How is exploring caves a good analogue for exploring space?
Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills, or CAVES, is the best analogue training astronauts have ever participated in. It does start with the environment, which offers similar stressors as human spaceflight – isolation, confinement, real risk, lack of privacy, reduced communication and resources, difficult rescue and so on.
Both are risky environments, both require safety to be your top priority and situational awareness needs to be high. But all that is just the fertile terrain over which you can create a real scientific exploration mission, using mission operations very similar to space operations. This is key. Using real speleological scientific exploration and documentation, not just a fake science-fiction, space-looking exercise, which may well be appealing to the public, but would be laughed at by astronauts.
CAVES prepares astronauts to become more effective and safe teams by exposing them to a realistic space analogue expedition. The analogies offered by the environment, the technical progression and the scientific and operational set-up are instrumental, but also the professional and personal qualities of the support team, which act as mentors
and role models: explorers of the underworld forming explorers of other worlds. Loredana Bessone is head of analogue field testing and exploration training at the European Space Agency