Paper
Challenges in Space Medicine
- Authors:
- Matthieu J. Guitton
- Abstract
- With the emergence of suborbital recreational flights (“space tourism”) and plans for manned missions to Mars, the effects of space exploration on the human body will become a subject of critical concern in the coming decades. Space medicine will face new challenges and become one of the new frontiers of public health. Here we show how space medicine is becoming an emerging problem of public health, and describe the threats that space poses for human health, and identify some of the limitations that hinder advances in this discipline. The challenges for human health in space are mostly related to exposure of untrained people of various ages and health conditions to space flight in the short-term context of suborbital recreational flights and in the long-term context of deep space exploration. We will expose some of the potential problems related to long stays in spaceand returning to earth after short or long exposure to space conditions, and, finally, to the particular issue of human reproduction under low gravity conditions. The challenges and limitations in the development of space medicine are mostly related to conceptual issues, to problems of access to space medicine education, to technical limitations related to experimental gravity control, and to limitations related to the very small size of the original astronaut population. We identify some of the issues which will have to be addressed and propose an operative framework to optimize space medicine advances, and to contribute to ensuring safe conditions for human space exploration.
- Keywords
- Cardiovascular System; Microgravity; Musculo-Skeletal System; Sensory Organs; Space Exploration; Space Tourism; Suborbital Flights; Vestibular System
- StartPage
- 73
- EndPage
- 77
- Doi
- 10.5963/PHF0103003