Psychology of Space Exploration
INTRODUCTION
In the 1950s, as America prepared for its first crewed space missions, it was
not clear that human performance capabilities could be maintained under the
demanding conditions of spaceflight. Where could NASA begin? Much of the
research, equipment, and testing procedures used to support test pilots who set suc-
cessive speed and altitude records transferred easily to the early space program.^1
Decompression chambers, centrifuges, rocket sleds, and the like made it possible
to explore the physiological and performance aspects of conditions that would be
encountered in space. Craig Ryan has detailed the contributions of high-altitude
ballooning, highlighting the usefulness of gondola designs (which he contends pro-
vided a basis for the Mercury spacecraft), flight suits, helmets, and much more.^2 Not
everything could be “off the shelf”; NASA had to develop elaborate simulators for
upcoming space missions. But, on the whole, the same “cast of characters”—engi-
neers, physicians, and psychologists, to mention a few—who brought America to
the edge of space brought America into space.
Animal studies gave some reassurance that humans could adapt physiologi-
cally and behaviorally to space.^3 As early as the late 1940s, biological specimens
were launched on balloons and sounding rockets. In 1958, the Russians successfully
launched a dog, Laika, who survived several days in orbit even though she could
not be brought back to Earth. Wernher von Braun approached behavioral biolo-
gist Joseph V. Brady to see if he would be willing to launch primates, which would
leapfrog the Soviets’ dogs.^4 In 1958 and 1959, America’s first primate spacefarers,
two squirrel monkeys named Able and Baker (known at that time as Miss Able and
Miss Baker) were launched on 15-minute flights reaching an altitude of 300 miles
on a 1,500-mile trajectory and were successfully recovered following splashdown.
- T. Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979); M. A. Weitekamp,
Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004). - C. Ryan, The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 1995). - C. Burgess and C. Dubbs, Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle
(Chichester, U.K.: Springer Praxis, 2007). - Anon., “Journal Interview 64: Conversation with Joseph V. Brady,” Addiction 100 (2005):
1805–1812.