Space X’s highly anticipated Polaris Dawn mission is set to launch later this summer – with an all-civilian crew. And a big part of their mission is researching how space changes the human body.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
SpaceX’s highly anticipated Polaris Dawn mission is set to launch later this summer with an all-civilian crew. A big part of their mission is researching health. How space changes the human body could shape the future of longer missions. Emily Kwong of NPR’s Short Wave brings us this story on the changing world of space medicine.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: As NASA pursues longer missions to establish a presence on the moon and put boots on Mars, the agency has begun to study one of the most fragile systems of all – the human body. And the International Space Station is the perfect laboratory for studying us.
KATE RUBINS: The majority of what we do is scientific investigations onboard the space station. So we’re studying everything from how do cells grow and replicate in space to making drugs with specific crystal forms and microgravity that are actually being used back on Earth for cancer patients.
KWONG: Astronaut and microbiologist Kate Rubins has spent 300 days across two missions in space, doing experiments related to human health and viral disease. Scientists already know a lot about what happens to astronauts on long missions. Microgravity weakens their muscles and bones. High amounts of space radiation can increase an astronaut’s risk for cancer. And the stress of space flight weakens their immune system. Over the years, astronauts aboard the ISS have come down with painful blisters symptomatic of shingles. That’s the reactivation of a previously had chicken pox virus.
RUBINS: So things like shingles have come back for healthy adults on space station – you know, herpes virus – so we definitely don’t want a crew on the way to Mars to have an issue with endogenous viruses.
KWONG: So tracking immune responses on missions is important, as is looking out for microbes. Historically, if there were some weird growth on the wall or in the water of the ISS, astronauts had to go through this really complicated, months-long process to figure out what it was.
RUBINS: We would take a little swab sample. We would streak it on a plate. We had to physically send it back to Earth. It would land in Kazakhstan. We would send some NASA people over on an airplane to get this plate and to fly back to the lab at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and then they could start their microbiology.
KWONG: But thanks to Rubins, who was the first person to ever sequence DNA in space, astronauts now have the technology at their disposal to identify microbes in less than a day. It’s just one example of how NASA is trying to give astronauts the biomedical tools they’ll need for deep-flight missions.
Another change for space medicine is that a greater diversity of people are going to space. It’s not just astronauts with Olympic levels of training. It’s civilians. Christopher Mason, a professor of genomics, physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, sees this as a real research opportunity.
CHRISTOPHER MASON: We have a chance to study how the human body adapts to space for a wider representative group of humanity – so people that might be prediabetic, who might have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease or maybe are a bit older, like we’ve seen William Shatner, for example, doing a suborbital flight.
KWONG: And that, in his opinion, is creating a second space age with more widely available data, a more engaged research community and a future where more people are prepared for the medical realities of spaceflight.
