An experience that is truly out of the world! I could keep reading astronaut quotes for hours! For some of them it was really difficult to find the primary sources. I ended up swapping two of the quotes because I did not have access to the originals. For a collection of other astronaut quotes you can look at the paper by Yaden, Iwry et al. (2016, careful secondary source 😉) or the magazine articles that I all linked in the reference list below.
The mentioned astronauts are:
- Samuel Thornton Durrance, a US-American astrophysicist, who took part on multiple NASA Space Shuttle flights as a payload specialist.
- James Benson Irwin, a US-American astronaut, who was the 8th human to walk the moon.
- Sigmund Werner Paul Jähn, a GDR cosmonaut and the first German man in space.
- Alexander Gerst, a German geophysicist and ESA astronaut. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter. And…
- Samantha Cristoforetti, a former Italian fighter pilot and now ESA astronaut whom you can also follow on Twitter. She is the first Italian woman in space.
Last but not least, I would like to send you off with Alexander Gerst’s “Message to the Grand-Children” which I personally found very moving (The video is in German, but you can turn on English or other language captions).
References
- Chirico, A., Ferrise, F., Cordella, L., & Gaggioli, A. (2018). Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study.
- Deiss, H., National Aeronautics and Space Administration, (NASA) (2015). Astronaut Requirements.
- European Space Agency, (ESA). (o. J.). Attributes of an astronaut.
- footage berlin – rbb media (2019). Interview mit Sigmund Jähn, DRA – aus “Talk-Fieber”, GDR-TV, 1980. (Sigmund Jähn, quote)
- Ihle, E. C., Ritsher, J. B., & Kanas, N. (2006). Positive Psychological Outcomes of Spaceflight: An Empirical Study.
- Kanas, N. (2020). Spirituality, humanism, and the Overview Effect during manned space missions.
- Kelley, K. W. (1988). The Home planet. (James Irwin, quote with photo plate 38)
- Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.
- Kluger, J. (2021). 7 Questions With Record-Setting Italian Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. (Samatha Cristoforetti, quote)
- Quesnel, D., & Riecke, B. E. (2017). Awestruck: Natural interaction with virtual reality on eliciting awe.
- Redfern, M. (1996). SCIENCE: A NEW VIEW OF HOME. (Sam Durrance, quote)
- Universität Stuttgart. (2015). Alexander Gerst an der Universität Stuttgart.
- Voski, A. (2020). The ecological significance of the overview effect: Environmental attitudes and behaviours in astronauts.
- White, F. (2014). The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. (Multiple things in the comic, but also Michael Collins, quote pp. 182 – 183)
- Yaden, D. B., Iwry, J., Slack, K. J., Eichstaedt, J. C., Zhao, Y., Vaillant, G. E., & Newberg, A. B. (2016). The overview effect: Awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight.
psychoSoph 