We’re going to learn a lot more about how the human body reacts to space

We could be entering a renaissance in human spaceflight research, as record numbers of private citizens go into space—and as scientists improve the techniques for collecting data on these intrepid test subjects.

A sign that the renaissance was coming appeared earlier this week when the journal Nature published a stack of papers which details the physical and mental changes the four-person Inspiration4 crew experienced almost three years ago. That mission, in partnership with SpaceX, launched on September 15, 2021 and returned to Earth three days later.

During the mission, the crew experienced a wide range of modest molecular changes, a dysregulated immune system and a slight decline in cognitive performance. But researchers can only analyze the data – more than 100,000 health-related data points – because the four-person crew was able to reliably collect it in the first place.

This is a greater achievement than one might realize. The Inspiration4 crew received a lot of training, much of it with SpaceX, which provided the Dragon capsule for their ride through space. But their preparation is a far cry from that of NASA astronauts aboard the ISS, who also regularly perform a series of health tests on themselves. That includes ultrasounds, cognitive tests, biopsies, blood and saliva tests, skin swabs and sensorimotor tests.

“You can conduct research in space with private individuals, that is result number one [of the research]” said Dr. Dorit Donoviel in a recent interview. Dr. Donoviel is a co-author of one of the papers published in Nature and an associate professor at the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor University. She is also executive director of the NASA-funded research consortium Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), which conducts and funds cutting-edge research to improve human safety in space.

“I’ll be honest: No one was sure that we could collect a reasonable amount of data, that we could implement it, that ordinary people who have never been exposed to scientific research could do anything. that we could actually analyze,” she continued, referring to the Inspiration4 mission.

In some obvious ways, the crew of Inspiration4 is far from ordinary: the mission’s leader, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire who founded a payment processing company at the age of 16; Hayley Arcenaux is a physician assistant at the world-renowned St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Sian Proctor is a pilot with a PhD who teaches geology at university level; and Christopher Sembroski is a former U.S. Air Force journeyman whose long career as an aerospace engineer brought him to his current workplace, Blue Origin.

And yet they still came to Inspiration4 as space travel novices. That meant TRISH researchers had to come up with a test package that could be performed with minimal training. The Inspiration4 crew also wore Apple Watches, and the capsule was equipped with environmental sensors that researchers could correlate with the other test results. Correlating the data is “unusual,” Dr. Donoviel said, but it gave researchers unique insights into how changes in the confined environment affected things like heart rate or cognitive performance.

Overall, researchers are trying to move toward digitizing testing and more passive data collection to reduce cognitive overhead for the private astronaut. (NASA astronauts also take cognitive tests, but they do so with pencil and paper, Dr. Donoviel said.)

Gathering such information will be critical as the number of private citizens going into space increases, which will almost certainly happen in the next decade. Researchers will be better able to understand the effects of spaceflight on people who don’t fit the mold of the typical NASA astronaut: male, white, and in the top percentiles for physical and cognitive performance. But they will only be able to do that if future space tourists are willing to collect the data.

More data means a better understanding of how spaceflight affects women versus men, or could help future space tourists with pre-existing conditions understand how they will fare in the zero-G environment. The results of Inspiration4 are promising, especially for space tourism: the TRISH article shows that, based on the data from that mission, short-duration missions do not pose significant health risks. This latest preliminary finding adds to existing evidence that longer stays in space – in this case 340 days – may not be as dangerous as once thought.

So far, commercial providers ranging from Axiom Space to SpaceX to Blue Origin have been more than willing to work with TRISH and have agreed to standardize and pool the data collected during their respective missions, said Dr. Donoviel.

“They’re all competing for these people [as customers]but this allows them to contribute to a common knowledge base,” she added.

This is just the beginning. The rise of non-governmental spaceflight missions raises important questions regarding the norms, ethics, and regulation of human research in space. Are more private citizens likely to go into space than ever before, but will they be interested in being guinea pigs for further scientific research? Will a private astronaut paying $50 million for a luxury space tourism experience want to spend their time in orbit performing ultrasounds on themselves or painstakingly measuring their temporary cognitive decline?

Possibly; possibly not. Last year, Donoviel co-published a article in Science which, among other things, calls for the development of a set of principles to guide commercial spaceflight missions. One of those principles the authors advocated for is social responsibility – essentially the idea that private astronauts arguably have a greater social responsibility to advance this research.

“When you go into space, you rest on the laurels of all the public funding that allowed you to go into space. Taxpayers paid for all those space capabilities that have now allowed you to go into space. So you owe the taxpayers the investigation,” argued Dr. Donoviel. She added that advances in wearable technology have only lowered the burden on research participants – not just with the Apple Watch, but with technology like the Biobutton device that constantly collects many vital signs or a sweat spot.

“We are not going to make you miserable, we are not going to prick you with a needle, we are not going to make you have an ultrasound, but wear the Biobutton and put on the sweat patch.”