# Four men lived 90 days inside a space station simulator and a later NASA report said three showed personality changes, but its warning about crew psychology rested on Rorschach tests and a follow-up that effectively shrank to three cases

> Long missions depend on a crew's ability to read tension, frustration and trust before small problems turn into serious ones. That is why an obscure NASA contractor report from February 1972 still feels surprisingly modern. It described what happened after four young...

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Byline: ARGO.net Editorial Team
Published: 2026-08-08T21:10:02+00:00
Categories: Explainer, Humans

![The compact interior of a vintage space capsule simulator](https://www.argo.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/spacecraft_simulator_interior.jpg)

Long missions depend on a crew's ability to read tension, frustration and trust before small problems turn into serious ones. That is why an obscure NASA contractor report from February 1972 still feels surprisingly modern. It described what happened after four young men spent 90 days sealed inside a simulated space station in 1970, then returned months later for personality testing that tried to measure whether confinement had changed them.

The follow-up report, [NASA's psychological examination](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720010431/downloads/19720010431.pdf), used the **Rorschach inkblot test** rather than a modern questionnaire or a task battery. Its summary offered a striking line: "significant personality changes occurred in three of the four onboard crew members." Yet the same document also admitted that the **Rorschach** was controversial, that the sample was tiny and that the changes could not be tied cleanly to confinement alone.

That combination is what makes the episode worth revisiting. The 90-day mission was a serious engineering test with real relevance to closed habitats, crew schedules and morale under isolation. At the same time, the psychological conclusion sat on a much shakier base than the life-support data around it. The story is less about proving that space confinement remakes personality and more about how early space psychology struggled to measure inner change with tools that were already under dispute.

## The simulator was real, but the psychology sample was tiny

The habitat itself was no stunt. NASA's broader [operational summary](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720006465) says the 90-day manned test ended on September 11, 1970, after four carefully selected and trained men lived in a **space station simulator** with all equipment and expendables stored onboard. The goal was to test a regenerative life support system in something close to a closed ecology, with two crews working staggered schedules inside a sealed environment.

A separate NASA record on the facility describes the same program as a 90-day test completed in a simulator whose long duration and human occupancy imposed strict reliability and safety demands. That [facility report](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720014605) matters because it shows the engineering side of the project was robust and heavily planned. The psychological follow-up, by contrast, rested on just four men from that single mission and only one mission.

The number got even smaller once the retesting phase began. The first Rorschach sessions were done during crew preselection from mid-December 1969 through mid-January 1970. The second round happened in late May and early June 1971, roughly nine months after the mission ended. One crewman, identified only as Crewman C, refused the second Rorschach, so the report's before-and-after comparisons were really built on **three repeat cases**, not four.

## Why NASA used the Rorschach and why that choice remains contentious

The report did not hide the problem. Its introduction called the **Rorschach inkblot test** "probably the most demanding, intricate and controversial psychological test method" available to clinical psychology and psychiatry. It also said opinions about the test ranged from essentially useless to highly valuable. That is an unusual sentence to find in a government-backed mission report and it tells readers that the authors knew they were leaning on a disputed instrument.

The consultant psychologist, **T. G. MacFarlane**, administered both rounds individually and scored them using the **Klopfer method**, an interpretation system that depended heavily on expert judgment. The report presented that expertise as a strength. Modern readers see a tradeoff. A skilled clinician may notice patterns a blunt checklist misses, but a method that depends on one expert's judgment is also harder to verify, reproduce, or compare cleanly across raters.

The controversy never disappeared. A 2022 peer-reviewed [critical review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9225754/) of Rorschach use in European courts concluded that the test did not meet the proposed standards for legal proceedings. That paper was about forensic settings, not spaceflight, so it does not erase every research use of projective testing. It does show why any large claim from a four-person space analog needs caution when the main measuring tool was contentious in 1972 and still debated decades later.

## What the follow-up actually said about the three men who retested

The NASA report did not claim a single shared reaction across the crew. Instead it described different patterns for Crewmen A, B and D. **Crewman A** was portrayed as less tense, more controlled in response to challenge and more secure in perception. **Crewman B** was described as having more felt inner tension, less dependency, more emphasis on detail and a stronger competitive drive. **Crewman D** was presented as the most favorable change, with more inner resources, broader interests and stronger emotional responsiveness.

Psychology stays central here because those descriptions were trying to capture how confinement, mission identity and close-quarters living might shift the way a person processes challenge from other people. The report repeatedly focused on tension, emotional control, affective needs, criticism and withdrawal. In other words, it was less interested in whether the crew could keep machines running and more interested in whether the men emerged with different social and emotional habits.

Even so, the wording never reaches the level of a modern, tightly defined result. The patterns were clinical interpretations written in narrative form, then backed by score tables in the appendix. Crewman C's case was even looser, because he refused the second Rorschach and the psychologist relied on the first test plus other direct experience before and after confinement. That makes the report historically interesting, but it leaves the core claim standing on **interpretive personality assessment** rather than on a cleaner repeated measure across the full crew.

## Why the report could not prove confinement caused the changes

The report included its own warning in a footnote that deserves more attention than the headline result. It said measured personality changes could not be unequivocally attributed either to confinement itself or to the broader life changes that came with pretest, mission and post-test involvement in the aerospace program. That caveat is crucial because the second test did not happen the week after release from isolation. It happened after months of ordinary life, graduate studies, travel, publicity and reflection.

The operational record from the same mission makes that context even more complicated. Another NASA conference volume on the 90-day test reported no serious decline in average [visual-motor performance](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730001406/downloads/19730001406.pdf) during confinement, even though some week-to-week dips seemed to match morale assessments by other investigators. The engineering and psychomotor evidence, then, did not point to a crew falling apart under stress. It pointed to a group that functioned adequately while showing subtler mood and morale shifts that were hard to isolate from the mission's social setting.

The broader operational summary also said the environment was generally benign and that no behavioral or medical changes occurred that would adversely affect space missions of equal duration. That does not cancel the Rorschach follow-up, but it does place it beside a more restrained set of findings. The strongest conclusion that survives is modest: four men in a 90-day simulator gave early researchers a reason to take **crew psychology** seriously, while the study design left far too much room to treat the reported personality changes as proof.

## What still matters for space psychology today

The most useful lesson is that the mission raised two different psychological questions at once. One question was operational: can a small crew live and work in confinement for three months without major breakdowns in performance or health? NASA's surrounding documentation answered that with guarded confidence. The second question was deeper and harder: do long missions alter the emotional habits people use to interpret each other? The Rorschach report tried to answer that second question, but it could only do so through a narrow and controversial lens.

That lens still captured something real about mission life. The operational summary described a morale slump around days 60 to 70, with less verbal interaction, less enthusiasm and a later rebound after extra tasks and direct conversations. Those observations fit what many isolation studies have found since then: crews may stay functional while mood, motivation and social tone drift over time. A sealed habitat does not need open hostility to create psychological strain. Quiet flattening, friction and changed interpretations of other people can matter just as much.

For modern readers, the 1972 follow-up is best treated as an early signal, not as settled evidence. It showed that **space psychology** belonged beside engineering in any serious long-duration mission plan. It also showed how easily a dramatic conclusion can outrun its method when the dataset is this small, the timeline is this stretched and the central instrument is a disputed projective test. The value of the report lies in that double message: concern about **crew emotion and morale** was justified, but the claim that three men changed in measurable personality terms remains more suggestive than definitive.