ASTRONAUTS

Raise your hand if you want to fly in space! If so, you share a quest with millions of dreamers around the world who have patiently, and impatiently, anticipated Sunday afternoon drives down celestial freeways.

"See You in Orbit? Our Dream of Spaceflight" will guide you on historical, personal, irreverent, and often-humorous tour of the promises, expectations, principal personalities, and milestones regarding the goal individuals have to fly in space.

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A number of interpersonal issues relevant to manned space missions have been identified from the literature. These include crew tension, cohesion, leadership, language and cultural factors, and displacement. Ground-based studies by others and us have clarified some of the parameters of these issues and have indicated ways in which they could be studied during actual space missions. In this paper, we summarize some of our findings related to social and cultural issues from a NASA-funded study conducted during several Shuttle/Mir space missions. We used standardized mood and group climate measures that were completed on a weekly basis by American and Russian crew and mission control subjects who participated in these missions. Our results indicated that American subjects reported more dissatisfaction with their interpersonal environment than their Russian counterparts, especially American astronauts. Mission control personnel were more dysphoric than crewmembers, but both groups were ...

Various space treaties, regulations and new laws have been enacted in order to maintain the crew code of conduct along with protecting the legal status of astronauts. This paper will mainly focus on the importance of legal status of the astronauts and the reason behind the crew code of conduct. The origin of astronauts' legal status has been derived from the intergovernmental space station agreement and new originated laws.1 The reasons behind giving the legal status to the astronauts are the peculiar situation and special environment in which they work. They are exposed to work in an artificially created environment where breathing and temperature are fatal in nature. Thus, the need is felt to the experts to make new regulations which should be more flexible in nature in which astronauts can cope up with the situation.2 The application of command authority in the context of space, is the Crew Code of Conduct called for by Article 11 of the 1998 IGA.3 The ISS Commander is the highest authority among the ISS crewmembers on orbit. In enforcing his or her command authority pursuant to the CCoC, the mission commander "shall have the authority to use any reasonable and necessary means to fulfil his or her responsibilities".

Astronauts live and work in highly unusual and challenging environments where they must withstand multiple stressors. Their abilities to maintain positive psychological outlooks and good interpersonal relations are crucial for personal well-being and mission success. From the inception of the space program, psychologists, psychiatrists, human factors experts, and other professionals have warned that the psychological stressors of space should be treated as a risk factor and that the risk would increase as missions involved larger, more diversified crews undertaking increasingly long flights. Thus, they called for research leading to the development and application of effective countermeasures. Although psychology played a significant role at the inception of the space program, for many years thereafter certain areas of psychology all but disappeared from NASA. Interest in psychosocial adaptation was rekindled in the mid-1990s when astronauts joined cosmonauts on the Russian space st...

Winner of the 2017 Sacknoff Prize for Space History from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Aerospace Special Interest Group (Albatross) and Quest: The History of Spaceflight: https://www.spacehistory101.com/Sacknoff_Prize_for_Space_History_s/1824.htm

Since the earliest days of spaceflight, a range of actors—philosophers, scientists, engineers, lawyers, politicians, and “the rest of us”—have connected the view of Earth from outer space, often called the “world picture,” with “thinking globally.”  In doing so, these actors have related space activities to new kinds of political and existential meaning. Historical, anthropological, and sociological studies of these perspectives usefully deconstruct the influence of colonialism, politics, social order, and culture on the world picture, suggesting that its so-called global thinking is not so global after all.  Notably, Benjamin Lazier (2011) and Jordan Bimm (2014) historicize views about observing Earth from outer space, mainly as intellectual, politicized developments among philosophers and early spacefarers.  In Lazier’s account, the world picture is flat, not merely a philosophical but an actual “enframing”—literally, a picture of Earth from space.  But for astronauts and the engineers who design their vessels, the view of Earth from outer space occurs not within a two-dimensional frame but a physical space, which I tentatively call a “world space.” This approach inverts the object of study in discourses on the world picture from the impersonal “Whole Earth” to the space in which actors encounter it. I ask: How do the historical contingencies and sociological networks of spacecraft design influence astronaut experiences of viewing Earth from outer space and their “global thinking” or lack thereof?

