THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYSpace psychology
Work psychologists don’t just provide advice to office-based organi-
zations. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is space travel.
NASA classifies psychosocial issues as one of the most serious
threats to a successful mission, and employs two aerospace psychol-
ogists to help recruit and support astronauts. The psychologists
help find those rare individuals who are brave and ambitious, and
yet are capable of coping with the monotony of long-distance
space travel. Fortnightly psychological sessions with on-board
astronauts ensure they are sleeping well and getting on with
their fellow crew-members. Psychologists also oversee supportive
interventions, including the sending of care packages containing
gifts for the astronauts, such as a favourite T-shirt or drawings from
their children.
Beyond NASA, other psychologists and psychiatrists have also
conducted research on psychosocial issues in space. Nick Kanas at
the University of California, for example, has uncovered an effect
known as “displacement”, in which during times of stress astronauts
take out their frustration on ground control. James Cartreine at
Harvard Medical School is developing a multimedia “Virtual Space
Station” featuring videos, animations and interactive questionnaires
to help astronauts cope with their own psychological and social
issues onboard.
An unprecedented psychological challenge will be the first Mars
mission, currently slated for the 2030s. To help plan for this, psycholo-
gists are heavily involved in a 520-day mock Mars mission, “launched” in
June 2010, involving three Russians, one Chinese man, one Frenchman,
and one Italian-Colombian, all locked in a simulation spacecraft. When
it comes to the real mission – a two- to three-year round trip – there
will be no more care packages and no chance to jump on the next
shuttle home. Any contact with earth will suffer delays of twenty to
thirty minutes in each direction.
Nick Kanas wonders about the psychological effects of losing sight
of the earth. “No one in the history of humans has ever, ever perceived
the Earth as an insignificant dot in space,” he has said. “The sense of
everything that is dear to you being so distant – we don’t know what
that means psychologically for people. It may mean nothing, it may
mean an awful lot.”
Aerospace psychologists were consulted in 2010 when a group of
Chilean miners were trapped underground for many months with only
very limited means of communication with the outside world.