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Openly Communicating The Human Risks Of Space Exploration At NASA

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 3, 2020
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Openly Communicating The Human Risks Of Space Exploration At NASA

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First Reported Occurrence And Treatment Of Spaceflight Medical Risk On ISS, LSU
“Ultrasound examinations of the astronauts’ internal jugular veins were performed at scheduled times in different positions during the mission. Results of the ultrasound performed about two months into the mission revealed a suspected obstructive left internal jugular venous thrombosis (blood clot) in one astronaut. The astronaut, guided in real time and interpreted by two independent radiologists on earth, performed a follow-up ultrasound, which confirmed the suspicion. … The study was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Human Research Program (grant NNJ11ZSA002NA).”
Keith’s note: When I lived at Everest Base Camp for a month at 17,600 ft in 2009 with astronaut Scott Parazynski I saw something serious like this happen almost daily. People came off the mountain in a bad way. Some came down in bags. I was on stretcher duty to the helo pad at one point. Indeed I suffered from extreme food poisoning and dehydration and have a permanent medical issue to this day as a direct result. I never heard anyone complain about the medical stuff since this is part of what it meant to be there. We all signed waivers. Alpine research continues to try and better understand all of the maladies that come with high altitude living and mountaineering and how to avoid and, if need be, treat them. Meanwhile people still climb.
This is going to be the same with the human exploration of space. You can reduce risks and be prepared for the worst and hopefully for some of the unexpected. But at the end of the day there is an embedded risk that has to be accepted. This instance may be the first case of diagnosing and treating a medical issue like this – remotely – while the patient is in space. It will not be the last.
While NASA to its credit has sought to reduce the risks of space travel, there is now a new player on the scene: Space Force – and as a branch of the military they have a different approach to dealing with risk. Interestingly the military can openly advertise recruitment of people to risk their lives for their country but NASA is prohibited by law from doing similar advertising and recruitment. It will be interesting to see how these two parallel approaches to human activities in space intersect and/or compete.
This government-funded biomedical research was conducted by government personnel on government employees on a government research facility. We should all be able to read about it. According to the LSU press release (NASA has published nothing about this that I know of) the link that they include (Venous Thrombosis during Spaceflight, New England Journal of Medicine) points to a page where you have to pay to read the full summary of the article. There is no link to the actual article. Yet if you know about the non-advertised/promoted NASA PubSpace service you can search for the title and find an open access version of the paper (which was actually published a month and a half ago).
This research was mentioned in the
NASA Spaceline Current Awareness List #875 22 November 2019 (Space Life Science Research Results) (see item #4) which links to this summary on NCBI’s PubMed (where the nation’s biomedical research is collected) which, in turn, links to the open access article. But you have to dig to find this resource since, as is the case with PubSpace, NASA and CASIS make little effort to tell you about it. FWIW we have a full Spaceline archive back to 1996. NASA only has an archive online that goes back to 2003).
NASA regularly gets open access for planetary science results and puts that in press releases. The same should be done for biomedical research. HEOMD, SMD, and PAO need to talk to each other as to how to get more of this science out to the people who paid for it. NASA was required by law to create PubSpace. It has also had Spaceline online since 1996. Yet NASA goes out of its way not to tell people that these resources exist. The only way that NASA is going to get everyone on the same page when it comes to understanding the risks of spaceflight and what research is being done on ISS to mitigate these risks is get itself on the same page and use the resources it has at hand. This is an important piece of research. NASA should have been talking about it in November 2019 not letting it sneak out in a university press release over the holidays.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

7 responses to “Openly Communicating The Human Risks Of Space Exploration At NASA”

  1. fcrary says:
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    By an odd coincidence, I just found out there is some plans to change the current rules for open access publications. At the moment, all publications funded by the government must be open access after twelve months, but they are thinking about changing this to require open access from day one. Unfortunately, there’s a letter to the President asking him not to do that, and signed by a four-page long list of journal publishers and professional societies. Including my own (the American Geophysical Union.) That’s more than a little annoying, since they make a big point of the costs and financial burden of publishing professional journals. In fact, they charge the authors a hefty publication fee (about $100 per page for the AGU journals) and take the copyright. If you want (or have to) make it open access sooner, that costs an extra couple thousand. Of course, all that gets charged to grants and therefore the government ends up paying. I’m also not clear on what those publication costs are. The journals are virtually all electronic these days, the authors do the layout and formatting themselves, and the reviewers aren’t paid.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      A question: What are the consequences to you, as the author/ researcher, of giving up the copyright?

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        I have to do the same thing when I publish at the American Society of Civil Engineering. Basically it means they own your paper and you need to get their permission to reproduce it elsewhere.

      • fcrary says:
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        To me, the copyright isn’t the biggest issue. It’s more annoying than anything else.

        First, I can’t legally send a colleague a copy as a PDF email attachment, until the journal decides to make it open access (usually a year after publication these days.) That’s actually a fairly common way of distributing the work. And, actually, even once it’s open source, the journal may prefer I just point them to the journal’s own web site. Of course, technically, the copyright only covers the published form of the paper, so distributing final drafts is a huge loophole.

        Second, there are lots of things in papers which can be reused. A figure with a clear, well-drafted illustration of a spacecraft’s trajectory past a planet. Most of the papers on the mission’s results could use that. But they can’t without going back to the original journal and getting permission. Or, more often, redrafting the figure just enough to avoid copyright issues (which usually makes it less clear and useful.)

        But, as I said, that’s mostly just annoying. What I object to is the complaints about financial hardship if they make open access more open. Since they bill the author to cover publication costs, that doesn’t seem reasonable. In addition, most of these journals are published by professional societies. They charge us dues and (in theory) exist to benefit the members and the community, not themselves as an institution or business.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          Thank you and thanks to the Texas Professor, who I always imagine (no doubt a bit over the top) fitted with the full western kit: the hat, the boots, the turquoise ring…

          “the complaints about financial hardship”

          The journals claim, chiefly I think, that the service provided in peer review far outweighs the annoyance. I wonder if that’s true, and indeed if it was ever true?

  2. supergrover says:
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    I agree that NASA funded research should be open access. However it is possible to read the New England Journal of Medicine paper by registering with an email address.

    Note that “Assessment of Jugular Venous Blood Flow Stasis and Thrombosis During Spaceflight” published in JAMA Network Open in November is different than “Venous Thrombosis during Spaceflight” just published in the NEJM.

    The first paper was the study of 11 astronauts that found reverse blood flow and the second paper was about the treatment of one astronaut for a blood clot discovered by that study. It does not yet appear in PubSpace.

    This is the article’s listing in PubMed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go

  3. Grumpy_Engineer says:
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    Despite the name, the new Space Force has no plans to put people into space. It is an organizational change to get better visibility from the top and improve or at least stabilize funding.