I offer an historical and a sociological account of design, architecture, and bodies in one of the most unique sites of the International Space Station (ISS), the Cupola, often referred to as “our window on the world.”  I argue that the Cupola and ISS are what Michel Foucault would call “heterotopias.”  This concept presents a politically-charged, unorthodox lens through which to study such spaces. The heterotopia enriches scholarship on the world picture, providing a language by which to highlight flows of power in the Cupola and ISS. First, I review and critique studies on space, place, outer space, and thinking globally, using the heterotopia to intervene in these discourses. I then reveal various kinds of heterotopias related to life in the Cupola that highlight control and resistance to it. I show that the Cupola was designed and operates to order life and technological practices within and beyond its space, but that it also induces experiences that contest this spatial order. Although the Cupola may not create a “sense of place,” as Lazier might suggest and as Lisa Messeri claims of planetary scientists’ encounters with other worlds , it partly rejects its own spatial order by eroding astronauts’ global thinking and subverting its function as a technology that disciplines astronaut life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to express the utmost gratitude to Richard Staley for his invaluable and continuing insights and guidance during and after the writing of my M.Phil. Dissertation at Cambridge, from which this article is adapted. I must also thank Charissa Varma, Marwa Elshakry, Peter Dickens, Jordan Bimm, and Jeremy Kessler for their generous feedback and for various discussions that stimulated the development of the piece. I am further indebted to Mary Brazelton, Josh Nall, Simon Schaffer, Asif Siddiqi, Matthew Hersch, and Eleni Panagiotarakou for conversations on and offline that extended the reach of my research.

A Lunar Space Elevator [LSE] can be built today from existing commercial polymers; manufactured, launched and deployed for less than $2B. A prototype weighing 48 tons with 100 kg payload can be launched by 3 Falcon-Heavy's, and will pay for itself in 53 sample return cycles within one month. It reduces the cost of soft landing on the Moon at least threefold, and sample return cost at least ninefold. Many benefits would arise. A near side LSE can enable valuable science mission, as well as mine valuable resources and ship to market in cislunar space, LEO and Earth's surface. A far-side LSE can facilitate construction and operation of a super sensitive radio astronomy facility shielded from terrestrial interference by the Moon. The LSE would facilitate substantial acceleration of human expansion beyond LEO.

After half a century hiatus the moon flights are progressing to resume in 2023 with moon landings now scheduled to take place in December 2023. Here is my flight crew interview where I outline my reasons for applying for the historic moon flight which Yusaku Maezawa 前澤友作 of Japan has funded and which Elon Musk's SpaceX corporation of the United States is the flight organiser. My aim to enrol for a moon flight (until September 2022) has been to draw attention to our very rapidly deteriorating environment and the fact that there appears to be a systematic bias in the West to underestimate the speed of climate change in the forecasts. (This bias to much later dates stands in stark contrast to the First Nations of Americas United Nations General Assembly Ethnoclimatology Motion 101292 which stipulated a much faster progression on climate change than the Western academia has been generally forecasting or even admitting - based on indigenous people's ancient ethnohistories how the last Ice Age was ended by then global warming with ice sheets destabilised rapidly. As a result, it is likely, if not almost certain that much faster changes in our climate will occur than those stipulated in the official documents released by UNFCCC, IPCC, WMO, UNEP, IEA, and WTO. Despite my setback in September 2022 regarding my plans to shout about climate change from the moon to get more attention to this important matter, I continue my efforts from this platform to continually remind world's nations that there are "red lines" laid down by others on climate inaction: what they will tolerate and what they will not. We need to avoid a crisis over our sharing of the atmospheric resource of our planet that needs protected against greedy users. This is important as in the past when men were fighting over access to the water holes and clubbing themselves to the death, today such fighting over global warming, climate change, Asia's monsoon rains, and sea level rise would automatically occur in industrial scale with deployment of nuclear weapons (Asia's monsoon can be re-instated by 260 nuclear explosions after the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover melts away by so-called "nuclear winter" effect - but this would involve unacceptable death tolls in the North.)

