Before the space traveler can return to earth, with or without a police force at his back, he must go into space, and psychologists are now engaged in a sharp debate as to just what type of person would be best suited to embark on a long extraterrestrial trip. Addressing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Indianapolis a few months ago, Dr. Donald N. Michael, a psychologist who has been doing research on the effects of automation, estimated that a journey to Mars might take about two and a half years, and concluded that our culture was unlikely to produce anyone with that much patience; good space men, he said, might be found in “cultures less time-oriented and more sedentary”—in a Buddhist monastery, perhaps, or among the Eskimos. Reasoning along other lines, Dr. Philip Solomon, chief psychiatrist at the Boston City Hospital, has come out for extrovert space voyagers. Like other medical men in all parts of the country, Dr. Solomon has been conducting what are called “sensory-deprivation experiments”—specifically, confining volunteers of various personality types in iron lungs to see how they bear up in isolation—and in a recent issue of Research Reviews, a monthly put out by the Office of Naval Research, he writes: “It appears that the self-centered introvert, whom you might expect to be quite content in the respirator, holed up in his own little world, so to speak, is precisely the one who breaks down soonest; whereas the extrovert, who is more strongly oriented to people and the outside world, can stand being shut off, if he has to, more readily. Sensory deprivation places a strain on the individual’s hold on external reality, and it may be that those who are jeopardized most by it are those whose ties to reality are weakest.”
Women have notoriously strong ties to reality, and for this reason, among others, some experts are convinced that they would fare better than men on a pioneering journey through space in cramped quarters. Another reason is that women live longer than men, and some of the envisioned journeys would take an extended period of time; still another is that women could probably weather long periods of loneliness better, because they are more content to while away the hours dwelling on trivia. Writing in the American Psychologist a couple of months ago, Dr. Harold B. Pepinsky, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, came up with the notion that the ideal space voyager would be a female midget with a Ph.D. in physics. When I asked a physiologist what he thought of this idea, he not only supported it heartily but embellished it. “It would be good if this midget woman Ph.D. came from the Andes,” he said. “We’re going to have to duplicate the traveler’s normal atmosphere in the ship, and it’s easier to duplicate a rarefied fourteen-thousand-foot atmosphere than a dense sea-level atmosphere.” The cards, though, seem to be stacked against any woman’s blasting off ahead of a man. One important officer, Lieutenant Colonel George R. Steinkamp, of the Space Medicine Division at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, in San Antonio, Texas, said recently, “It’s just plain not American. We put women on a pedestal, and they belong there.” The pedestal apparently should be anchored firmly to the ground.
As for the Ph.D. in physics, I gathered that while it would definitely be an asset, some of the experts are worried lest a physicist might not know all he should about astronomy. An astronomer, on the other hand, might be weak in meteorology, and a meteorologist might well bungle some vital engineering problem. An engineer might know how to operate and maintain his ship but would probably not be able to cope with any illness that happened to befall him. The possibility of illness in outer space is receiving its share of attention, to judge by a paper that Drs. Donald W. Conover and Eugenia Kemp, of Convair’s Human Factors Engineering Group, submitted to the American Rocket Society several months ago, in Los Angeles. “Space men and women must have almost perfect health in order to avoid bringing disaster on the flight by physical incapacity,” they declared, and went on to say that even these paragons of fitness should “be trained in self-medication and, particularly, the use of antibiotics.” From that point of view, the ideal traveler would seem to be a physician, but Professor Lasswell, the Yale political scientist, has a different idea. An anthropologist-linguist, he feels, would make a good space traveler, especially when it came to communicating with the inhabitants of remote celestial bodies; other candidates the Professor has nominated include individuals gifted with extrasensory perception—perhaps members of the Society for Psychical Research, Western parapsychologists, or Eastern mystics.
Naturally, all these difficulties would be cleared up if the vehicle carried a physicist, an astronomer, a meteorologist, an engineer, a physician, and the rest, but at the moment it seems likely that the first spaceships will carry a crew of only one, because present computations show that half a ton of fuel and metal must be provided for every pound of cargo. Still, some farsighted psychologists are pondering the intangibles that would make a large spaceship a happy one. The crew members, living close to disaster at all times and needing all their resources to forestall it, will have to be able to get along with one another, and various experts have told me that this state of affairs will not be as easy to achieve as it might sound. One question they are mulling over is what size crew would prove most efficient and congenial, and the question, I learned, has its facets. A group of five or six, research discloses, would be better in some ways, and worse in others, than a smaller one. Studies now in progress at various universities, though their results are anything but definitive, seem to show that half a dozen men thrown together in close confinement tend to form a highly standardized, if miniature, community, taking on and retaining social patterns through a desire to conform. The members of a smaller group, being less concerned about neighborliness and conformity, are apt to attack the business at hand, whatever it may be, with greater zest and intelligence. “It’s something of a dilemma,” I was told by Luigi Petrullo, who heads up the Group Psychology Branch of the Office of Naval Research, an agency that has for many years observed the behavior of submarine crews. “The factors that make for harmony—a nice clubby atmosphere, if you will—won’t necessarily make for efficiency, will probably lead to jangled nerves. The particular character of a mission, I suspect, will have a lot to do with determining the size of the crew.”