Behavioral Healthin tubs of ice water, and numerous psychological and psychiatric evaluations. They
completed 13 tests on personality and motivation, and another dozen or so on intel-
ligence and aptitudes. NASA historians offer the following observation:
Two of the more interesting personality and motivation studies
seemed like parlor games at first, until it became evident how pro-
found an exercise in Socratic introspection was implied by con-
scientious answers to the test questions “Who am I” and “Whom
would you assign to the mission if you could not go yourself?” . . . .
Candidates who proceeded this far in the selection process all agreed
with the one who complained “Nothing is sacred any more.”^62After five Mercury flights, NASA officials decided that, given the absence
of serious performance deficits to date, there was no need to continue exhaustive
testing procedures. Although ongoing research would have provided an excellent
basis for refining selection methods, by the end of 1962, NASA had prohibited
research teams from collecting data on astronaut job performance, thus making
it impossible to validate selection methods. At that point, according to Patricia
Santy’s authoritative work, Choosing the Right Stuff: The Psychological Assessment
of Astronauts and Cosmonauts, normal reluctance to participate in psychological
research was transformed into “outright hostility.”^63 Psychiatric and psycholog-
ical data from the Mercury program were confiscated, and researchers were told
that apart from incomplete information that had already appeared in an obscure
interim report, nothing could be published about astronaut psychology. The rea-
sons for this are not entirely clear—for example, confidentiality was a growing
concern, and data that could provide a basis for invidious comparisons could
work against crew morale—but Santy favors the view that “NASA became fear-
ful that information on the psychological status and performance of their astro-
nauts would be detrimental to the agency.”^64
- Mercury Program Overview, available at http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/mercury/
mercury-overview.htm (accessed 4 December 2007). - Santy, Choosing the Right Stuff, p. 29.
- Ibid., p. 29.