If you stop to think about it, the experiences of astronauts in space are not so dissimilar from what we are experiencing at home as we shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Astronauts orbit the earth every 90 minutes, and therefore get to view a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes. If not careful, their days can blur together. Similar to what we are experiencing here on earth, their work and personal spaces aboard the space shuttle and the International Space Station are the same. They see the same people 24 hours a day for weeks and sometimes months at a time. This mirrors our current reality during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Astronauts are extremely focused on their mission and can run on pure adrenaline for the shorter missions. Team resilience is key to any mission and cross-training to build in redundancy is imperative given the fact that the size of crews will remain limited for the near future. You have a job, you have a mission. Everything else is secondary. You train hard and work to be the best so that you know your job better than anyone else. This is especially useful now as people are balancing work and home lives under extreme conditions. Being able to juggle these multiple demands effectively is challenging, especially with the added stress of trying to keep ourselves and everyone around us healthy and safe. Default to your training. Info
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