Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Mission specialist astronauts carry out the science experiments, make the repairs, launch the satellites. They’re still the best and the brightest, but not by necessity the boldest. They’re doctors, biologists, engineers. Astronauts these days are as likely to be nerds as heroes (View Highlight)

Another reason to see how would-be astronauts handle stress is that options for reducing it are limited on board a spaceship. “Shopping, let’s say,” says Tachibana. “You cannot do such a thing.” Or drinking. “Or a long bath,” adds Kumiko Tanabe, who handles press and publicity for JAXA and thus, I suspect, takes lots of long baths. (View Highlight)

As a gross overgeneralization, the Japanese are well suited to life on a space station. They’re accustomed to small spaces and limited privacy. They’re a lighter, more compact payload than the average American. Perhaps most important, they’re raised to be polite and to keep their emotions in check (View Highlight)

We Japanese have a tendency to suppress emotion and try to cooperate, try to adapt, too much. I worry that some of our astronauts behave too much well.” Suppressing one’s feelings too tightly for too long takes a toll. You either explode or implode. “Most Japanese will become depressive rather than explosive,” says Tachibana (View Highlight)

With a twenty-minute radio transmission lag time, you can’t rely on advice from ground control in an emergency. “You need again a brave man.” (View Highlight)

Isolation and confinement are issues of no small concern to space agencies. The Canadian, Russian, European, and U.S. space agencies are spending $15 million on an elaborate psychology experiment that puts six men in a simulated spaceship on a pretend mission to Mars. The hatch opens tomorrow. (View Highlight)

This perhaps explains why so many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it (View Highlight)