Human Factors Of Outer Space Production

T. Stephen Cheston

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367171971
• eBook ISBN: 9780429728266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The missions of the early space age--when a relatively few, very highly trained, physically fit male, pilot/astronauts operated for short times--will be supplemented in the future by missions where large numbers of nonpilot/astronaut men and women will work in orbit for long periods of time on research and industry-related tasks. The lengthening and changing complexity of space operations requires that the psychosocial, habitat design, food systems, and economic aspects of humans working in space be reviewed carefully. In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of experts addresses these aspects of space work and delineates avenues for future research.

1. Psychological Considerations in Future Space Missions

Robert L. Helmreich, John A. Wilhelm, Thomas E. Runge

Introduction

Since the suborbital flight of Allan Shepard in 1961, American astronauts have logged 938 man-days in space. The Russian program has added another 1,136 man-days, including the longest mission. Psychological adjustment to the conditions of space has been generally excellent, with no major problems reported during missions. Experience thus far would suggest that psychological factors will not be a major concern on future flights. Our thesis, however, is that generalization from early spaceflights can be misleading and dangerous and that more problems in psychological adjustment can be anticipated in the future. Russian space scientists have apparently drawn a similar inference from their program. Alexei Yeliseyev, the Russian space flight director, has asserted that the only barriers to longduration spaceflights are psychological (1).

We will not review the substantial literature on man's reactions in space but will instead outline the empirical and theoretical issues that lead us to expect more difficulties in adjustment unless preventive strategies are adopted (2). The issues we will consider include the changing scope and goals of future missions, differences in crew composition, and shifts in the costs and rewards for participants. More speculatively, factors in crew selection and composition, authority structure, length of mission and the optimum physical environment will also be discussed.

Factors in Personnel Requirements

New Missions in Space

Pioneering American spaceflights were manned by a cadre of highly trained, professional Astronauts. In the initial phases (Mercury and Gemini), those selected for the program came from the ranks of military test pilots. Some liberalization of selection policies occurred during the Apollo program with the recruitment of Scientist-Astronauts, individuals holding advanced degrees in a substantive area relevant to space exploration. In reality, however, the focus of early American spaceflight was on the high technology involved in safely sending men into orbit or to the moon, with science per se playing a distinctly secondary role. Indeed, the degree of technological expertise and pilot proficiency that Scientist-Astronauts were required to achieve in training for their flights appears to have had deleterious effects on their scientific careers (3).

In contrast, the forthcoming Space Shuttle program represents a major change in policy and a relaxation in requirements for flight. The Shuttle concept provides for a highly trained flight crew to be responsible for the launch, operation and re-entry of the orbiter. Additional crewmembers without flight qualifications or experience can now be accommodated. Thus, in this approach, scientists and others with work to perform in space can go into orbit without extensive technical training in the flight aspects of spaceflight. The result should be a considerable improvement in the quality of scientific research conducted in space, since scientists and other technical personnel at the forefront of their disciplines will have the potential to work in space without sacrificing commitment to their respective disciplines.

The shuttle-orbiter concept calls for a large number of relatively short (one week) orbital flights by the end of the 1980s, approaching a rate of one launch per week.

If the scientific potential of the next generation of space missions is fulfilled, the result may be the development of space stations dedicated to applied technology. Two applications for space stations are zero-gravity manufacturing and the transmission of solar energy to earth-based receiving stations. Should such industrial applications prove feasible, the type of orbital facility required would almost certainly entail a larger crew in orbit for extended periods. Thus, in long range planning, consideration should be given both to relatively small crews in orbit for short periods and larger crews in orbit for lengthy working periods.

Changes in Crew Composition

Whatever the evolution of the space program, one definite change will be in the composition of crews. Women have already been selected for the spaceflight program and will certainly be routinely going into space during the 1980s. In addition, crews for such programs as Spacelab will be more heterogeneous in terms of vocational interests and nationality, through collaboration with the European Space Agency. As was just mentioned, on many flights there will also be two categories of crew--flight personnel and scientific personnel. Such culturally and vocationally mixed crews are more likely to have interpersonal conflicts than the more homogeneous crews of the past.

If a long-term orbital facility devoted to manufacturing or energy transmission is developed, crews will doubtless become not only larger but even more heterogeneous. Such a station would almost certainly need workers with less education for relatively routine and repetitive tasks, in addition to highly trained scientific and technical personnel. Such crews might differ in terms of nationality, race, sex, social class, education, and vocational and avocational interests. Each of these factors raises the possibility of social conflict.

In summary, we can reasonably anticipate major changes in crews, which suggests that generalizations from the experiences of small, homogeneous crews with an extended, intensive backgrounding in the procedures of NASA may be quite unwarranted.

Changes in the Costs and Rewards of Spaceflight

Another factor that might lead to greater difficulty in adjustment on future flights involves the psychological costs and rewards associated with living and working in space. Reactions to unusual and stressful environments have been analyzed in terms of a cost-reward matrix (4). The essence of this analysis is that outcomes (in terms of both performance and adjustment) are determined by an individual's perceptions of the costs and rewards inherent in the environment. Rewards are defined as the sum of all aspects of the situation that the participant sees as personally satisfying or as leading to future benefits. Costs are defined as the unpleasant components of the environment. These include the frustrations, discomforts, dangers, and all other foreseeable negative concomitants of living and working in a given situation. When rewards are perceived as outweighing costs and the situation appears, on balance, preferable to other options available to the individual, performance and adjustment are likely to be good, even where the objective costs are very high. This was clearly the case in the early phases of the American and Russian space programs. The costs were certainly high in terms of lengthy and grueling training, danger, and discomfort in the space capsule. The rewards were also great. Early Astronauts were national heroes, recipients of the world's adulation. Along with the hero status, a number of American Astronauts enjoyed considerable financial rewards and vocational opportunities outside the space program.

