Travel to Mars is being discussed everywhere today. Private and public organizations are serious about conquering the Red Planet. Elon Musk presented his plans for a new rocket that will allow SpaceX to be the first to reach Mars, and NASA is preparing a new rover as part of the Mars 2020 mission. But human space flight is many times more serious than just sending robots and experiments outside the Earth. It is necessary not only to build a suitable rocket, calculate the travel in microgravity and remotely make an ideal landing on Mars, but also do everything possible to keep the crew of people alive without any outside help.
Questions also remain about how to collect enough food and water to support the crew and keep the rocket not too heavy, but still have room to live. What if someone becomes mortally ill or claustrophobic? In six months, anything can happen, and not only in space - on Earth.
John Bradford works at SpaceWorks Enterprises in Atlanta.
Using a $ 500,000 grant from NASA, Bradford's team is working to adapt a promising medical procedure that could resolve many space-related restrictions. At the annual Hello Tomorrow Summit in Paris, Bradford shared his team's concept of immersing the crew in a so-called "low metabolic state." In other words, we are talking about the immersion of the crew in hibernation.
The idea is based on the already existing medical practice of therapeutic hypothermia, or targeted temperature control. It is used for cardiac arrest and neonatal encephalopathy. The patient is cooled to 33 degrees Celsius for 48 hours to prevent tissue damage due to lack of blood flow. Sedatives are then administered to induce sleep. Former Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher was plunged into this state after a ski accident in 2013.
Adapting this procedure to space flight, the crew will be fed and drunk directly into the stomach using an endoscopic gastronomic tube. This eliminates the need for food and standard digestion. Electrical stimulation of the whole body will also be used to avoid muscle atrophy.
Bradford's team found that in this state of sleep, the body requires a third less food and water to maintain itself, which significantly reduces the payload weight for Martian missions.
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Most of the concept is devoted to the rotation of sleeping and awake. Medical procedures currently last between two and three days, so the plan is to extend the time a person is in suspended animation to eight days. By adding a two-day awake period, it is possible to schedule an individual crew member to keep track of the others while the rest are eight days asleep and two days awake.
This does not mean that people will sleep during the entire trip, but such periods will make it easier for most of the crew to travel, reduce the weight of psychological and physical stress, and also better allocate resources on board. There is also hope that the time in such anabiosis can be increased to several weeks.
SpaceWorks is not alone in exploring the idea of putting a person to sleep during space travel. The European Space Agency has commissioned its Advanced Concepts team to do this research, among other things. But the last work on this topic was published already in 2004.
Skeptics tend to question the human body's ability to wake up effectively and safely after long periods of hibernation, and whether our bodies can adapt to healthy work in colder temperatures. We evolved to work in a certain way (three days later, yeah), and the effects of long-term exposure to low temperatures are not fully understood.
The SpaceWorks research group has both short and long term prospects. The knowledge that we gain on the way to researching hibernation can be useful in the medical field, for example, in organ transplantation and emergency care in extreme conditions.
Of course, all this will not be soon. According to Bradford's estimates, we will start using suspended animation in manned missions no earlier than 2030. And since Elon Musk plans to send the first settlers with a rocket in 2024, he will have to use already proven methods.
Ilya Khel