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another exam unboxing video you might have wondered in the past why I call it
an unboxing if there's no box but today I've solved that problem and I have a
box I'm pretty excited to show you what's inside here which is an exam from
1959 which was used to select astronauts for the mercury program now mercury was
the first u.s. attempt at crewed space flight and they aimed to put someone in
orbit around the earth as you can imagine becoming a mercury astronaut
would have had pretty stringent requirements and been pretty competitive
to get into so let's open up this box and have a look at what they had to do
so let's open this up and have a look inside we've got this document in here
which is actually a big report that's been released from the US military
offices all about this exam so here's the document here you can see that it's
the project mercury candidate evaluation program and there were 31 astronaut
candidates who undertook all these exams and they came from a background of being
military test pilots they had to be aged between 25 and 40 there had to be
shorter than 5 foot 11 and have a background of a stem degree although a
couple of them didn't meet that requirement of the stem degree but they
managed to schmooze their way in anyway out of 31 candidates 7 ended up being
selected to be mercury astronauts there's a link in the description to
this full exam so you can read it goes into a lot of details and a good insight
into what really makes up the right stuff for an astronaut because
the committee have several reports and summaries that they also detail here so
you could follow along if you'd like to I haven't printed out all 147 pages here
but I will go through some of the tests they were all designed to test the
stresses that an astronaut might go through if they were on a mission and
those stresses as you can see from the timetable could be psychological as well
as physical so if you look at say Monday we've got a day filled with some psych
tests in the morning we've got acceleration tests we've got physical
fitness tests we've got isolation and complex behavioral simulator and also
just doing a lot of medical testing they've got a full day and then they've
got a little break for dinner and then a nice dessert of some more psychological
testing it's a pretty intense schedule this was one full week of this exam but
there was a lot of preparation that these candidates needed to do to be able
to prove themselves these are a couple of pictures from the acceleration tests
where they would essentially exert the astronauts to high accelerations or
g-forces and then measure when they left out you can see here they would
accelerate them then take some measurements accelerate them again in
various positions and then they would rank them and give scores to how each
candidate did and I guess the longer you can go without blacking out the better
this particular part I found pretty interesting it's an intelligibility
measure and for this say I guess really practically wanted to know how easy it
would be for an astronaut to communicate back down to Mission Control and how
easy it would be to understand them so they gave them the list of words to read
out and then play those words to a panel of listeners but they mixed in plenty of
noise I was a little difficult to hear them and then they did some statistics
on which candidates were easier to understand a very practical measure I
guess this one here is pretty cool we've got the effect of noise on the ability
to perform addition you know noise is capable of interfering with effective
human activity this test is designed to
measure the effects of high noise levels on the performance of a simple mental
task so with an intense annoyance of a hundred and forty five decibels being
produced by a siren the candidates had to add up a string of numbers until it
reached the total so adding up these ones until it reached 35 and then put a
dash on you know once they'd reach 35 maybe not too hard on its own but
certainly difficult under the stress of dealing with all this noise so here's a
picture of one of these exams right here and this is our sound generator we've
got heat tests which are literally how well a subject can cope with heat
they're talking about how space vehicles are expected to heat to sustain high
temperatures especially during the period of reentry it is therefore necessary to
see how men can withstand this heat and since some can withstand it better than
others they want to know who would be the best so it looks like they were
essentially just exerting them to a lot of heat and measuring you know some
biological factors maybe how your hearts going you can see this guy sweating up
whilst reading a book there so that's kind of funny I won't talk too much
about these biological tests but there's another one here that at least you could
try at home which is the Harvard step test which seems like you're just
stepping up and down from a platform except you are doing it with a metronome
and you know you have to step up and the first second sit down on the second
second and then step up on the third second and continue now for five minutes
here's a picture of that step test here now we're getting on to the interesting
chapter which is the psychological tests now there's a few qualities here that
they say they're looking for you know they say he should have a high level of
intelligence with abilities to interpret instruments perceive mathematical
relationships and maintain spatial orientation in the mercury program there
were no female astronauts I guess because they were also no female
military test pilots at the time so the language reflects that but number two he
should demonstrate in of sufficient Drive and creativity to
ensure positive contributions to the development of the vehicle and other
aspects of the project as a whole so those are a couple of things that they
were looking for this one seems interesting he should not demonstrate
evidence of impulsivity so I guess this is the psychology of having the right
stuff as they say the psychological tests were taken pretty seriously it
says that the evaluation included 30 hours of psychiatric interviews
psychological tests and observations of the stressful tests they were measuring
all these sorts of factors here through these tests so all of these aspects of
