KEY ONGOING RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Awe & Soul-Centered Mindfulness in Space: Promoting Human Wellbeing and a Deep Sense of Community Across Borders and Disciplines
There is a moment — reported again and again by astronauts, pilots, and deep-sea explorers— when the ordinary boundaries of self dissolve and something larger comes into view. From orbit, the fragility and beauty of Earth is overwhelming. In deep space, the silence is absolute. These are not merely poetic observations. They are psychologically significant experiences with measurable effects on values, identity, and the sense of connection to other human beings.
This research initiative examines that experience through a comprehensive scientific lens. Drawing on the emerging science of awe — including Dacher Keltner's work on wonder and its transformative effects — as well as contemplative traditions, Jungian depth psychology, and the rich literature of flight from Saint-Exupéry to the present, this program explore show extreme environments can become catalysts for profound human wellbeing, meaning-making, and a felt sense of solidarity across cultures and disciplines.
This is not research designed to optimize performance metrics per se, rather, it is an inquiry into the inner life of people who venture beyond ordinary limits — and into what that journey might offer the rest of humanity. How do we cultivate awe as a resource for mental health and resilience in isolated environments? How do we bring the spaceflight experience of planetary unity back down to Earth in ways that matter?
This initiative is community-centered in spirit and non-commercial in character. It is open to contemplative practitioners, artists, philosophers, psychologists, astronauts, and anyone drawn to the question of what space does to the human soul. Collaborations across all disciplines, traditions, and borders are invited.
→ See also: International Cross-Sector Partnership
2. The Human Analog — Cross-Environment Learning Between Undersea and Space Operations
The ocean floor and low Earth orbit are separated by hundreds of kilometers and entirely different physics — yet the humans who inhabit both environments face a remarkably convergent set of challenges: pressure, isolation, limited life support, sensory alteration, team interdependence under stress, and the constant awareness that the environment outside is lethal.
This research thread treats that convergence as a scientific resource. Undersea environments — saturation diving, submarine operations, underwater habitat programs — are among the most rigorous and longest-studied analogs for long-duration spaceflight. Decades of operational experience, human factors data, and hard-won physiological knowledge exist in the diving and submarine medicine communities that the space community has only partially absorbed. The reverse is also true: frameworks developed for spaceflight crew dynamics, cognitive monitoring, and habitat design have direct potential applications below the surface.
The goal here is deliberate, structured cross-pollination identifying the specific human factors domains — habitability, team cohesion, psychophysiological monitoring, emergency decision-making, decompression and re-adaptation — where knowledge transfers meaningfully across environments, and building the research collaborations to make that transfer systematic rather than accidental.
This thread calls partners in naval medicine, submarine operations, commercial and scientific diving, and space analog research programs. It is a genuinely bilateral conversation — both communities have something to teach.
→ See also: Human Factors & Aerospace Medicine