Early Tuesday morning, Polaris Dawn flew through the atmosphere, taking its four crewmembers to the highest altitude humans have experienced since the Apollo era, where they will conduct the first ever private civilian spacewalk. These civilians double as researchers, advancing the study of human biology and space health. Private space missions like Polaris Dawn present a valuable opportunity to collect health data before, during, and after exposure to spaceflight.
These new data points will inform researchers studying the body’s response to space, leading to safer space exploration for people of all backgrounds as well as potential health improvements and new medical innovations on Earth.
Space is an entirely unique testbed for human biology that has yet to be fully explored. While scientists have identified analogs on Earth to some of space’s rigors, data collection during real missions allows us to explore the impact of multiple simultaneous stressors. The extremely limited resource of time in space requires that these studies be both exacting and efficient so that we can better understand the early phase of adaptation to the exposure of space stressors. And through consistent measuring protocols and standards, we can track different people’s responses to the same stressors across independent space missions. This will be key to the discovery of natural resistances to stressors in general and the development of countermeasures to expand human exploration possibilities.
Our team at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), a consortium with Caltech and MIT and based at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Space Medicine, is leading the effort to partner with commercial space travelers for health research, more of whom are signing on to conduct biomedical science. We believe these initiatives will yield new health technologies to transport astronauts safely to the moon and eventually to Mars. But they are also poised to directly help improve health for many on Earth.
The Polaris Program has committed to several research initiatives and will collect and store biomedical information from its flight participants in TRISH’s EXPAND (Enhancing eXploration Platforms and Analog Definition) database for future analysis. EXPAND complements NASA’s work of collecting a standardized suite of measurements on its own astronauts. By implementing Essential Measures — standardized data collection and sampling for commercial space —TRISH accounts for the differences between health studies of NASA astronauts and those of private space mission participants, who are likely less homogenous than NASA astronauts, allowing for the study of data from a new crop of diverse and international fliers. The goal is to study a wider cross-section of human health profiles, some of which with pre-existing medical conditions that are unlikely to be seen in NASA astronauts.
The research projects on board Polaris Dawn include essential measure initiatives that have been refined and implemented on all TRISH collaborations, including otolith and posture evaluation, space omics and BioBank collection, Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome surveillance and cognitive and psychological monitoring. Beyond adding to this robust biobank, Polaris Dawn hosts two new, exciting research projects to inform our understanding of human health both on Earth and in space.
The first study seeks biomarkers that could indicate early carcinogenesis. Radiation exposure is a hazard for deep space travel, and at such a long distance from Earth, the Polaris Dawn crew will experience the highest intensity of environmental space radiation of any mission since the Apollo era. In the short time span of this five-day mission, this will amount to even more radiation than astronauts regularly experience aboard the ISS on much longer missions. Monitoring for changes in DNA and molecular markers in blood samples could uncover early indications of carcinogenesis and inform biomarker research on Earth. A better understanding of the very early-stage occurrence of cancer could also contribute to the highly active research areas of cancer treatment and prevention.
The second new study uses novel 3D scanning technology to track body morphology: how the body shifts and changes in space with respect to the distribution of water, fat and muscle. The goal is to passively and continuously monitor astronaut body composition and correlate it with other health changes by integrating image analyses with bioimpedance data. The crew would be alerted if significant changes in their measurements occur, such as muscle loss, severe dehydration or other health risks. The data will be used to generate a body composition model that could inform dietary, pharmacological and physical activity interventions to prevent adverse health events on future journeys into space.
Translated to Earth, this technique for tracking a patient’s body morphology using a scan could reduce the need for comprehensive metabolic panels that require blood samples, potentially detecting early signs of illness in an easy, non-invasive manner. It may even remove the prerequisite access to a clinical lab. On a mission to Mars and in remote places on Earth, an accessible and lightweight medical scanning device would be a boon.
It’s commendable that multiple commercial spaceflight missions have chosen to enable health discovery as part of their mission. Lessons from the limited time spent in space by the Polaris Dawn crew will contribute to how future space explorers will train, how health surveillance approaches could change, what supplies and medical devices are provided and how procedures are conducted. The safety and well-being of astronauts, as well as the feasibility of deep space missions and the sustainability of the low-Earth orbit economy, are common goals for human space exploration. As humanity’s space aspirations grow, we must understand how the human body changes in response to the spaceflight environment.
The laboratory above our heads – in space – will lead to impacts closer to Earth than we may initially think.
Dorit Donoviel, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), a NASA-funded consortium of Baylor College of Medicine, California Institute for Technology and Massachusetts Institute for Technology. She is also an associate professor and Director of Research at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Space Medicine.
