Shuttle Crew Takes Its Medicine
Columbia rocketed into orbit Thursday on what could be NASA’s longest shuttle flight yet, a 2-1/2-week medical research mission that for some of the astronauts will be like one extended visit to the doctor’s office.
Four of the seven astronauts will be poked with needles, wear caps with electrodes, collect blood, spit and body waste, and subject themselves to other not-so-pleasant tests over the next 16 or 17 days, so that future space travelers can adjust more easily to the effects of weightlessness during longer missions.
Within a few hours of the launch, commander Terence “Tom” Henricks and his crew had opened up the laboratory. And the four medical guinea pigs - a U.S. physician and veterinarian, a Canadian doctor and a French physicist - began collecting urine and blood samples.
The four will have blood drawn every other day in orbit and regularly record their diminishing muscle strength. They will also monitor their sleep by wearing caps with electrodes.
NASA wants to learn how and why the human body changes in weightlessness. Some of the more noticeable side effects: weakened muscles and bones, body fluid gathered in the chest and face, and, for some, poor sleep.
To better understand these changes, NASA conducted a bed-rest study last summer, using eight healthy volunteers to mimic the research now being conducted on Columbia’s astronauts. The volunteers had to lie in bed for 17 days with their heads lower than their feet.
“What we are learning from bed rest and from actual space flight is what sorts of procedures are best for recovery of function after disuse,” said Frank Sulzman, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s research branch.
NASA’s goal is to keep space travelers as strong at the end of a long trip as they were when they started. It’s vital for astronauts on a space station or a trip to Mars, but no one knows how to do it.
When Columbia returns to Earth, the four astronauts will undergo muscle biopsies again - they had muscle tissue removed before the flight, too - and endure other follow-up tests. NASA expects all this to yield valuable medical data, essential if the space agency ever hopes to send astronauts back to the moon or on to Mars.
The Russians, who leave cosmonauts on the space station Mir for months at a time, have an extensive in-orbit exercise program, Sulzman said. The cosmonauts work out two hours a day, three times a week in the early going, and double the number of hours toward the end, he said. Cosmonauts use exercise bikes and rowing machines, and pull against elastic cords to simulate weight training to preserve strength, he said.
Even this, however, doesn’t prevent some loss, Sulzman said. Cosmonauts lose about 1 percent of their bone density per month in such areas as the hip and lower spine, he said.
U.S. astronauts, whose time in orbit is far shorter than that of the cosmonauts, take aerobic equipment on space shuttle trips but are only experimenting with resistance equipment. Elastic cords were tried in the 1960s, but were not good enough. So NASA is looking at whole-body resistance equipment, Sulzman said.
This could pay off for Earth-bound exercisers. Stimulating more muscle cells to contract could result in doing as much work in two to five exercise repetitions as is done normally in 10-15 repetitions, Kenneth Baldwin of the University of California-Irvine said.
This would take electrical stimulation beyond its current use in some therapies, Baldwin said.
The $138 million worth of experiments to be conducted aboard Columbia, involving not only biomedicine but also plants, animals, metals and fluids, are similar to the kind of work planned for the international space station, to be built later this decade and next.
“It represents kind of a blueprint, a road map, to space station,” said Dr. Arnauld Nicogossian, acting head of NASA’s life and microgravity sciences office.
A video camera inside the cockpit provided unprecedented views of the astronauts being strapped into their seats for liftoff.
The videotaping resumed at liftoff, recording the eight-minute climb to orbit from the pilots’ perspective. On landing day, the camera will provide live views of the fiery descent through the atmosphere, as seen from the cockpit.
“The idea is to take some pictures that don’t cost a lot of money and to give the American people access to their space program,” said Joe Benton, executive producer of NASA’s television system.