Psychology of Space Exploration
went with being a minority among a majority from the “host” nation, led to con-
siderable dissatisfaction and frustration.
This chapter examines the archived reminiscences of both majority and
minority astronauts and cosmonauts, relying primarily on the method of Thematic
Content Analysis (TCA). TCA is a set of techniques whereby trained scorers iden-
tify and quantify specific variables in narratives. In this study, TCA procedures were
used to analyze how majority-minority status and other variables (e.g., gender, mis-
sion duration, and Space Age era) affected satisfaction, feelings about crewmates
and home agencies, personal values, ways of coping with problems, and other psy-
chosocial reactions of the mission participants. The study drew upon astronauts’
and cosmonauts’ memoirs, autobiographies, media interviews, and oral history
interviews as the databases on which TCA scoring was performed.
NATIONALISTIC EMBODIMENTS OF A
UNIVERSAL HUMAN DRIVE
The exploration of space may be attributed to two driving forces. One is an
innate drive shared by many species but perhaps best exemplified by humanity: the
urge to seek novelty, to enlarge the sphere of the known as we advance into the
hitherto unknown, and to expand the habitat of humankind.^2 Long before tech-
nology made real space voyages possible, fictional explorations can be traced to the
myth of Daedalus and Icarus and its counterparts in other traditions, to the writ-
ings of Cyrano de Bergerac, and eventually to the imaginations of Jules Verne and
the multitude of early-20th-century science fiction writers.
The second motivator, which determined just when in our species’ history
space travel would move from fiction to reality, was international rivalry. Primitive
military rocketry began centuries ago, accelerated and took the first large steps
toward space during World War II, and was increasingly well supported and brought
to eventual fruition as the “space race” component of the Cold War.
- M. Holquist, “The Philosophical Bases of Soviet Space Exploration,” The Key Reporter 51,
no. 2 (winter 1985–86): 2–4.