Abstract
Kanas synthesizes American and Soviet mission and simulation reports on long-duration spaceflight — sleep disruption, time sense, anxiety, crew cohesion decay, privacy needs, and postflight personality change — and lists steps to reduce psychological risk before and during flight.
Kanas, N. (1990). Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, 27(5), 457–463. DOI
Key findings
- Mission-stage stress — Psychological issues include sleep problems, altered time sense, homesickness, and shifts in perceptual sensitivity across mission phases.
- Psychiatric spectrum — Anxiety, depression, psychosomatic symptoms, and stage-linked emotional strain appear in reports — not a single syndrome label.
- Crew cohesion — Interpersonal tension and decreasing cohesiveness over time sit alongside needs for privacy and tension between task vs emotional leadership.
- Postflight change — Postflight personality changes are documented in the literature reviewed — relevant to re-entry adjustment, distinct from pre-launch goal fantasy.
Limits
A 1990 narrative review of mission reports and Earth-bound simulations — not a controlled trial of happiness after achieving a lifelong dream. Club Astronaut syndrome borrows the metaphor; this paper documents operational space-psychology risk, not the coaching folk label for post-summit emptiness. Do not over-clinicalise ordinary post-peak let-down.
Application
Use as a boundary cite when Astronaut syndrome needs honesty: real space crews face documented re-entry and crew-stress phenomena — your post-goal flatness still maps more directly to adaptation and forecasting literatures unless mission-grade isolation is literally your context.