LONELY PLANET

How astronauts will don VR headsets to offset the effects of isolation

- Ian Evenden

You’re trapped in something the size of a camper van with three of your buddies for the next three years. The payoff is that you get to go to Mars, but at what cost? How do you look after your mental health on such a strange journey?

Crewed missions to Mars and beyond are still in the planning stage at NASA and private companies such as SpaceX. In 2015, then-administrator of NASA Charles Bolden pointed to 2030 as the date for a human landing on the red planet, and current US Vice-President Mike Pence wants boots on the surface of the Moon again in 2024. There’s rather more to it than jumping on the top of a giant missile and setting up a guidance computer running at 0.043MHz though. Long periods of isolation can have detrimental effects on any human, not just astronauts, and the mental health of crews need to be considered. This is where the NASA Human Research Program, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), and a startup VR company come in.

But first, to a film festival. “I’m on a team of people that goes to South by Southwest every year,” says Josh Ruben of Z3VR, a Houston-based company that was spun out of Friday VR sessions at his previous employer, a medical device manufacturer. “And on that team with us is a woman named Dorit Donoviel. She is the director of TRISH, and basically, in the second year of my affiliation with this team, you know, just one night we started talking about the applications of virtual reality and space health generally.” As you do.

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