LAUSR

“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena” (Sagan and Druyan, 1997, p. 6). This paper explores similarities across the space and theater industries. Both of these fields, for example, require people of the highest proficiencies to serve as the face of their project (i.e., astronauts and actors) while a mostly-unseen technical team supports the larger goal (i.e., mission control and backstage crews). We discuss a non-exhaustive list of domain-general factors (Plucker, 1998) while providing examples of domain-specific characteristics (Baer, 1998) encompassed within the expertise of astronauts and professional actors. While these domain-general factors may also be transferable across fields not covered here, we spotlight the space and theater industries as an illustrative example to further the call by research psychologists (e.g., de Vries, 2019) to investigate gaps within the literature of creativity in extreme environments.