Design your astronauts to interact with each other! In Astrobuilder, you can give each astronaut a psychological profile. A high Courage level protects your astronaut under stressful conditions. A high Social level will cause them to interact with others more often. A high Personal Needs level will cause them to take better care of themselves, at the expense of work. A high work ethic will cause them to choose repair tasks more often. A high Constitution level will protect them from space sickness. A high playfulness level will cause them to play more games. High leadership will cause them to assist other astronauts when in a module together. Low levels of any of these will have corresponding negative effects as well!

New astronauts are sent up using the Soyuz vehicle. Since the Soyuz can only hold three crew and we never know when a Tourist may show up, you will need two Soyuz vehicles (or X-38) docked on your station in order to evacuate more than two astronauts. You can launch up to four astronauts, if you have enough escape vehicles. You can get a bonus astronaut by running nine levels of the same experiment, and another bonus astronaut by running nine different types of experiments.(bonus astronauts are available with the update)

Cooperation is important. No one space agency has all the answers, capability, or resources. In order to make additions to your station and win the game, you must accumulate goodwill for each one. Goodwill is represented by flags for each agency. Launching a module from an agency raises goodwill in that agency's country or countries. Launching an astronaut produces even more goodwill. However, this is not enough. You can also direct your astronauts to perform scientific experiments to accumulate flags for the sponsoring agencies. Strategic planning is very important. You will need to launch the right combination of modules, components, astronauts, scientific facilities and experiments. The experiments that will gain flags for one agency must often be loaded into the module of another agency. You should view the game not as a competition between the agencies but as a single goal to help them work together to achieve.