“What are you watching, Maria?” My sister poked her head just above the couch where I was nestling in one of those relaxed, laid-back late afternoons, after I was done with school homework and finally had some spare time to enjoy my favorite cartoons streaming on tv. This was an interesting one – the adventures of a mysterious, charismatic Captain called Harlock, who turned his ship into a space shuttle in a distant future era, in a mission to protect the Earth and the humans inhabiting it.
So, there it was, the Arcadia cutting across a starfield, its skull-and-crossbones figurehead glowing against the dark. Captain Harlock — scarred, silent, impossibly composed — stood at the helm of a ship that had no business looking like a pirate galleon and a spaceship at once. Harlock was a man who belonged to no fixed element: he was of the sea in spirit and of the stars in fact, and the ship itself seemed to remember both.
My sister often had her own opinions about how delightfully odd my favorite idols were, although in reality, I was just like every Italian kid growing up at that time, glued to those bold, somewhat intense Japanese anime cartoons streaming on the kids’ channels back in the ‘80s.
Decades later — and now in my adult life studying human beings in extreme operational environments — I am appreciating different aspects of this maritime hero who turned his ship into a space shuttle. Leiji Matsumoto transposed a vessel of the sea into the vacuum, and in doing so, he superbly kept its soul intact.
Now, looking at this idea with the eyes of a scientist, it turns out to be strangely accurate in paralleling the Spectrum of Gravity – a spectrum that aerospace and undersea medicine treat as scientifically continuous by definition. From a physiological standpoint those are different problems that nonetheless, have one underlying question: how does a human body and mind hold together as gravity's grip changes from one side of the spectrum to another?
A Hero for every point on the Spectrum
There's a thread that runs from a submariner's control room, through a centrifuge gondola, into a fighter jet's cockpit, and out to a spacecraft window — it's gravity itself, stretched across its full operational range. Undersea, buoyancy nearly cancels weight. In orbit, it disappears into freefall. In a centrifuge or a high-G turn, it multiplies to 6,8, 9 times. Aerospace and undersea medicine study this range because the human body — its vestibular system, cardiovascular reflexes, and mind — has to renegotiate its relationship with that "downward pull" at every point along it.
In undersea environments, submariners and divers operate in a near-neutral buoyancy world, where orientation cues are muted and the environment is unforgiving of panic or poor judgment. Isolation, confined space, and the physiological demands of pressure change (decompression and hyperbaric aspects) make this its own extreme environment. Under zero-G, microgravity strips away the otolith organs' normal gravitational reference, producing space motion sickness, fluid shifts, and — over time — bone and muscle deconditioning.
At the opposite pole, fighter pilots and centrifuge trainees face hyper-G forces that pool blood in certain parts of the body, risking G-induced loss of consciousness (i.e., G-LOC) and dire consequences. The countermeasures — anti-G straining maneuvers, pressure suits, and trained tolerance — are examples of aerospace physiology coupled with psychological resilience under load.
A Fluid Continuum, and the Navy Connection
An interesting historical pattern sees Navy aviators having long been highly represented in NASA's astronaut corps. Of the Mercury Seven, three — Shepard, Schirra, and Carpenter — were Navy pilots, and to date 83 of roughly 330 NASA astronauts have come from the Navy, more than any other single service.
Naval aviators uniquely train and operate across the gravity spectrum: carrier operations begin below the flight deck, performing instrument flying with minimal visual reference over open ocean, high-G maneuvering, and — for many — training included actual submarine or diving experience earlier in their careers (RocketSTEM, 2015).
This immersion in a genuinely fluid, multi-domain gravitational and sensory environment may build a kind of cross-trained resilience: comfort with disorientation, practiced trust in instruments over raw sensation, and an intuitive feel for one's body moving through a medium that isn't solid ground. Whether this "sea-to-sky continuum" is causally linked to astronaut success, or simply reflects overlapping (or preferred) selection criteria (test-pilot pedigree, engineering training, risk tolerance), is an open question.
The "Right Stuff," Psychophysiologically
What Tom Wolfe called "the right stuff" — a special, superior blend of sheer courage, skill, and calm when facing a very hard or dangerous job — was coined to describe the ineffable quality of test pilots like Chuck Yeager, the men who pushed aircraft and themselves past the edge of what was known to be survivable.
Wolfe meant it as an innate quality — something you either had or didn't. Reframed through a psychophysiological lens, though, it looks less like an ineffable trait and more like a well-regulated autonomic nervous system paired with rapid, embodied decision-making.
