Psychology Students Give Tips for Lunar Mining Base

A future mining base on the moon already has a draft management plan, thanks to psychology students at WSU Tri-Cities.

Students in the summer session of Psych 306, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, prepared a management and operations plan for a fictional international helium-3 mining base on the moon, set in the year 2025.

The 12 students took on the role of an international management consulting firm, drawing up plans for how the lunar base would operate from the human resources angle—including recruitment, staffing, crew composition, rotation schedules, establishing corporate culture, communications, and leadership styles.

A thorough review of crew studies on extended space and analog missions implies that systems in place in the staffing and operation of national space programs are the source of problems encountered in multinational spacecrews, and that crew problems are not necessarily endemic to extended space missions.

"We are proposing a management and operations model centered in 'positive psychology,'" said Jim Wise (clinical associate professor, psychology). "We feel that is more congruent with the realities of an international consortium that would be guiding development of the world's first Helium 3 Mining Base to support a future hydrogen economy."

Adopting a perspective shift to 'positive psychology' in the service of multicultural space crews (first suggested by Professor Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia in 2001), the class asked "how good can we make it" rather than "what pathology might we avoid." The team of students concluded that many multicultural concerns of space missions can be 'designed out' through appropriate crew selection, training, management, and organizational procedures complemented by human-centered habitat and technical systems design.

This type of mission development likely hallmarks international commercial development of space, and not nationalized efforts. Extended space missions staffed by multicultural crews can be high points of human experience and achievement and can show how much psychology has to contribute to such endeavors.

The class project included a public presentation of their plan, with a 45-minute PowerPoint, exhibits, and a question-and-answer period.