Humans are going to Mars, and they are going to need some medical support in order to survive the trip, at least according to a panel held last week at a conference in Washington DC. The discussion, at the Humans to Mars Summit held last week at George Washington University, covered some of the biomedical risks of a potential human trip to Mars and the countermeasures required to arrive healthy (and maybe return to Earth, but not all trips include that option).
Panel chair Dr. Kris Lehnhardt, Emergency Medicine faculty at George Washington University Hospital, went over some general known biomedical risks of spaceflight and how a long duration flight would exacerbate or modify those risks. Some of the risks included: space motion sickness, vibration effects, auditory injury from the constant noise astronauts are exposed to during flight operations, psychosocial risk factors from team dynamics and isolation, and possibly the most important factor, making sure the toilet technology works during the entire proposed mission. As Dr. Lehnhardt relayed, a crewmember told him once, “When a toilet is broken on the spacecraft, nothing else matters”
He was followed by Dr. Vince Michaud, NASA’s Deputy Chief Health and Medical Officer who expounded a bit more on the possible risks of a trip to Mars. He focused mostly on the radiation effects of a long flight, which is different than a space station flight because the majority of the flight to Mars will take place outside of the Earth’s protective magnetic field. In Dr. Michaud’s opinion radiation is a mission limiting issue, not a show stopper. In the Q & A after his talk he also spoke about how a private mission to space, such as proposed by Inspiration Mars, wouldn’t have the same radiation limits as a government mission, because the federal regulations only apply to government employees, such as NASA astronauts, not employees of a commercial or philanthropic enterprise in space. He also discussed extended duration medical issues such as bone loss and vision loss. A fair amount of his talk was devoted to the recently released Institute of Medicine report on the ethical issues of an extended duration mission which gave some guidelines about how to balance the risks of the journey with the benefits of exploration. As Dr. Michaud puts it, “We are going to have to ask people to take risks to explore.”
Bill Paloski, NASA Human Research Program (HRP) Manager, started his talk by explaining that he had about $160 million a year budget that he could disburse among about 200 grantees to try and reduce the previously mentioned risks, which he felt also included altered light cycles and closed environment issues. As the researcher on the panel he elaborated on the strategy HRP is using to categorize the risks of long-term spaceflight, which is then used to develop targeted countermeasures. Paloski groups risks by features of long-term spaceflight; the altered gravitational environment, isolation and altered light/dark cycles that come from a small group of individuals living in a fully mechanical environment, closed environment issues dealing with food and resource recycling, increased radiation, and distance from Earth limiting the degree of rescue or repair that can be attempted.
The last speaker was Michael Lopez-Alegria, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) and a former NASA Astronaut with the longest ISS mission so far by an American, soon to be surpassed by the year long mission of Scott Kelley and Russian Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko. Speaking about his seven months on the ISS, he felt that the isolation the crews will experience on their multi-year mission to Mars will have a much larger effect than is seen on current ISS crews, who can actually pick up a phone on the station most of the time and call whoever they want. This wouldn’t be possible on a mission to Mars with distances large enough to cause a several-minute delay in voice or video communication. To rectify this, and address most of the medical issues the panel had discussed, Lopez-Alegria felt that the best solution would come from better propulsion, reducing the total length of the trip. In an interview with Medgadget following the panel, Lopez-Alegria said that, at the moment, the CSF has a pretty limited involvement in a Mars mission, since all the proposed missions are either government run or philanthropic endeavors, such as Inspiration Mars. CSF is mostly focused on Low Earth Orbit attempts, both human and robotic. However, the CSF does have a few companies attempting to do lunar missions. In terms of medical standards for the commercial spaceflight industry, the CSF is hopeful for an “informed consent” process, where as long as the spaceflight participant is aware of the risks involved in the flight, the FAA (or NASA) won’t have any regulations preventing whoever wants to fly from going.
The panel ended on a hopeful note, with the participants claiming that, in their opinion, the medical and health problems they considered the most significant for a mission to Mars were all solvable.