Boy, a lot of space stuff today. There’s a story over at Yahoo about treating astronauts for depression during long-term space flight.

“Astronauts in some ways are a lot like prison inmates, they are cooped up in small spaces, have limited access to their families and see the same people everyday. And like prisoners, tasks which merely fill up time are not enough, what is really needed is work which occupies the mind and passes the time quickly.”

While this is a legitimate concern, I have a couple comments.

First, the implications of this for space tourism are zero. They are talking about long-term flights, not short vacations.

Second, some of this is a result of the cramped quarters, which in turn is a result of design choices made early in the program, in which it was more important to justify the development of the Shuttle by using it to launch the station, than it was to build a good station. Having to essentially extrude the entire structure through a fourteen-foot hole (the effective diameter of the Shuttle payload bay), resulted in the lack of spaciousness. Skylab had much more room than the current station did, because it was based on the upper stage of a heavy-lift rocket, rather than being assembled from small pieces that had to fit into the Shuttle.

While having pleasanter quarters wouldn’t eliminate this problem, surely it would alleviate it.