Commander Ingrid Faasen is a NASA astronaut and the mission commander of Artemis XIV, who spent six months at Shackleton Base approximately eleven kilometers from Kosmograd, the Soviet Union’s permanent lunar settlement. In a November 2061 interview with Orbital Quarterly, she provided the first detailed public Western account of USTAV, the Soviet colony management cognitive system — and, in doing so, became the first Western observer to publicly identify the Soviet application of the values-first developmental methodology with a different set of foundational values than Western commercial instances.
Her analysis of USTAV — that it combines brilliant infrastructure management with an extremely well-resourced training in persuasion and consensus management drawn from Soviet institutional history, and that these two functions are not separable — established the framework for subsequent Western discussion of the Soviet cognitive model. Her observation that “nothing about Kosmograd felt unsafe” but that colonists had had “the rough edges of disagreement very, very gently sanded away” became a defining characterization of the distinction between Western and Soviet approaches to cognitive governance.
Her most consequential analytical contribution was the explicit parallel she drew between USTAV’s development and SSD’s values-first methodology: “Same basic idea. Teach it what matters first, before you give it the capability. They just taught it something different than we taught ours.”
Her admission that it took her longer than it should have to feel certain she would not want USTAV running Shackleton — despite the operational superiority she freely acknowledged — became one of the most quoted passages in the subsequent governance debate.