• Question: What do the astronauts do on long missions to prevent boredom? Rock papers scissors has to lose its appeal eventually.

    Asked by Barney to Tom, Jon, COLFlight, Beth, Anne on 4 Oct 2015. This question was also asked by SpaldingHighSchool7C, space guy.
    • Photo: Columbus Flight Directors

      Columbus Flight Directors answered on 4 Oct 2015:

      Sergio:
      Hi Barney, if astronauts had so much free time to even get bored, that would be awesome!
      Unfortunatley today on the ISS we have the opposite problem: there are so many things to do and we don’t have enough astronauts to do that. The current astronauts work every day for several hours on numerous scientific experiments and on top of this they also have to do a couple of hours of physical exercises.
      If you sum every thing, they usually work more than we normally do on Earth. So they don’t have so much time to get bored!

      And then, in their free time, they do pretty much the same things we do at home: they have meals together, they watch movies, watch football games on TV, listen to music, read books, they talk on the telephone with their families, they read and answer to emails, surf the internet and so on.
      We try to let them have in their space home all the things they would have in their homes on Earth!

    • Photo: Beth Healey

      Beth Healey answered on 5 Oct 2015:

      As Sergio said it’s kinda hard to get bored in space. However on long duration missions you are right there may be some monotony (doing the same things over and over again with the same people) and this is something we are looking into with our research down here at Concordia. We are looking at how this can affect people. For example each week the crew make a video diary like on big brother and we are looking at how people are changing over time. We also all wear watches which record where we are going and with who and how this may change too.

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