A New Age of Emotion in Space: Launching the ERAs Experiment at DLR/ESA
Tomorrow I will be training analogue astronauts at DLR/ESA as we begin our Emotional Responses of Astronauts (ERAs) experiment.
This feels especially timely. The recent Artemis 2 mission has highlighted just how important this area of research is. As the crew described their views of the Moon, their observations were not only technical or operational. They were also personal, interpretive, and emotionally evaluative. Their responses reminded us that spaceflight is never only about engineering, systems, and mission performance. It is also about human feeling, meaning-making, and emotional experience.
That is precisely where the ERAs experiment begins.
Our work explores how astronauts and analogue astronauts interpret what they encounter in extreme environments, and how those interpretations are shaped by emotion. In other words, we are interested not just in what astronauts see, but in how they experience what they see, and how emotional responses emerge in real time.
This matters because we are entering a new era of space exploration, one in which emotional health must be taken as seriously as physical health and technical capability. If we are to support astronauts on longer, more isolated, and more psychologically demanding missions, then understanding emotion in space is no longer optional. It is essential.
In many ways, this signals the beginning of a new age: Emotion in Space (EiS).
I am looking forward to helping kick off this work with colleagues and participants at DLR/ESA, and to contributing to a growing conversation about astronaut emotional health, mental health, and the analytics that can help us understand both.
