Jul 13 2011

From The Space Library

RELEASE: 11-226 NASA SUPPORTS COMPETITION TO CREATE OUT OF THIS WORLD T-SHIRT DESIGN WASHINGTON -

NASA, through the Harvard-NASA Tournament Laboratory, is supporting an online challenge for artists to design a T-shirt commemorating the final space shuttle mission and the program's contributions to exploration. The challenge is run by Threadless, an online design site, and the Harvard-NASA Tournament Laboratory. The lab is administered by Harvard University, which is under contract to NASA to study crowd sourced innovation that leads to tournaments for scientific and engineering challenges. Threadless, an online community of amateur and professional designers, is challenging its 1.5 million international artists and the public to design a shirt about "The Final Frontier" by July 22. Threadless will produce the design chosen through online votes. The chosen designer will receive a $500 cash prize, a $500 Threadless gift certificate and a shuttle-flown patch from his or her home country. The Harvard-NASA Tournament Laboratory will provide the patch.

RELEASE: 11-223 NASA RELEASES BOOK ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT

WASHINGTON -- NASA's History Program Office is releasing a new book that examines the different psychological factors that affect astronauts during space travel, especially long-duration missions. The book, "Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective," is a collection of essays from leading space psychologists. They place their recent research in historical context by looking at changes in space missions and psychosocial science over the past 50 years. What makes up the "right stuff" for astronauts has changed as the early space race gave way to international cooperation. Different coping skills and sensibilities are now necessary to communicate across cultural boundaries and deal with interpersonal conflicts. "The essays give a comprehensive overview of this complex subject, providing novel insights for behavioral researchers and historians alike," NASA's Chief Historian Bill Barry said. "The data is important as we work to send astronauts to Mars, which will mean longer missions without real-time communication with family and friends leading to increased potential psychosocial stresses." The book's editor, Douglas A. Vakoch, is a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He also is a manager at the SETI Institute.

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