THE largest artificial object in orbit has long been the butt of cruel jokes. Some call the International Space Station (ISS) a “turkey in the sky”, while others deride the $100 billion spaceship to nowhere. Now it seems that the great sprawling structure may be the key to getting people to asteroids, Mars and beyond.
After nearly 50 years of space travel, we still haven’t figured out how to keep people healthy in low-Earth orbit, let alone on journeys to exotic destinations that could last months or even years. The ISS is the perfect lab to overcome our lack of data, with the astronauts as the guinea pigs.
“The International Space Station is the perfect lab, with the astronauts as the guinea pigs”
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We already know that being in microgravity for just six months turns astronauts’ muscles into those of an 80-year-old (see “How to survive in space”). If crews arrived at Mars in that condition, they might have trouble standing once they experienced Martian gravity, or scrambling to safety in an emergency.
To overcome these problems, it is likely that astronauts will need to tweak their regimes, doing shorter but more intense bursts of exercise, and eating all of the food given to them, even when they do not feel peckish. Yet astronauts’ health is not at the top of the agenda: the technological challenges of space flight still come first. Congress is debating what kind of next-generation rockets to build, and whether private space companies should be tasked with ferrying people to low-Earth orbit.
Private companies are itching to get the chance to compete for these potentially lucrative “space taxi” contracts, and NASA wants to spend $6 billion to spur a private industry that would deliver crews to the space station after the shuttles retire next year.
But it is less clear whether the private sector would have an incentive to do research on how to keep astronauts healthy during long-term missions. So NASA should continue to focus on the human element and consider boosting its proposed $215 million annual budget for health studies.
More must be done to ensure that when people set foot on another world, their bones won’t fracture and crumble under their own weight. To venture beyond low-Earth orbit, we have to learn to walk before we can run.
