Space Health

Last week on the podcast we talked about space health. Specifically, we told you about a new paper discussing the role that physicians will have to play in determining which citizens are fit enough for commercial jaunts into space. Now let's leap ahead, and much farther afield. What kinds of issues might a crew of astronauts face on a longer journey say, a round-trip to Mars? To find out, six volunteers spent a record 520 days confined to a simulated space habitat near Moscow. They emerged in 2011. Now a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the simulated spaceflight did have real effects.