International space station as time machine. New routines of everyday life: establishing a time in space

Living and working on board the International Space Station (ISS) produces a cognitive, postural, physiological, and semantic ‘shift’ that significantly affects the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours of the crew. The routine of everyday life is altered by different conditions, including confinement and microgravity, which have a decisive influence on the perception of space and time. In addition, there are two orders of ‘space’: the one inside the time machine, the spaceship, and the one ‘outside’ seen through the windows of the Cupola, the Cosmic Space, the void, the infinity. The idea of considering the ISS a time machine is fascinating. During the orbital journey around Earth at a height of 408 kilometers, the astronauts live 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in 24 hours, every 90 minutes. How can this extraordinary experience not affect the physiology and especially the psyche of human beings who have lived their daily life through days marked by the natural cycle of day and night? Time is a fundamental dimension of everyday life. We cannot see or touch time; however, we can unequivocally perceive its passage and adapt our behaviour accordingly. Like other senses, our perception of time is not true, but rather is modulated by changes in the environmental context. Experiences suggest that emotions can be according to different parameters – including neuronal mechanisms and networks, cognitive functions, awareness (which implies cognition), age, and culture – whose interrelations and effects are not yet well known, but become of extreme interest to those who must design environments in confinement and microgravity conditions, like space stations, the ISS and the future Gateway, but also future habitable bases for the Moon and Mars. In this essay the author – Space Architect with 20 years of experience in the design of objects, equipment and extra-terrestrial environments, as well as Principal Investigator of several experiments carried out on board the ISS with the collaboration of astronauts – proposes a perceptive and cultural ‘shift’ that presents the ISS as a time machine, in which the role of architecture and design is to ‘mitigate’ the effects of the extraordinary environment lived in Space trying to bring back the ‘weightless inhabitants’ a condition of balance and increased well-being.