Psychology of Space Exploration
THE AEROSPACE PSYCHOLOGY
LABORATORY SIMULATOR EXPERIMENT
I will begin by setting the stage for what took place. McDonnell Douglas Aerospace
(now Boeing Space Systems) in Huntington Beach, California, was in the process of
developing a new, single-stage-to-orbit rocket to replace the Space Shuttles. This vehi-
cle would take off vertically the way the Shuttles do, but instead of gliding in for a land-
ing, it would land vertically using the thrust of its engines the way the Moon landers did
in the Apollo program. The rocket, which was to be called the Delta Clipper, was first
conceived of as a cargo vehicle. Soon, engineers began thinking about having both a
cargo bay and, interchangeable with it, a passenger compartment. The passenger com-
partment was to accommodate six passengers and a crew of two for a two-day orbital
flight. Former astronaut Charles “Pete” Conrad was then a vice president of McDonnell
Douglas Aerospace and a key player in the development of the Delta Clipper. At the
time, all of the McDonnell Douglas designers were fully occupied with work under a
NASA contract on the design of what would eventually become the International
Space Station. Dr. William Gaubatz, who headed the Delta Clipper program, had hired
one of my graduate students as part of the team developing the vehicle. She gave Dr.
Gaubatz and Pete Conrad a copy of my book, Human Factors in the Design of Spacecraft.^3
After reading the book and engaging me in several interviews, they selected my labora-
tory to design the passenger compartment for the Delta Clipper.
Pete Conrad had determined that a spaceship in orbit about Earth at the incli-
nation then being commonly flown by the Shuttles would be able to see most of
the parts of Earth that the passengers would want to see in daylight if the space-
craft orbited for two consecutive days (remember that when orbiting Earth, one is
in darkness half the time).
Once the passenger compartment design was satisfactorily completed, there was
considerable excitement among the McDonnell Douglas engineers about the idea of
taking civilian passengers to space (no one spoke words such as “space tourism” yet
at that time). The designers were excited about such ideas as not putting full fuel on
board the vehicle for orbital flight but keeping it lighter, adding more passengers,
- H. A. Wichman, Human Factors in the Design of Spacecraft (Stony Brook: State University
of New York [SUNY] Research Foundation, 1992).