Was haben ein Western-Film und ein Science-Fiction-Film gemein? Auf den ersten Blick scheinbar nichts. Beide operieren mit komplett unterschiedlichen Topoi: Der Western mit Cow- boys, Pferden und dem Wilden Westen, Science-Fiction hingegen mit Astronaut*innen, Raum- schiffen und dem Weltraum. Und doch bestehen mehr Gemeinsamkeiten, als der Schein trügt. Ikonographisch wie auch erzählerisch evozieren US-amerikanische Science-Fiction-Filme wie THE MARTIAN (Ridley Scott, US 2015) und INTERSTELLAR (Christopher Nolan, US 2014) das ursprünglich dem Western intrinsische Frontier-Narrativ. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es daher, zu untersuchen, in welchem Ausmass der Frontier-Mythos auch in Science-Fiction implementiert wird. Wie wird in THE MARTIAN und INTERSTELLAR die an den Western-Mythos angelehnte Weltraumeroberung narrativ als auch ästhetisch dargestellt und welches Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Kosmos wird dadurch etabliert?

This paper, based mainly on astronauts’ first-person writings, historical documents, and my own ethnographic interviews with nine astronauts conducted between 2004 and 2020, explores how encountering the earth and other celestial objects in ways never before experienced by human beings has influenced some astronauts’ cosmological understandings. Following the work of Timothy Morton, the earth and other heavenly bodies can be understood as “hyperobjects”, entities that are distributed across time and space in ways that make them difficult for human beings to accurately understand, but whose existence is becoming increasingly detectable to us. Astronauts in outer space are able to perceive celestial objects from vantages literally unavailable on earth, which has often (but not always) had a profound influence on their understandings of humanity, life, and the universe itself. Frank Wright’s term, the “overview effect”, describes a cognitive shift resulting from seeing the Earth from s...

The crash of Apollo 13 is the retribution of the lunar People to earthlings trying to penetrate into the Moon. // Сакральный закон строг: вандалу святилище — гибель. Авария, постигшая «Аполлон-13» на пути к Луне — плод незнанья: Луна — врата в Вечность, Отчизну нас, бренных, и гибельны пробы ломиться в сей Храм.

This paper outlines the challenges and discoveries arising from an ambitious workshop designed to introduce participants of the International Space University, Southern Hemisphere Summer Space Program to the rigours of EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity or spacewalk) and the complexities of working in neutral buoyancy facilities (WET)
and interdisciplinary networked environments (DRY). Conducted with two teams of 20 people, over two days, and across two-locations, the EVA simulation training exercise aimed at challenging and connecting the activities of participants in the water with those of a remote mission control. The mission objective was to perform a simulated EVA to complete the installation of the D’Underarm (an Australian response to the Canadarm). Under the supervision and remote control of a mission control centre, the space walkers, wearing regular SCUBA gear in a 3-
meter deep pool, were to egress through an airlock (simulated by hula hoops); transport hardware and tools to the work-site using specific tethering protocols; complete the hardware installation with semi-real time rudimentary instructions from mission control; attach a calibration tool to the end of the installation; manoeuvre the D’Underarm to perform an inspection, and translate back to the airlock with their tools. We highlight the activities to report on the lessons-learned and the recommendations for future low-cost educational EVA Simulations, covering aspects including operational design considerations for the systems installation, the configuration and operation of crew aids, tools, communications and operational protocols.

This review article is a compendium of six individual manuscripts, a Commentary, and an Executive Summary. This body of work is entitled "The Impact of Sex and Gender on Adaptation to Space" and was developed in response to a recommendation from the 2011 National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey, "Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration: Life and Physical Sciences for a New Era," which emphasized the need to fully understand sex and gender differences in space. To ensure the health and safety of male and female astronauts during long-duration space missions, it is imperative to examine and understand the influences that sex and gender have on physiological and psychological changes that occur during spaceflight. In this collection of manuscripts, six workgroups investigated and summarized the current body of published and unpublished human and animal research performed to date related to sex- and gender-based differences in the areas of cardiovascular, immun...

Lists sixteen Hollywood films that show the heritage of the U.S. Air Force from World War I through the Korean War and the space age.
[This full text is made available since amazon has changed the formatting of its "idea lists" so that descriptions are clipped.]