We Finally Learned What a Year in Space Did to Astronaut Scott Kelly's Body

[Eugene]

Source: TIME

We Finally Learned What a Year in Space Did to Astronaut Scott Kelly's Body

BY JEFFREY KLUGER 3:03 PM EDT

Traveling in space looks like all kinds of fun, and in a lot of respects, it is—provided you can overlook a few downsides. There’s the loss of muscle mass, for one thing. Then there’s the decalcification of bones and the stress on the heart and the damage to the eyes and the changes in the immune system and the disruption of the genome and an actual shortening of your overall life expectancy.

It was, in part, to study all of those biological problems that astronaut Scott Kelly spent 340 days in space from 2015 to 2016 (chronicled in TIME’s Emmy-nominated series A Year in Space). Now, just over three years after his return, the first tranche of studies into Kelly’s off-world marathon has been published in Science. The results are mixed — Kelly fared better than expected on some measures and worse on others. The overall conclusion is less ambiguous: space travel is exceedingly hard on the human body, and we have a lot to learn before we’re ready to start living on the moon or Mars.

One of the things that made Kelly an improbably perfect specimen for the year-in-space study was that he has an identical twin brother, Mark Kelly. Both were NASA astronauts, both are generally fit and healthy and both, of course, share the same basic genome. Take two people with identical genetic software and put them in decidedly non-identical surroundings, and then compare them throughout the year and after. At least some of the differences in health will be attributable to the time spent one of them spent in space.

Some of the most important medical experiments involved cardiovascular health. Throughout the flight, Scott self-administered sonograms of his carotid and brachial arteries, and he regularly monitored his blood pressure and collected urine and blood samples. Mark underwent identical tests. It was the arterial monitoring that yielded the most striking results, with Scott’s carotid distending and thickening shortly after his arrival in orbit and remaining that way until four days after his return.

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Read more: http://time.com/5568522/kelly-twins-year-in-space/

[ZZenith]

1. I'll bet he felt really overweight when he got back.

[Ohiogal]

2. I highly recommend

Scott Kelly’s book about his experience in space.... “Endurance.” It’s is very readable and just fascinating.

[Tanuki]

3. I suppose most people here know that the identical twin brother, Mark Kelly,

is the husband of former Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and that he is a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.

[Canoe52]

5. I didn't know that! Thanks for the info.

[hedda_foil]

4. Not bad but can humanity maintain the level of civilization to go much farther?

All in all it's not particularly bad. Most everything returned to baseline within a month or so. Still, I don't think that extended space travel and off-earth settlement will be anything more than experimental until people figure out a way to maintain earth gravity levels throughout. Given the way we're going, I don't think that's going to happen before our high tech interconnected civilization breaks down from all the environmental and economic imbalances we've created to attain that level of civilization.

Unbridled capitalism is turning out to be exactly the disaster that Roosevelt era (both TR and FDR) worked to correct through regulation.

And now we have the disaster capitalism on steroids of Trumpism.

[Hekate]

6. He was part of our university's Arts & Lectures series. Very interesting! I was particularly struck

...by the cognitive effects he suffered on his return, and was still feeling when he spoke to us. He attributed it to (iirc, as this was awhile ago) molecules of iron sleeting through space, straight through the hull, straight through the brains of astronauts. Someone asked about shielding, and he indicated the appropriate shield was a planetary atmosphere.

Ummmm. Now that would give me pause. I hope it was not permanent.

The other thing I recall is more amusing: while living in Zero G, every trace of callous sloughed off his feet, meaning when he returned to Earth gravity it was with baby-soft very tender feet.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Incredible challenge. Scott Kelly is more courageous than ordinary people, by far.

Loved his comparison of returning in the Soviet vehicle to going over Niagara Falls in a flaming barrel.

Hope he will be able to actually bounce back to complete health, as time progresses, and discover whatever he lost has actually be regained.

[hunter]

8. This is Low Earth Orbit, still somewhat protected by Earth's magnetic field.

Beyond that fragile human bodies get chopped up worse by high energy particles.

There's a question at the end of this article, Do you want to see NASA return to the moon and prioritize manned space exploration? and my answer is "Hell, no!"

It's a total waste of resources to send humans to the moon, mars, or anywhere else. I don't think there will ever be a significant presence of natural humans in space beyond low earth orbit. We're just not evolved for it. I'd much rather spend money on autonomous and semi-autonomous space exploration.

Our future in space, if we have one, belongs to our intellectual offspring, beings designed to be comfortable in environments that would immediately kill unprotected natural humans.

If there's to be any mars colonists, they'll be a sort of people who can walk around on the surface naked -- no worries about radiation, temperature, atmospheric pressure, or oxygen. Maybe they'll be mechanical, maybe genetically engineered, or a combination of both.

If we're good parents of these space people, maybe they'll take us along for a ride someday.