I know depression usually has a grave cause and astronauts have quite an active schedule. But say their family dies. Depression makes you think and perceive time differently. Surely wouldn’t it become a risk to the mission? You can’t steamroll over it…
People with depression still doing their job everyday. Idk how much of a difference space would be. Maybe worse depression?
Depression isn’t the same thing as sadness, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it disqualifies someone from being an astronaut. Most people don’t have depression, but everyone feels sadness at some point in their lives.
To answer your question, astronauts are trained to work under extreme stress, so they would know how to compartmentalize the pain and focus on completing the mission. Similar to soldiers.
This isn’t a direct answer to your question per se, but if this a topic that interests you, I can’t recommend The Right Stuff enough. I’ve not seen the film from the 80s, though by all accounts it’s pretty good, but the book is an excellent overview of the early days of space exploration, when the exact sort of questions that you ask here were being bandied about by the fledgling, pre-Apollo program NASA.
The focus of the book is on the first wave of astronauts who, as someone else mentioned, were pulled primarily from combat aviation backgrounds. I recall several passages which detailed their reactions to the sorts of psychological testing that they were undergoing, usually complete with humorous anecdotes.
They have to be re-pressurized in the pressure chamber.
nasa employs psychologists.
or at least they did until conservatives decided to fuck everyone over.
I think they opted not to make any cuts to NASA. It would be a conflict of interest if they did. In the sense that Elon Musk wants them to keep giving spacex lucrative contracts and they can’t do that if they don’t have piles of money
