Most space travelers face the same debilitating illness; understand

Each of the four crew members on board the SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission reported different physical sensations during its historic trip which sent private astronauts to a highest orbit around Earth than any human being has ventured in decades.

“My visual acuity started to deteriorate within the first few days,” said Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former United States Air Force pilot, in a recent interview with CNN . His crewmate Anna Menon, a SpaceX engineer and medical officer on the Polaris Dawn mission, said she was affected by space adaptation syndrome.

It’s a phenomenon that affects approximately 60% to 80% of people who travel to orbit, although astronauts rarely openly discuss the condition.

“It can be a whole spectrum of experiences, from dizziness, to nausea, to vomiting,” Menon said. “I really experienced the whole gamut.”

Traveling to space—with its intense G-forces and disorienting weightlessness—can have a variety of effects on the human body, ranging from the uncomfortable to the downright dangerous.

NASA has known and studied these diseases for a long time, as the agency’s astronauts have reported such symptoms for decades.

But the Polaris Dawn mission — a five-day orbital journey carried out by the private sector, not NASA — sought to take this research further, hoping to unravel some of the most problematic aspects of spaceflight.

During the mission, the crew performed a variety of health-focused experiments, including wearing special contact lenses that measured the pressure in their eyes and MRI scans to track changes in the anatomy of their brains.

The Polaris Dawn team sought these answers because the mission aims to pave the way for more people to venture into space, noted Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments technology company Shift4. The CEO helped finance and was the commander of the unprecedented mission.

“About 600 people have been in orbit in the last 60 years — more than half have had space adaptation syndrome,” Isaacman said. “And we’re talking about mostly government astronauts — some of the most highly selected individuals. […] This just highlights the importance of why we have to solve this if we are going to put hundreds or thousands of people in space one day.”

SpaceX’s founding goal is to take the first humans to Mars and eventually establish a settlement there.

“If you think about a future where there are thousands of people living in space and they eventually — after nine months of travel — reach the surface of Mars, and a large percentage [das pessoas] have changes in vision that make them unable to do their job, unable to read their procedures — that’s a big problem,” Menon said about why SpaceX hopes to find answers to pressing medical conditions in space.

During the September mission, the Polaris Dawn crew performed the first commercial spacewalk, as well as venturing into the lower range of Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, which are areas within Earth’s magnetic field where radiation pools from the Sun. they get stuck.

Initial reports from the Polaris Dawn crew did not necessarily reveal any specific health effects from radiation exposure, although Isaacman said he saw “sparks or lights” when he closed his eyes, as did other NASA astronauts who experienced high-radiation environments. reported. This phenomenon is still not well understood.

However, Poteet said his vision was noticeably less clear during his first few days in space, which could point to a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, or Sans.

NASA estimates that up to 70% of astronauts experience this condition, which can be caused by the displacement of bodily fluids, resulting in pressure changes in the eyes.

The changes in Poteet’s vision may have shown up in data collected by the special contact lenses worn by the crew, which they dubbed the “cyborg experiment.” The lenses were designed to collect data on intraocular pressure throughout its mission, Menon said.

“This is new because you are getting long-term data. And you can then really understand better how that transition occurs over time and especially in this early time in space,” she said. “We’re really interested to see what researchers come up with when they get a chance to analyze all this data.”

In total, the Polaris Dawn team performed 36 experiments on behalf of 31 partner institutions, including universities and NASA. And although he had unfortunate lapses of vision during the journey, Poteet said he was pleased to report that he didn’t experience any of the nausea typically associated with spatial adaptation syndrome, which he called “quite ironic.”

“People assume there is a correlation between motion sickness [na Terra] and spatial adaptation syndrome,” he said. “I tend to get motion sickness in the back seat of an Uber. […] But I haven’t actually experienced these symptoms [no espaço].”

“It really gave me a huge appreciation for how it can impact your ability to work and accomplish tasks, especially in those early days of adjusting,” Menon said.

Before liftoff, Isaacman — the only crew member with prior space travel experience — told CNN that medications given to treat the symptoms of spatial adaptation syndrome can make people sleep for about eight hours. He led a previous self-funded orbital voyage called Inspiration4 in 2021.

Sarah Gillis, a lead operations engineer at SpaceX who was a mission specialist aboard Polaris Dawn, also noted that crew members had their blood drawn before and after the mission to assess how their bodies processed medications — such as acetaminophen (or Tylenol). — in orbit versus on Earth.

Another experiment the Polaris Dawn crew performed to understand disease in space involved a series of MRI scans just before liftoff and immediately after returning to Earth. The crew even had a portable imaging machine right outside their quarantine facility, Isaacman said.

Doing so allowed the team to collect data even faster than NASA collected such scans on astronauts after returning from space, Menon said.

The changes included brains shifting upwards in astronauts’ skulls, according to Dr. Donna Roberts, deputy chief scientist at the ISS National Laboratory, who has spent years researching the effects of spaceflight on brain structure.

Roberts noted last Thursday that initial reviews of the MRI data “did not show any clinically concerning findings.” Spaceflight can also enlarge fluid-filled cavities in the center of the brain, called ventricles, Roberts added.

Gillis, whose work at SpaceX includes training NASA astronauts going into orbit, said in an interview with CNN before takeoff that “human spaceflight is not going to be glamorous all the time” due to the discomfort that microgravity can cause to the human body.

Upon his return, he reflected on the effects. “It’s been incredibly fascinating to go through all these changes to see how your body responds, and how the fluid shift affects you, and how all your organs kind of shift inside you,” she said.

“We don’t thrive without an atmosphere, without oxygen,” Gillis added. “I think this really highlights to me the importance of the research that we are doing, the data that we are collecting.”

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This content originally appeared on Most Space Travelers Face the Same Debilitating Illness; understand on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil