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SPACE MEDICINE, EARTH MEDICINE: SAME, SAME...BUT DIFFERENT When I first became an aquanaut, my friend, knowing my love of water and space, sent me a graphic of an aquanaut and an astronaut, floating in water and space, respectively, with the caption, “same, same...but different.” I loved it at the time, and think back to it frequently when about challenges in space medicine and terrestrial medicine.
The hazards associated with the spaceflight environment are myriad, but generally fall into one of 5 categories: microgravity, distance from Earth, radiation, isolation and confinement, and hostile environments, which covers everything from altered day-night cycles to exposure to lunar dust. Microgravity alone affects nearly every single bodily system, resulting in decreased muscle mass, loss of bone density, and fluid shifts, causing congestion and even increased pressure around the brain and eyes in some astronauts. Knowing this, it makes perfect sense that “space medicine” as a field of study exists. If we are knowingly sending humans to live and work in a high-risk environment, we want to prepare them at every step of the mission timeline, starting right at selection, and continuing pre-, post- and during flight.
Identifying and mitigating human health challenges in space is but one part of the puzzle. The other challenge of human spaceflight has to do with constraints space is not just risky, it is also expensive. It costs thousands of dollars to transport a single kilogram of material to space, and we have limited supplies and resources. In addition, astronauts have a lot of skills to master and a heavy operational schedule to manage. A workday, on the International Space Station, for example, is scheduled down to 5-minute intervals. Knowing all of this, anything we pack with us, even if it is to be “medical-grade,” has to be low-mass, low-volume, low-cost, low-power, easy to use, and have a long shelf-life.
