Aside from physical challenges, psychological factors can also be tough, especially when doing missions alone. I am curious what kind of preparation Austronout does before taking up the mission in space.
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It’s very rare that an astronaut is entirely alone, much less for an extended period of time. In the space stations, there’s typically at least a few people in there, so it’s not like there’s nobody to talk to or interact with. Sending and keeping people in space is quite expensive as well, so they tend to keep the astronauts pretty busy doing stuff, it’s not like they have a huge amount of spare time to sit around being bored and think about how lonely they are.
That being said, the selection process for astronauts is very competitive and various mental evaluations are generally part of the process. One of the goals of that process is certainly to weed out individuals who are more likely to seriously struggle with the relevant psychological factors.
Just a something I learned the other day was about saturation divers. Omg these guys live for up to 6 weeks in a tiny pressure vessel at up to 31 times standard pressure. They can work at up to 600m below the surface.
I have no idea how they prepare mentally like astronauts, it looks even harder than space flight.
Mary Roach wrote a funny and informative book called “Planning for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void” that talks about how the astronauts train for space flight.
Training. Months and months of training to the point that of anything occurs they’ll just switch into calm problem-solving mode.
Ironically I just spent the last 4 hours or more reading through the [annotated transcripts of the Apollo 13 mission](https://www.nasa.gov/history/afj/ap13fj/08day3-problem.html) from the time the oxygen tank blew up to splashdown.
Despite what the 1995 film would have you think, there was almost no drama within the crew and most of the time they were just going back and forth with Mission Control discussing incredibly detailed technical spacecraft systems functions and procedures which would have obviously taken years to become familiar with.
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