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Between an absolute void that will burst your lungs just before you die from cold, lethal doses of cosmic radiation, microgravity-induced physiological changes and the psychological stress of being isolated in such a ruthless, poorly prepared or weak environment of heart.
Since the creation of the space agency, NASA has rarely experienced adventurous minds willing to risk their lives in the name of exploration. What's more, these people who volunteer for space service are different from the physical limits of your average American. "NASA's philosophy is to take the most healthy people and spend as few resources as possible to keep them healthy," said Daniel Buckland, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. Duke University. as assistant professor of surgery at the Division of Emergency Medicine of Duke U., told Engadget. "[NASA] simply treats them as high level athletes. "
However, once ordinary people (even those who are obscene) begin to move into space for fun, the most common health and safety issues will be felt. Space tourists will likely be "nominally healthy," according to Buckland. "They are in good health, at 50 or 60, but they have health problems different from those of 40-year-old NASA astronauts who are at the same high level."
In fact, the problems they might face may already be familiar to us. "The same kind of problems you would have if you were playing football or playing football," Buckland continued. "Previously, you had very good people doing it.Now you have everyday people who do it and it's more an emergency medicine, a matter of acute care."
Buckland expects many space tourists to eventually bring their diseases with them. "If you have diabetes, you have a new environment and so with [the] different foods and different amounts of effort that you are doing, you should pay more attention to your sugar or glucose levels than you think otherwise, "he explained. trip would probably make an episode more likely. "
Buckland explains that for suborbital trips such as Blue Origin's 90-minute flights, "you would need the same type of medical equipment you would need at an amusement park." expect medical care closer to the ones you would find on a cruise ship.
"Currently, the International Space Station probably has the medical capabilities of an ambulance," he said. "It is designed for extremely healthy people who are going to have industrial problems like fractures, which you expect to see in an industrial environment.The way it is designed right now is to maintain your health as long as possible like an ambulance up to a higher level of care. "
Since the people aboard these tourist rockets will not necessarily be highly trained astronauts who have traditionally moved to space, the emergency protocols as well as the medical equipment itself will have to adapt. As Buckland notes, the five most critical design factors in the construction of medical devices for use in space minimize its mass, volume, power consumption, and material consumption. Simplifying these aspects in turn reduces the amount of training that users must undergo before they can properly use the device.
This change also means that there will be a large influx of easy-to-use medical devices – such as defibrillators at the mall – on commercial spaceflight versus government-run missions. On NASA flights, for example, where the crew was handpicked, access to these defibrillators will not be possible because "the decision was made to not have the ability to handle this situation." Buckland explains that government analysts "have decided that the risk is so low [that a perfectly healthy NASA astronaut would suffer a heart attack] that maintaining this capacity is not worth it. However, as part of a mission funded by commercial funds, it is much more worrying to keep everyone alive than to make scientific discoveries.
Radiation exposure is one of the most common hazards for space travelers and comes from two main sources: Francis Cucinotta, professor at the University of Nevada's department of physics and diagnostic sciences of Las Vegas, said to Engadget.
"These tourist missions, they only speak for a week, so the risk of cosmic rays is relatively low," he said. Solar flares would still be a problem, but they are detectable. If an eruption occurs before take-off, the flight will simply be postponed. But cancer affects different people in different ways.
"There is a strong dependency at the age," continued Cucinotta. "If you have people – especially under 30 – they would be at a much higher risk than astronauts, who are usually in their forties and fifties, and women have a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer." good.
Fortunately, modern radiological protection is sufficient for the relatively local destinations suggested by commercial operators such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. NASA has been successful in transporting teams to and from the moon without significantly increasing their chances of developing cancer later in life. ISS crew members, for example, expressly agree that their on-site residence may result in a 3% probability of developing cancer. However, once we begin to venture deeper into the solar system, we will need to develop new and innovative ways to protect future space advocates.
"It's a question if they will pay for [necessary additional shielding] and put it on these vehicles, "said Cucinotta. And for the galactic rays, you can not protect at all because the energies are just too high. "We would need to pack spaceships in meters of shielding thickness to counter Cucinotta's hypothesis that the high energies of the galactic rays" Nobody can afford to throw so much mass into the space for a volume of several people.
This radiation also carries a secondary danger. A study published in 2016 in Nature suggests that NASA astronauts absorbed while walking on the moon had a negative impact on their overall cardiovascular health compared to astronauts who did not venture beyond the Earth's orbit low. In fact, the study found that Moonwalkers suffered from cardiovascular disease at a rate 4 to 5 times higher than traveling astronauts. The problem is not so much that researchers are not yet quite certain of how spatial radiation affects the human body as much as their uncertainty to the extent that it affects our physiology.
"These are studies and experiments. [Commercial and government space agencies] Cucinotta said, "Is this really useful?" If the increased cancer risk is twenty percent [as opposed to 3 percent aboard the ISS] I do not think that they can take these missions in the long run. You see NASA leaders say, "We'll just accept the risk." But the fact is that no one knows exactly what the risk is. "
The stakes are even higher for commercial carriers, says Cucinotta. Space tourism will not last long if the first two sets of amateur explorers return to Earth with cases of rapid onset cancer raging. "Leukemia … has a very short latency," said Cucinotta. "It may be that in the years following exposure to radiation, you may have leukemia and this will be definitive if it was caused by radiation."
However, this applies only to acute intoxications. "Probably your 30-year cancer risk is higher [after taking a tour around the Moon]but is it important for a 60 year old man?
We communicated with SpaceX several times about this story, but the company declined to comment.
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