your personality I guess and this is how they were actually doing it so these are
the tests they were using and some of these are still used today so we've got
the Rorschach test which is where you try to say what you can find and some
ambiguous inkpots it's apparently able to probe relatively deep into the
personality we're doing a draw a person test so by drawing male and female human
figures the subject gives information of his body image and feelings about his
place in the world they asked them to complete a bunch of sentences to give
further insight into their personalities a few of these other I guess ranging
from like multiple-choice things and then down to number 12 which is Who am I
the subject is asked to write 20 answers to the question Who am I this is
interpreted predictably to give information on identity and perception
of social roles then on this page we have the intellectual tests so these are
essentially how they're measuring the intelligence of the candidates and
they've done it through to at least 12 different kinds of tests and I've got a
few example problems here which are supposed to replicate some of the
tests so like we have analogies that's often something that pops up on sort of
intelligence tests like this and we have some examples so for example a
parallelogram is to an octagon as to what is t quadruped four biped
eight or animal I'll put the answers to these down in the description so that
you have a chance to try them yourself another example here is metabolism as to
what as combustion is to locomotive engine train human or anabolism after
analogies that say they've got Raven progressive matrices said I've got a
couple examples of those these are things that look similar to what pop up
on IQ tests trying to look at what's going on find some pattern and then pick
the one that completes the pattern so that's another example there of one of
these matrices we've got mathematical reasoning tests
engineering analogies and mechanical comprehension I guess that's where a
background and maybe engineering or something like physics would come in
handy so like extending the reach of the crane will shift its what total weight
allowable speed center of gravity center of buoyancy seeing how well you
understand a essentially physics why does the intake valve open on this pump
when the piston goes down well there's a few different options to do with where
the air pressure is going to be greater we've got some air force and aviation
tests a measure of academic achievement space memory test of memory for locating
objects in space spatial orientation as well and spatial visualization so you
can see how those would come in handy in the space to know you know when when no
direction is up what how things are going to rotate so they give us a clock
and they say that's the direction of rotation so what is the clock going to
look like after that right and another one here that undergoes one
to three different rotations and what the clock is going to look like the last
example I have here is this hidden figures test an ability of measure to
locate a specified form embedded in a mass of irrelevant details these ones
are kind of tricky but somewhere in this shape here you will find one of these
shapes in the same orientation so you can have a little look there and that is
another example of it in addition to all these intelligence tests like I said
they're really just trying to test the stress that you would be under so that's
when they have isolation and behavioral and pressure suit tests which I think
can be quite actually a claustrophobic one on this page here is a picture of
the evaluation committee so this was who they were trying to impress and these
are the people who then wrote up some thoughts about you know who they were
actually going to select there's a few notes here about why they didn't pick
particular candidates one candidate was not entirely sure that he desired to
continue on in Project Mercury one candidate had a heart murmur and one had
a very high index of strain as a result of performance on the heat test they
then ranked all of them and and scored them on each of the tests which enabled
them to come up with a final table of recommendations I don't know who was who
on here but some of these ultimately went on to be our astronauts there was
some if it made by the committee to do some statistics and finding a
correlation between the data they got from these tests and what actually made
for a successful mission so that they could improve astronaut selection in the
future there's some notes here that are interesting they say that number one
psychological stability is the most important consideration in evaluating a
candidate the intelligence maturity and motivation of a candidate are vital
areas to be assessed before rendering and recommendation number two is the
excellent physiological performance was a secondary consideration in the final
committee recommendations so no matter how strong and healthy you are you
really need to pass these intelligence and psychology personality tests that we
spoke about interestingly enough when it talks about these stressful
physiological tests maybe that's like the heat test the acceleration or the
pressure suit what they are really looking at was the interpretation of the
psychological response to that stress test it says that whenever a subject
terminated a severe test for a psychological reason he was not
recommended by the committee maybe if you pass out it's fine but if you want
to terminate for psychological reasons that is a mark against you so I hope
that's been a little bit of insight into how these sorts of decisions were made
and how astronauts were actually chosen I've gained a lot of insight recently
into modern astronaut selection by listening to Chris Hadfield audio book
and astronauts guide to life on Earth where he talks a lot about his own
preparation and journey to becoming an astronaut things might have changed a
little bit since the mercury days if anything space flights might be a bit
longer you could be on the ISS for months at a time but these psychological
factors I think are even more important to test in that case you need to be able
to live in cramped conditions and work with other people for a long time if you
would like to listen to an astronaut's guide to life on Earth or any other
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