At places like Michoud, she would become convinced that the price she was paying — all the Astronaut Office bullshit, the disruption of her career, the compromises of the science, the laying waste of her personal life — all of it was justified.

…We see that a manned space mission may be viewed as a complex biotechnical and sociotechnical system consisting of manufactured and human parts. A thorough understanding of the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the Mars mission is crucial for reducing the probability of malfunction of the human part of the system, independently of the structural, mechanical, and electronic elements, thereby forcing the readjustment of the system as a whole. Psychological and interpersonal stresses may be reduced through environmental engineering, manipulating crew composition, and the structuring of situations and tasks…

To York, the psych experts’ pseudoscientific lectures — and the role-playing group exercises, and the individual and group psych analyses the crew had to endure — were the worst part of the premission training. They were invariably excruciatingly dull, or profoundly embarrassing, or both.

York had little experience of the soft sciences; and she was dismayed by how limited the underlying thinking was — even here, in the money-no-object space program. Some of the theories that were being applied to her and her crewmates seemed speculative at best. And it was clear that the study of group psychology — as opposed to an individual’s psychology — was still primitive.

Also, more fundamentally, experience of long-duration spaceflight was still so small that there was hardly any evidence to back up the guidelines and techniques being taught to them.

A deep-space mission like Ares was basically unprecedented. So, to figure out what might befall the mental state of a Mars crew, the research psychologists were having to work from case studies of analogous situations — undersea habitats, nuclear submarines, polar research stations, isolated Canadian villages — and they used data from sensory deprivation experiments, sleeplessness studies, and work on social isolation. And sometimes, it seemed to York, they pushed those analogies a little far.

She’d gotten used to the idea that the Ares flight would take aerospace technology to its limit. It was disturbing to her that the softer disciplines, like psychology, would be pushing at the edge of their envelope, too.

It was disturbing that in this fundamental aspect of the mission, nobody actually knew if the crew could survive the flight.

Later, from Vladimir Viktorenko, York started to learn something of how the Soviets handled such matters.