Polaris Dawn mission could shed light on human health in space

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission, which made headlines for the first private spacewalk, took billionaire Jared Isaacman and three other crew members to space aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft news. While the flight has been hailed as historic, Issaman said the trip was not just for fun but also contributed to science.

Project Polaris research plans for three flights, with a special focus on human health and the effects of spaceflight on the body. The current mission will be conducted by Baylor College of Medicine, with astronauts donating blood and undergoing extensive biomedical testing before and after the flight.

But what’s unique about the Polaris Dawn mission is its altitude, 870 miles above the Earth’s surface to be exact. That’s well above the International Space Station’s typical altitude of about 250 miles, making Polaris Dawn the furthest humans have traveled from Earth since the Apollo missions.

This altitude allows the spacecraft to pass through Earth’s inner Van Allen Belts, a region of charged particles that protect the planet from dangerous radiation. The crew is equipped with sensors to measure their cumulative radiation exposure during the mission, and there are sensors inside the spacecraft to detect different types of radiation in the environment.

“This is an opportunity to understand what [radiation] As they get farther and farther from the Earth’s surface, we are affected by the exposure,” explained Jimmy Wu, associate director of the Baylor Space Health Translational Institute. “This is something we don’t have a lot of data on because we’re limited to the number of people so far. So it’s critical to understand that.

From a health researcher’s perspective, more data is always welcome, whether from a space agency mission or a private mission. Although the Polaris Dawn mission is much shorter than a typical astronaut rotation on the International Space Station, only five days instead of six months or more, it still provides opportunities for different types of research.

If you want to study the long-term health effects of space flight, such as muscle and bone loss, you’ll need a longer mission. But due to certain effects of spaceflight, the body adjusts to baseline within days or hours, making these ideal research topics for short-term missions.

Astronauts can suffer from space motion sickness when entering or exiting microgravity environments, and it’s unclear why some people are more susceptible to it than others, especially during the first few days of spaceflight.

Wu noted that while space sickness may seem more like an annoyance than a big problem, damage immediately following a launch or landing event can be a big problem.

“You go to the moon. When you land, there’s no welcome committee to look after you,” he said. “What happens if there’s some kind of incident during landing and you have to leave? If you lose your sense of direction and up and down, can you still functionally do it?

Another key area of ​​health research is the relationship between different factors in spaceflight and how they affect each other. It’s not just understanding the effects of microgravity, radiation exposure, or isolation and confinement, but understanding the cumulative stress that going into space puts on the body.

While proponents of space tourism believe that space tourism is increasing access to space and even democratizing access to space, that may not be possible when the only people going into space are billionaires like Isaacman and their friends. It’s hard to accept.

However, it is true that the astronauts currently flying on space agency missions are not representative of the public. Some of it is necessary—it’s only wise to select astronauts who are healthy enough to withstand the physical challenges of spaceflight—and some of it is a legacy of racism, sexism, and the idea of ​​people deemed worthy of becoming astronauts.

Efforts to diversify the international astronaut workforce are underway, with the European Space Agency recently selecting its first disabled astronaut to train. But despite this, people on space agency missions make up a very limited proportion of the population, so the only data we have on space health outcomes relates to this small group of people.

“I think it’s important to understand the breadth of humanity so that we can understand the full spectrum of humanity’s performance in space flight, not just our early pioneers,” Wu said.

Although commercial astronauts to date have been predominantly (but not exclusively) white, they represent a wider range of ages and backgrounds than professional astronauts. Future commercial missions could help expand the repository of human health in space. For example, the crew of the Polaris Dawn has an equal proportion of men and women, so gender comparisons can be made.

TRISH is building a repository that will collect biomedical data from Polaris Dawn and future commercial space missions. The aim is to collect data from a wider population, not just well-trained young astronauts with no medical conditions, to see how people with conditions such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease fare on space missions.

“We have to start collecting this data because we don’t know how [conditions] It will perform in space,” Wu explained.

One experiment on the Polaris Dawn mission that could have huge consequences seems simple on the surface: testing a tiny ultrasound scanner that crew members can use to scan themselves and collect medical data. Researchers are not only focusing on the device’s performance, but also on the best way to train crews to use it.

While adapting hardware for space comes with its own challenges, preparation for using a handheld medical scanner, especially for someone who is not a trained medical professional, is about education and procedure.

“There’s a series of studies surrounding this question: How do we provide pre-flight training before they go on a mission so that they can at least understand some of the basics?” Wu explained. “So, can we provide just-in-time training? So, can you give them a refresher as they prepare for the actual event?

It turns out that finding the best way to teach non-medical professionals how to use diagnostic equipment, and making those devices as small and rugged as possible, isn’t just useful in space. It could also be invaluable here on Earth, such as in rural areas or areas where people don’t have access to doctors.

“We talk about the concept of health equity and being able to provide services to underserved, low-resource settings,” Wu said. “If you can keep someone healthy far away in space, you should be able to do that anywhere on Earth.”