We could be entering a renaissance in human spaceflight research, as record numbers of citizens head to space – and scientists improve techniques for collecting data on these intrepid test subjects.
A sign that rebirth is imminent came earlier this week, when the journal Nature published a series of articles detailing the physical and mental changes that Inspiration4’s four-person crew experienced nearly three years ago . This mission, in partnership with SpaceX, launched on September 15, 2021 and returned to Earth three days later.
During the mission, the crew experienced a wide range of modest molecular changes, a dysregulated immune system, and slight decreases in cognitive performance. But researchers are only able to analyze the data – more than 100,000 health-related data points – because the four-person team was able to collect it reliably from the start.
This is a greater accomplishment than one might think. The Inspiration4 crew received extensive training, much of it with SpaceX, which provided the Dragon capsule for its journey to orbit. But their preparation is still a long way from that of NASA astronauts aboard the ISS, who also regularly carry out a battery of health tests on themselves. This includes ultrasounds, cognitive tests, biopsies, blood and saliva tests, skin swabs and sensorimotor tests.
“You can do research with individuals in space, that’s the number one outcome (of research),” Dr. Dorit Donoviel said in a recent interview. Dr. Donoviel is a co-author of one of the papers published in Nature and an associate professor at the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor University. She is also executive director of the NASA-funded research consortium, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), which conducts and funds cutting-edge research to improve human safety in space.
“I’ll be honest, no one was sure that we would be able to gather a reasonable amount of data, that we would be able to implement it, that ordinary people who have never been exposed to scientific research could do something that we would actually be able to analyze,” she continued, referring to the Inspiration4 mission.
In some ways, the Inspiration4 crew is far from ordinary: the mission’s leader, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire who founded a payment processing company at the age of 16; Hayley Arcenaux is a physician assistant at the renowned St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Sian Proctor is a pilot with a doctorate who teaches geology at the college level; and Christopher Sembroski is a former U.S. Air Force journeyman whose long career as an aerospace engineer brought him to his current workplace, Blue Origin.
And yet they still came to Inspiration4 as spaceflight novices. This meant that TRISH researchers had to come up with a suite of tests that could be performed with minimal training. The Inspiration4 crew also wore Apple Watches, and the capsule was equipped with environmental sensors that the researchers were able to correlate with other test results. The correlation of the data is “unusual,” Dr. Donoviel said, but it gave researchers unique insight into how changes in the confined environment affect things like heart rate or cognitive performance.
Overall, researchers are trying to move toward digitizing testing and making data collection more passive, in order to reduce the cognitive load on the private astronaut. (NASA astronauts also take cognitive tests, but they do it using pencil and paper, Dr. Donoviel explained.)
Gathering such information will be essential as the number of private citizens heading to space increases, as it almost certainly seems poised to do over the coming decade. Researchers will be better able to understand the effects of spaceflight on people who don’t fit the mold of the typical NASA astronaut: male, white and in the top percentiles in physical and cognitive performance. But they will only be able to do this if future space tourists agree to collect this data.
More data means a better understanding of how spaceflight affects women compared to men, or could help future space tourists with pre-existing conditions understand how they will fare in the zero-G environment. The findings Inspiration4 are promising, particularly for space tourism: the TRISH article revealed, based on data from this mission, that short-term missions do not present significant health risks. This latest preliminary finding adds to existing evidence that long-term stays in space – in this case, 340 days – may not be as dangerous as once thought.
So far, commercial providers ranging from Axiom Space to SpaceX to Blue Origin have been more than willing to work with TRISH and have agreed to standardize and pool data collected from their respective missions, said Dr. Donoviel.
“They’re all competing to attract these people (as customers), but this allows them to contribute to a common knowledge base,” she added.
This is just the beginning. The increase in non-governmental space missions raises major questions related to the standards, ethics, and regulation of human research in space. Even though more and more private citizens are likely heading into space, will they be interested in serving as guinea pigs to advance scientific research? Will a private astronaut shelling out $50 million for a luxury space tourism experience want to spend his time in orbit performing ultrasound scans on himself or meticulously measuring his temporary cognitive decline?
Maybe; maybe not. Last year, Donoviel co-published a paper in Science calling, among other things, for the development of a set of principles to guide commercial spaceflight missions. One of the principles advocated by the authors is social responsibility – essentially the idea that private astronauts arguably have an increased social responsibility to advance this research.
“If you go to space, you rest on the laurels of all the public funding that allowed you to go to space. Taxpayers paid for all these space capabilities that now allow you to go to space. So you owe the research to the taxpayers,” argued Dr. Donoviel. She added that advances in wearable technology have only eased the burden on research participants — not just with the Apple Watch, but with technology like the Biobutton device that continuously collects numerous vital signs or a sweat patch.
“We’re not going to make your life miserable, we’re not going to stick you with a needle, we’re not going to give you an ultrasound, but wear the Biobutton and put on the anti-sweat patch.”