A recent series of papers published by a group of scientists probes the impact that space travel has on the human body, tackling the question of whether humans can survive more extensive explorations in searches for inhabitable planets.
As part of the 2021 SpaceX Inspiration4 mission, four civilian astronauts allowed themselves to be researched from top to bottom as they circled in low-Earth orbit for about three days and then returned to their normal lives back on the ground.
This collection of studies, published Tuesday in Nature and related journals, draws upon research outside of NASA, showing the impact of space travel on a larger number of people and also a more diverse group.
“It really provides the foundation as we think ahead and more futuristically,” Susan Bailey, a co-author on many of the studies and a radiation cancer biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, stated. The papers, she said, encouraged her and her peers to “think a little bit more about what it’s really going to take for people to live in space for long periods of time, to thrive, to reproduce. How is all of that really going to happen?”
The results found that radiation exposure apparently causes the acceleration of diseases and damages cells “even in three to five days,” Bailey told reporters on Monday.
One of the most imperative observations was that although the subject’s bodies were stressed and displayed dramatic signs of aging during the journey, 95% of the indicators studied returned to normal within a few months.
In addition to the age-related diseases, the papers revealed other health issue space travelers can develop, such as kidney stones.
Another insight is that women seem to recover faster from space damage compared to men, though Christopher Mason, professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, cautioned that more women need to be studied to better understand the effects. He noted that faster recovery could come at the expense of higher long-term risks of breast and lung cancer from extended radiation exposure.
According to Mason, research into radiation exposure could also potentially help treat cancer patients on Earth.
Aside from the various findings which are still development, Mason says that there is “no show-stopper. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to get to Mars and back,” arguing that human bodies can relatively handle space travel.
