What Happens To The ISS Human Research That NASA Won't Finish?
Look at all of the human health research that @NASA will NOT have completed on ISS (after several decades of work) when they pull the plug on funding ISS in 2024. pic.twitter.com/lGQQSMZVB3
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 27, 2018
Oddly while these human research priorities still need to be done before the whole #JourneyToMars thing starts up again the LOP-G/Gateway will be far LESS capable of addressing this research than ISS. Yet somehow @NASA is going to make these issues go away or maybe change color pic.twitter.com/HH4QeDuwfD
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 27, 2018
Keith’s note: After decades of selling the ISS as necessary for the human exploration of space NASA now seems ready to walk away from ISS before all of that critical human biomedical and risk reduction research is complete when funding for ISS stops in 2024. Where will that research be done? NASA won’t tell you but suggests that the Lunar Gateway thing (a mini-ISS) is where some of it could be done.
It tells you how valuable they really consider that research to be. A lot of the human health microgravity research was there to justify having humans in microgravity for long periods of time, versus other alternatives.
Time to stop sending humans in space. Too hazardous to human health. Robotics is the only way to explore.
On the other hand, by the standards of almost all of human history, sending humans into space is an incredibly safe form of exploration. Much safer than sailing from Spain to Central America in 1625, or traveling by land and river from St. Louis to the Pacific in 1805.
I get your predilection for robots, given your own personal success.
But the gathering of scientific data can never cover the romance of standing on a distant shore.
I’m not sure if that was a reply to my comment or not. I was pointing out that most people’s idea of acceptable risk has apparently changed in the past few hundred years. Actually, in the past century. At least that’s true of most people think human spaceflight is unacceptably risky.
Personally, I don’t think it is an unacceptable risk. But when it comes to things like cancer risks from radiation exposure, I hear things which amount to, “Oh no! He might die thirty years after getting back to Earth instead of forty year. We can’t allow that.” Compare that to the mortality rate for people working in Antarctica in the 1960s. It implies a very different attitude towards risks.
Yeah, for exploration, robots are safer, cheaper, and for the same cost can explore more, different spots. But ultimately they cannot do our settling.
Well, yes. Someone will make the colors change. That’s an inherent problem with the sort of risk-consequences charts NASA uses (as the source for those reds, yellows and greens.) The assessments are highly subjective. They do have a lengthy system for tracking all this and for documenting changes. But that doesn’t add rigor, just documentation.
For example, “Inadequate food and nutrition” is listed as 3×4, which means high likelihood of occurring and high risk if it did occur (which is as bad as it can get.) But someone could argue that the only way this could be an issue is if nutritional requirements change due to being in the space environment, and that’s captured by other risks on that list. The likelihood of “inadequate food and nutrition” for other reasons is low, and that’s what this item should really be capturing. Someone can stand up at a review, put that on his viewgraphs, say something about how they shouldn’t be bookkeeping the same risk in two places. If everyone nods, and they document it, that now becomes 1×4 and turns yellow.
How about stuff like bone fractures? How do researchers retire that concern without studying how bones mend in space?
I wish I knew. But the risks aren’t retired by researchers, they are retired by managers. I’m more used to seeing charts like this for robotic mission, and what I said was more of a hypothetically illustration. But, for bone fractures, the likelihood of that happening isn’t easy to determine. Maybe it’s moderately likely, maybe it’s a low probably. The consequences are also hard to determine. If it would mean no risk of fatalities and one crewmember getting stuck with a console job instead of EVAs on Mars, that would make it the consequences less serious. Those sort of considerations determine if an issue shows up as red, yellow, green or doesn’t show up at all. My point is that those judgements are often subjective and made by people who have in interest in retiring or retaining risks. Despite looking like a technical, engineering process, it often isn’t.
The most serious risk of spaceflight, dominating all the others by orders of magnitude, is the risk of death due to traumatic injury due to an unanticipated spacecraft or launch vehicle contingency.
Although loss of bone mineral occurs in any disuse state, there is no documented case of bone loss in spaceflight that was severe enough to clearly increase the risk of fracture. Disuse fractures are a much greater problem on Earth, where they are fairly common in people with spinal cord injury, yet there is not much research to find countermeasures for this.
My feeling, not necessarity reality, is that the flight crew should have the right to accept reasonable risks. The biomedical risks of spaceflight are lower than the physical risks most space travellers are already willing to accept, so they are not IMO a roadblock, although further research to reduce risk is alsys helpful.
You’re thinking of space-related health risks and crew safety. I think a good risk assessment should be a little more general and a little more heartless.
In terms of likelihood, there are a long list of serious medical problems which are unrelated to being in space. There severity would be increased by limited facilities to treat the problem, but that’s not unique to space either. What, for example, is to probability of someone breaking a bone over the course of 15 person-years? (My guess is 15 person-years is about right for an initial Mars mission.) On Earth, I’d think that’s over 10%, possibly over 25%.
In terms of risk, the assessment ought to include the risk of mission failure. The Apollo 13 mission, for example, was a mission failure despite the fact that no one died. Or, to stick to medical risks, Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition was a mission failure since they failed to reach the pole, as was his Endurance expedition since it failed to cross Antarctica. For a Mars mission, my example of a broken bone wouldn’t kill anyone. But it could incapacitate someone and prevented them from accomplishing a large part of the surface program.
I’d say, in the formal NASA risk assessment sense, as used in that chart, a broken bone would probably live somewhere at 2×2 (moderate likelihood and moderate consequences for the mission) and would have to be listed as an accepted risk, since there isn’t any way to mitigate it.