It is our contention that as pioneering enterprises become more routine and mundane, rewards tend to be more unstable than costs and to diminish at a greater rate. In the case of spaceflight, while costs in terms of the dangers and discomfort of missions will doubtless be reduced, missions will still be objectively dangerous and, for the foreseeable future, habitats will lack many of the comforts of earth. Rewards, on the other hand, can be expected to diminish even more dramatically. The sense of personal accomplishment and the extent of benefits from society should be markedly less for the 10,000th person in space than for the 10th or the first. As the exhilaration and challenge of the novel environment wane, participants' attention may begin to focus on the negative aspects of the environment that were endured or ignored during pioneering phases. Some evidence for the drop in extrinsic rewards can be seen in the increasing public indifference to space ventures after the first lunar landing. This is certainly to be expected when spaceflights become a weekly occurrence or when missions involve only the resupply of permanent orbital facilities.

Crowding and Privacy in the Space Habitat

With the exception of Skylab, American and Russian spacecraft have had very limited living space, making the term "crowded" an appropriate descriptor. Although visionary advocates of space colonization talk in terms of enormous orbital stations, a realistic appraisal of the costs per pound of orbiting payloads suggests that future vehicles and stations will continue to be environments of high social density.

While former Astronauts have commented on the extreme crowding in Gemini and Apollo capsules, adjustment to these conditions was, as noted, very good. This appears to be another instance where generalization from early flights to future situations could be dangerously misleading. The cost-reward analysis suggests that, as the rewards from spaceflight diminish, participants may be much more susceptible to the stresses of negative environmental conditions such as crowding.

Recent theoretical formulations on crowding confirm this assessment and suggest as well possible strategies to reduce the negative impact of high social density. Most workers in the area of crowding make a distinction between density, a physical measure of the number of occupants per cubic unit of space, and crowding, the psychological perception of an excess of undesirable social contact. Sommer, Hall, and others have defined personal space as an "invisible bubble," immediately surrounding the body, intrusions into which lead to anxiety and discomfort--the perception of crowding (5,6). Personal space is thus seen as an extension of the self. The size of this personal space in any one social contact is a function of the type of interaction and the relationship between the people who are interacting. Stress arises when what a person perceives as the appropriate distance is violated. This stress can be reduced by one of two means: rearranging the interaction in order to reestablish comfortable spacing or, when this is not possible or successful, through various coping strategies. Investigators have proposed a variety of mechanisms for coping which have differing implications for design. We will consider two of these which have both theoretical rationale and empirical support.

Worchel and Teddlie, who have proposed a two-stage theory of crowding based on the notion of personal space, have reported the results of a study relating to coping strategies (7). Subjects who had their personal spaces invaded and who were not given the opportunity to rearrange the interaction distance reported less crowding and performed better on a group task when the walls of the experimental room were decorated with visually stimulating materials (paintings and posters) than when they were blank. Their two-stage theoretical model explains these results in this way: the violation of personal space leads to physiological arousal. From Schachter's theory that emotions consist of cognitive labels applied to undifferentiated arousal (8), they argue that if an individual then attributes his or her arousal to the intrusion of personal space, he or she will experience the negative sense of being crowded. If, on the other hand, the arousal is attributed to some other external cause, there will be less of a sense of crowding, at least temporarily. Thus the subjects exposed to salient visual cues attributed part of the crowding arousal to the stimulating environment, not to social density.

Other examples of this misattribution process suggest an explanation of how positive emotions result from crowding. Individuals can be in a situation with very high social density, such as the crowd at an athletic event, without experiencing a negative sense of crowding. Presumably this is because persons in such settings attribute part of their arousal to the excitement of the event rather than to the violation of personal space. It may be for this reason that a sporting event is more exciting when viewed "live" than when seen on television. Similarly, early Astronauts may have made other attributions for arousal even in the close confines of the capsule. Astronauts undoubtedly experienced arousal from at least three major sources: fear, excitement arising out of the challenges of the mission, and extreme impingement on personal space. The most adaptive attribution for this arousal would, of course, be to the challenges of the mission. When missions become more routine and prolonged, attribution to negative sources of arousal such as crowding may become more frequent. The implication of Worchel and Teddlie's theory that may assist the designer is the derivation suggesting that, if an environment is complex and visually stimulating, inhabitants should tend to attribute part of their arousal positively to the physical environment rather than negatively to crowding. If dense situations are a reality, methods can be found to accentuate positively the coping process. For example, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Book
• About the Series
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• About the Editors and Authors
• Preface
• 1 Psychological Considerations in Future Space Missions
• 2 Future Directions for Selecting Personnel
• 3 Well-Being and Privacy in Space: Anticipating Conflicts of Interest
• 4 Habitat Requirements, Design and Options
• 5 Man-Machine Design for Spaceflight
• 6 Nutritional Criteria for Closed-Loop Space Food Systems
• 7 Rationale for Evaluating a Closed Food Chain for Space Habitats
• 8 Problems of Food Technology in Space Habitats
• 9 Use of Phytotrons in Assessing Environmental Requirements for Plants in Space Habitats
• 10 Controlled-Environment Agricultural Systems for Large Space Habitats
• 11 Economic Factors of Outer Space Production