The authors of a series of simultaneously published scientific papers described the impact of the space flight of the first ever private crew — Inspiration4, sent into space by SpaceX — and concluded that, despite the lack of long-term and systematic pre-flight training, the organisms of the flight participants endured it normally. This has serious implications for the future of spaceflight, in which the majority of all crews are highly likely to be private.
As Naked Science has already written, astronauts and cosmonauts, contrary to popular myths, are not an excess, but a key element of the entire flight. The survival of the Gemini VIII mission and the success of the first moon landing were ensured by manual human control in a critical situation. Without them, it is impossible to achieve serious results in the study of other scientific bodies and it is impossible to put complex experiments in orbits. Therefore, great attention is traditionally paid to training: to get into the astronaut/cosmonaut squad, as a rule, it takes years of waiting.
Now this situation is gradually becoming a thing of the past: since 2021, SpaceX has been putting private astronauts into orbits above 500 kilometers. The company expects to have to move at least thousands of people in space as early as the 2030s. Therefore, it is extremely important to understand how the body of ordinary people, without many years of preparation, will react to such an environment.
The Inspiration4 crew is on the Ground
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
A group of papers published in the journals of the Nature group seems to carry optimistic information on this issue. Their authors studied the different sides of the body reaction of four people from Inspiration4 who reached an orbit up to 590 kilometers high. They stayed in space for three days, during which they were closely monitored and took a variety of samples. These samples were then compared with similar ones previously taken from professional astronauts.
As expected, during the flights, all four had multiple body reactions typical for space flights. When a person enters space, he starts a number of adaptations — up to the frequency of protein coding by certain genes. The level of cytokines increases, telomeres lengthen (usually their shortening is associated with a shortening of life expectancy), the immune system is significantly activated.
For the crew of the "amateurs", 95% of all known biomarkers of space flight returned to the basic ones within three months after the flight. Only the synthesis of alpha-synuclein, collagen and cytokines such as CXCL8 remained elevated by the end of this period. Similar changes were previously observed in astronauts and took place after a significantly longer time than three months.
It should be noted that the flight took place significantly above the orbit of the ISS (it does not fly above 460 kilometers) and only 50 kilometers from the beginning of the Earth's radiation belts. In the summer of 2024, a similar private mission will reach an altitude of 790 kilometers, that is, it will enter the radiation belt. This will provide additional confidence that amateur astronauts normally tolerate space conditions of various levels of complexity.
The takeoff of the Crew Dragon spacecraft with a crew of private astronauts on a private SpaceX rocket
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
In the case of amateurs, gene expression levels (that is, the frequency with which they are used to encode certain proteins) returned to normal in women faster than in men.
Previously, Naked Science noted that the greatest practical benefit from space can be just data on its impact on human health. The fact is that, according to animal experiments and an accidental Taiwanese incident, prolonged low-dose radiation exposure to humans significantly reduces the incidence of cancer (up to 30 times), as well as the incidence of congenital deformities in children. For animals, a significant increase in life expectancy (up to 14%) was also noted in experiments, but in the case of humans, sufficiently long-term radiation exposure has not yet been observed.
These data are not used by modern medicine, because they contradict the picture for single high doses of radiation (with sufficient strength, giving an increase in the likelihood of cancer). Long—term observations of civilian astronauts can solve this problem, as they will allow you to quickly collect statistics that are convincing enough to stop further ignoring the Taiwanese experiment.
