Artist Rendition: Lunar Disney, c. 2075
The event seems to suggest a future where normal people will travel to space on a regular basis. This presents an interesting problem. How will “normal people” (fatties and non-fatties, alike) survive the rigors of space travel? To-date, human space tourists have consisted of highly-trained astronauts and cosmonauts, representing a near-pinnacle of human athletic and psychological conditioning. (Well, except for this one)
A particularly relevant story comes to mind from the early days of human space travel. Back then NASA still practiced water landings following dead drops through the atmosphere. It was not uncommon for astronauts to pass out given the extraordinary acceleration they experienced when reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The astronauts would land, be pulled out of their metal shuttlecock capsules, and muster up just enough fortitude to wave at helicopters capturing the footage overhead before passing out in the bowels of a US Navy destroyer. NASA realized one potential reason for this frequent fainting was the human baroreceptor reflex (BRR). The BRR acts as a feedback system to ensure proper blood flow to the brain: if too much blood is headed to the brain it’ll slow your heart down and vice versa. Well, the scientists at NASA thought, the brief period of massive acceleration must be causing our astronauts’ blood to rush to the brain. In response their hearts are slowed down, but the BRR overcompensates in the face of a scenario it never evolved to handle and eventually put our astronauts to sleep when blood flow to the brain slowed to a crawl. NASA responded by equipping astronauts with either a type stimulant or pacemaker (a technology pioneered by NASA) to speed up heart rate during reentry . What happened? Astronauts fainted more than ever. In this case, it wasn’t the baroreceptor reflex – it was a massive amount of fear, psychological stress, and a stomach-upsetting ride speeding that sped the heart to unsustainable levels that caused astronauts to pass out, especially when working in concert with something that sped heart rate. The likely situation is that the heart couldn’t fill with blood fast enough before squeezing it out and up to the brain.
(Special thanks to the teaching staff in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins for that anecdote – see what you learn when you go to class?)
What does this mean for you or me? Unless you’re a professional soccer, basketball, or baseball player, there is a good chance you don’t come close to the physical fitness levels of these astronauts (note that I left baseball and football off the list). And these people STILL experienced difficulty with the types of problems posed by space tourism, as evidenced by all that fainting. And even the brightest scientists in the world couldn’t correctly diagnose the problem. This all raises a few questions:
- Unlike traditional air travel, where cost, timeliness, service, safety, and frequent flier rewards help travelers make decisions, a premium will also be placed on the ability to keep people from throwing up. How much extra will people pay for a more enjoyable (and conscious) experience?
- Will “training” be required, and how much? Can businesses based off NASA’s training regimen be replicated at for-profit locations, and also be condensed to get tourists up-to-speed in the matter of days and not months?
- What medical devices and/ or drugs can be applied to keeping people happy and healthy in space and upon exit/ reentry? (Hallucinates do not count: while they would surely make space travel more memorable, they will likely be illegalized even in outer space for any trips operating out of the US.)
It will surely be exciting to see our current body of human understanding applied to solving problems posed by space travel. But continued space travel will also introduce us to many questions about our physiology that we wouldn’t even think to ask today. In the past, getting around these problems has led the space program to develop many technologies that have been applied to improve life on Earth. NASA has even developed an annual record of its commercialization successes that range from the aforementioned pacemakers to invisible braces and the ear thermometer. Hopefully this virtuous cycle will extend further into the world of healthcare, and the rate of innovation will grow exponentially as more stakeholders outside of NASA get into the mix.
