Psychology of Space Exploration
and work successfully in space in Earth orbit. This ability has been demonstrated in
spacecraft as tiny as the Mercury capsules, in Space Shuttles, and in various (and
much more spacious) U.S. and Soviet/Russian space stations. Spending up to half a
year in space with a small group of others is no longer unusual. However, plans are
afoot to return to the Moon and establish a permanent settlement there and then
to proceed to Mars. Big challenges are on the horizon, and their likely success is
predicated on three historical series of events: first, the long series of successes in
Earth-orbital flights since the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957; second, the
six successful excursions of Apollo astronauts on the Moon; and third, the success-
ful robotic landings to date on Mars.
In addition to the challenges that lie ahead for the big government-sponsored
Moon and Mars projects of the future, the challenging era of civilian space tour-
ism is about to begin. Five persons, beginning with Dennis Tito in 2001, have
purchased flights to the International Space Station on board Russian Soyuz space-
ships and have had short stays of about a week in space. On 4 October 2004, Burt
Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites, LLC, won the $10 million Ansari X
Prize by successfully flying a privately developed and funded suborbital rocket ship
capable of reaching space. The British company Virgin Galactic is now planning
to fly commercial passengers to the edge of space in a larger suborbital spaceship
being developed by the X Prize–winning Scaled Composites in Mojave, California.
These will be short rides in space, lasting only minutes, but it is clear that the era
of space tourism is at hand. Travel and touring form a powerful human motive, an
observation corroborated by the fact that tourism is the world’s largest industry.
Spaceflight involving humans used to be exclusively the domain of the massive gov-
ernmental programs in the space race between the United States and the Soviet
Union. Now, however, other countries have smaller but significant space programs
with human spacefarers. Robert Bigelow’s private aerospace company in Las Vegas,
Nevada, now has flying in Earth orbit a pair of proof-of-concept scale models of a
proposed generic habitat that could become a space hotel or a private space fac-
tory or laboratory.
Both the Soviet/Russian and U.S. space programs have demonstrated that
humans—men and women of different national and ethnic groups—can live and
work together in Earth-orbiting habitats for modest periods that have quite pre-
cise beginning and ending times. But all of these successful experiences have taken
place in the quasi-military social structures of the astronaut and cosmonaut space