Psychology of Space Exploration

Flying with Strangers: Postmission Reflections of Multinational Space Crews

to fly for a brief visit to the ISS upon payment of a multi-million-dollar fee) were
included; neither were payload specialists, who fly as members of nongovernmental
institutions such as corporations or universities to carry out a specific task or exper-
iment. Participants from countries other than the United States and the USSR/
Russia were a more mixed group, which included both professional astronauts and
others (many of them professional air force officers) who, after their one spaceflight,
would have no long-term connection with a space program.
The collections covered the era of human spaceflight from the very first period
through the construction of the ISS, but we omitted reports related to missions in
which crews of only one nation were involved. Due to the extremely small sample
available from ISS veterans, we also omitted those data from our analyses. With the
increasing number of crewmembers who have served on the Station, this problem
may be on the way to being solved.
Because the source materials of this study varied widely in length, all TCA
results reported below are based on number of category mentions per page in the
source. Not every subject had references to all of the dependent variables, so n’s
(sample sizes within each subcategory) varied from measure to measure.
Anecdotes and a numerical content analysis software program were used as sec-
ondary data.

Independent Variables

Table 1 shows the breakdown of the subjects by relevant demographic and
spaceflight categories, which served as the independent variables. “National ori-
gin” refers to the country with which the source was identified in the space pro-
gram. For example, some “U.S.” astronauts were originally immigrants from
elsewhere; however, they were selected, trained, and chosen to fly by NASA.
“USSR/Russia” includes cosmonauts whose citizenship was Soviet during the exis-
tence of the USSR and those who were Russian afterward. The “Other” category
includes astronauts who had been recruited and selected by the established space
programs of other nations (e.g., Canada or Japan, as well as France, Germany, or
other EU nations) and who flew with either the U.S. or the Soviet/Russian space
program. Interkosmos crewmembers and their equivalents flying with NASA are
also classified as “Other.”