Gary Klein's work on naturalistic decision-making describes how experts under time pressure don't deliberate from scratch; they are able to pre-reflectively recognize patterns and quickly act on trained intuition (Klein, 1998). Neuroergonomic studies of pilots (Sestito et al. 2018a, 2018b; Callan et al., 2013) point in a similar direction: expertise reshapes sensorimotor and neural processing so that "grasping the world from the cockpit" becomes an embodied, largely automatic skill rather than a deliberate, effortful calculation.
On the leadership side, the same regulatory capacity that keeps a pilot's hands steady in hyper-G and challenging operational environments — interoceptive awareness, the ability to notice and downregulate one's own stress response — is closely tied to the composure that makes someone trustworthy to follow in a crisis (Sumida, 2001). The Polyvagal theory (Porges,2009) offers one physiological account of how a settled autonomic state underlies both clear thinking and the kind of calm presence that steadies a team.
A philosophical reflection: mind settling and the whispering Wisdom of our Ancestors
There's a more contemplative layer worth mentioning as side philosophical reflection. Many high performers describe their best decisions arriving not from frantic analysis, but rather, from quietness — a place where mental noise settles down until something clearer can be heard underneath.
As Carlson (1995) wrote, “shutting down your mind only activates a deeper type of intelligence (…) No one knows for sure where this deeper intelligence comes from, or what it’s called, but all wise cultures are certain it exists. (…) It’s as if we get the benefit of universal thought instead of having to rely on our own limited thinking”.
Psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1968) wrote of a collective unconscious, an inherited layer of the psyche shared across humanity, from which archetypal wisdom might surface when the conscious mind stops crowding it out. This resonates with the idea that high functioning, intuitive decision making is the result of a sort of deep pattern-recognition, forged over generations of human ancestors navigating danger, now surfacing as a "voice" in the stillness.
An evolutionary and anthropological reading suggests that such intuition is a sort of inherited behavioral wisdom — the residue of ancestors who survived unpredictable, high-stakes environments (open water, high places, physical threat) passed down as trainable disposition rather than mystical gift. If so, training for undersea, flight, and spaceflight might do well to include not just physiological conditioning but also structured practices for quieting mental noise — meditative or biofeedback-based training methods— so that this deeper, pattern-trained intuition finds its way to the surface when it matters most.
The Call Beyond Gravity
In the end, Harlock's ship never really left the sea — it simply carried it into the stars.
Perhaps the same is true for whoever inhabits those extreme environments — across the gravity spectrum, from the pressure of the deep to the weightlessness of orbit, the constant is the human moving through it: adapting, steadying, trusting instinct and training. The hero, in the end, isn't defined by the element they inhabit – rather, by how they smoothly carry themselves – and their humanity — into whichever one they're called to face next.
About the Author
Dr. Mariateresa Sestito is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist specialized in human factors, pilot, and founder of Ad Astra Human Science. Her work focuses on human performance, leadership, safety and extreme operational environments.
References
1. Callan, D. E., Terzibas, C., Cassel, D. B.,Callan, A., Kawato, M., & Sato, M. A. (2013). Differential activation of brain regions involved with error‑feedback and imitation‑based motor simulation when observing self and an expert’s actions in pilots and non‑pilots on a complex glider landing task. NeuroImage, 72, 55–68. PDF
2. Carlson, R. (1995). Stop thinking, start living: Discover lifelong happiness. New York, NY: Hyperion. PDF
3. Klein, G. (1998). Sources of power: How people make decisions. MIT Press. PDF
4. Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1; 2nded.). Princeton University Press. PDF
5. Porges, S. W. (2009). The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 76(Suppl 2), S86–S90. PDF
6. RocketSTEM. (2015, February 17). Land, sea, space: Naval aviators led the way. https://www.rocketstem.org/2015/02/17/land-sea-space-naval-aviators-led-way/
7. Sestito, M., Flach, J., & Harel, A. (2018a). Grasping the world from a cockpit: Perspectives on embodied neural mechanisms underlying human performance and ergonomics in aviation context. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 19(6), 692–711. PDF
8. Sestito, M., Harel, A., Nador, J., & Flach,J. (2018b). Investigating neural sensorimotor mechanisms underlying flight expertise in pilots: Preliminary data from an EEG study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 489. PDF
9. Sumida, J. T. (2001). The Relationship of History and Theory in On War. The Journal of Military History, 65(2), 333–354. PDF
