous vetting and the preparation process – which includes cross-cultural communication training – astronauts need to undergo makes a rebellion scenario extremely unlikely.
If it came down to it, though, it is unclear what the commander could legally do about it. The ISS Crew Code of Conduct does not explicitly authorise the commander to use physical force against crew members. According to a bulletin the ESA published in 2001, the negotiators – from Nasa, ESA, Russia’s Roscom, the Japanese Space agency, and the Canadian Space Agency – had a long discussion over a provision that would have added the proportional use of force to the commander’s prerogatives. Two of the negotiating parties opposed the inclusion of the rule, which was eventually relegated to the status of note in the minutes of the meeting: “In cases where necessary to ensure the immediate safety of the Crew Members of the ISS, reasonable and necessary means may include the use by the ISS Commander of proportional physical force or restraint.” No other crew member was authorised – not even in an implied, hinted-at form – to use force to fight off a murderous fellow astronaut or a crazed Commander.
More practically, the ISS has no dearth of ways to exert “force or restraint” – by either the Commander or the mutineers. Knives, screwdrivers, drills and other tools, ordinarily used to carry out repairs and scientific experiments, can be easily brandished as melee weapons; medical supplies comprise bungee ropes, tranquilliser and grey tape – which are expressly recommended as the kit of choice to restrain astronauts suffering from psychosis. Russian Commanders used to have access to a handgun, included in the Soyuz spacecraft’s survival equipment in case cosmonauts had to deal with dangerous wildlife after landing back on Earth; but, according to industry experts and astronauts, that seems to no longer be the case, even if the Russians never officially announced that the gun would no longer be carried. Numbers – that is, how many members of the six-people crew were mutineers as opposed to loyalists – would in all likelihood be the most important factor in determining a mutiny’s outcome.
The real question, in fact, is more about what successful mutineers would do after taking over the Station. “It’s one thing to do a mutiny on a ship here on Earth, where you can jump off on an island or sail wherever you want to go,” says Alexander Soucek, a legal officer at ESA. “In outer space you cannot do that. You have to come back. You still depend on Mission Control.”
Of course, that could change one day in the far future, if and when we build more sophisticated spaceships. A spacecraft designed for a mission to Mars would likely have more autonomy than the ISS has. So would a lunar, or interplanetary base – even if a rebellion there would be more properly called an uprising than a mutiny.
Today, though, a mutiny on the ISS could only make sense as an absurdist stunt, or a government-backed provocation. Sure, they would not have to worry too much about water, which is mostly recycled from urine, moisture from breathing, and sweat. But, without new supplies, a mutinous crew could only resist for about three or four months on the Station’s food stockpile. And the Station depends on mission control for spotting and dodging dangerous space debris.
So, apart from scraping by, there is not much a rogue crew could do. And, crucially, there is no way it could pose a danger to Earth. David Baker, a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, explains crash-landing the ISS in a suicide attack would be a no-go.
“To change orbit you need to apply rocket thrust, and the ISS itself has no rocket thrusters at all,” he says. “Deorbiting the ISS would take a very long burn from either the Soyuz spacecraft or the Progress tanker installed right at the rear of the station. The activation of all of the control procedures to power up the spacecraft will take a considerable amount of time.” It is highly unlikely that the personnel in Mission Control would just stand idly by while the crew set about propelling the Station back to Earth.
“People on the ground would very easily electronically disable the systems the crew would use. You'd need enormous conspiracy on the ground to pull it off,” Baker explains. He adds that a hypothetical mutinous attempt to crash the Soyuz reentry module would be met with a similar fate, as it can be quickly taken over by the mission control folks. The communication equipment allowing mission control to manoeuvre the Station is located on the craft’s exterior, and would therefore be hard – Baker says: “impossible” – for the mutineers to dismantle it.
As things stand, the sole serious damage an outer space mutiny could achieve is, perhaps, in the public relations domain. A senseless massacre, or a terrorist escapade 400 kilometre above our heads might end up ruining one of the last redoubts of uncontaminated optimism. Space would start looking as messed up as Earth. Astronauts and cosmonauts, now revered as quasi-saintly figures, would lose their shine. And utopias of interplanetary peace and prosperity would suddenly seem less convincing.
This article is part of our WIRED on Space series. From the global fight over how we handle first contact with aliens to the endless search for dark matter and the inside story of China's top-secret space ambitions, we're taking an in-depth look at humanity's future amongst the stars.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
