Empathy is a relevant factor which the astronauts must own to face with long missions. In fact, the absence of this can be a cause of a fail mission. Due to the fact space projects involve a great invest, the way of developing empathy on crew and the teaching of strategies is a priority. For all this, the main goal of this paper was to analyze the current situation of the research on empathy concerning space travels. The specific objectives were (a) to find out how this issue and other

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... ical variables were related to astronauts and space travels and (b) to propose aspects for the design of an educational program to encourage people to solve social problems and develop social skills. For that, a review was made by using diferent databases and diferent resources by studying several variables related to empathy and long-duration space missions. Findings show that the psychological variables will be specially relevant in future missions and space colonization, as for instance, on Mars or the Moon. Conclusions can be useful to design educational programs to train crew members and control mission personnel on empathy and problem solving.