Nowadays the requirements posed on a human participating in a space flight have significantly changed. Long-termed flights (ranging over 1 year), informational and emotional deprivation, vanishing personal space, multinational crew with members, differing in age, gender and professional background, all these factors influence the work interaction a lot. This contrasts drastically to previous situation, as crews were very limited in size and had nearly artificial objectives, so the spacemen were selected primarily on the base of health condition.

The modern technologies allow expeditions of considerable groups of differently educated professionals. In particular, during the Mir expedition the station was visited by over 100 cosmonauts and astronauts. As the consequence of the above mentioned tendencies there emerge a whole set of new (or well forgotten old) problems, related to the group interaction between spacemen during the flight:

• Cross-national and cross-gender interaction;
• Isolation and forced communication;
• Narrowed life space;
• Conflicts of professional motivation.

The psychological nature of these problems requires an intensive participation of psychologists in their prevention and/or immediate solution. An outline solution strategy would need following stages of psychological intervention:

• Development of selection criteria, unified for all the participating agencies;
• Special training for spacemen and ground control personnel focused on intercultural and intergender interaction, group problem solving, conflict settlement;
• Coordinated extern guidance and support for the crew during the flight;
• After-flight rehabilitation of the crew.

IBMP supports different research programs in these directions. In particular, undergraduates and post-graduate students take part in investigated activities dedicated to the specifics of spacemen functional states, to the problems of cooperation in multinational crews under condition of a modeled long-termed space flight, to the specifics of communication in situations of prolonged isolation.