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We often say that space is empty, but in truth it's full of things like micrometeus, cosmic rays,

perpetual sunlight, lethal radiation, and tons of other

things waiting impatiently to kill you. Honestly, it's really just missing air to breathe,

from ground to stand on, and any sense of which way is up or down, nothing to stress over.

Earlier this year, I was attending a conference on space development, and it was a fascinating

talk on psychology and space, and I ended up chatting a lot during the conference with

its presenter, Logan Smith, and a lot of what we spoke about was on the challenges any

psychologist's faces, just trying to work with astronauts, especially if we introduce light

lag into the mix. Waiting hours or even years to get a message back from home during a crisis

is not great for raising confidence that help is available. Currently, we have an advantage

that we can really screen folks for mental health before space flight, and that we mostly

have had very few astronauts, we just don't tend to send many folks to space, so we have

not had anyone flip out or break down yet, but not for lack of reasons why. I'm reminded of the

famous moment on Apollo 13 when their oxygen tank explodes, and Jack Swigert says,

Houston, we've had a problem. It's basically become the legendary statement for keeping calm

...