An open-source portal about astronaut health will feature among the medical research flying aboard Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first all-civilian flight.
Shift4Payments billionaire founder Jared Isaacman bought four seats aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft for an undisclosed sum, and will be flying no earlier than (NET) Sept. 15 with physician assistant Haley Arceneaux, geoscientist Sian Proctor and data engineer Chris Sembroski.
The flight is scheduled for three days after lifting off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. While a detailed flight timeline isn’t available yet, what is clear is that the flight will focus very closely on human health – which is no surprise given Isaacman is also running the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
“The crew of Inspiration4 is eager to use our mission to help make a better future for those who will launch in the years and decades to come,” Isaacman said in a statement. “We are proud that our flight will help influence all those who will travel after us, and look forward to seeing how this mission will help shape the beginning of a new era for space exploration.”
Much of the crew’s time will be spent gathering environment, biomedical and biological data and samples while in orbit, in partnership with SpaceX, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine, the mission said in an August update.
Collecting health science in space is nothing new; NASA in fact devoted whole shuttle missions to human health and made a practice of collecting data on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts to better understand the stresses of microgravity, radiation and isolation on its crews.
The International Space Station program is also a rich repository of long-term research on crews who have been in space anywhere from a few months to a year, providing data that may be useful to investigators planning moon and Mars missions. (The Moon is especially relevant given that NASA’s Artemis program hopes to send astronauts there by 2024, although NASA’s Inspector General warned this summer that spacesuit development will likely induce delays.)
But what may make Inspiration4 stand apart is its pledge to provide data “through an open data repository funded and overseen by TRISH that can be easily accessed for research purposes,” as the release put it. Such data on professional astronauts often comes years after a flight (when the investigators write their results in peer-reviewed scientific journals) and is anonymized, although from time to time astronauts do disclose medical conditions. A recent example was Mark Vande Hei, who did not undertake a spacewalk in August and said – after NASA’s vague announcement about “a medical issue” – that a pinched nerve caused the delay to his extravehicular activities.
The below is a list of the disclosed research that will be undertaken on this mission, according to a joint TRISH-Weill Cornell release.
- Collect data including movement, heart rate and rhythm, blood oxygen saturation and the human body’s response to cabin and light intensity. As first reported by SpaceExplored, the crew will do so using an Apple Watch. (The cabin data might be useful for SpaceX engineers as they continue to adapt the new Crew Dragon spacecraft for later missions; recall the first crewed mission only took place last year.)
- Use NASA’s Cognition app (which will run on more Apple devices – specifically, iPad mini 4 tablets) to look for changes in behavioural and cognitive performance. This dataset will essentially bring the Inspiration4 crew’s results into a larger pool of information with NASA astronauts, allowing for some interesting research comparisons.
- Use the Butterfly IQ+ ultrasound device running on an iPhone 12 Pro. The experiment will see if artificial intelligence can guide non-medical experts for ultrasound imaging to see how the body changes during spaceflight. Notably, there is a version on board the International Space Station being tested by professional astronauts, which an uncrewed Dragon brought this summer.
- Perform balance and perception tests before flight and immediately after landing, similar to what NASA astronauts have been doing for many years.
- Collect and test blood drops in-flight to examine markers of immune function and inflammation, using a little device called Vertical Flow Immunoassay – this is likely a reference to University of Arizona research discussed in greater detail later in the article.
- A longitudinal study of crew members including numerous types of samples that will be cryogenically frozen and placed into a “biobank” – examples of such types of samples include microbiome, genome, RNA, metabolic, and the “proteome” or set of proteins used by humans. Investigators on this study are planning to replicate several protocols and experiments used during the long-running Twins Study comparing the body of NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (who spent a year in space in 2015-16) and his NASA astronaut twin brother Mark (a veteran shuttle astronaut who had retired by that time).
Additionally, the University of Arizona has announced that it plans to do biomarker testing in-flight to search for changes in stress, inflammation and immunity. They will use Vertical Integrated Flow Assay System Technology (VeriFAST) that can provide measurements down to the molecular level. “The devices have nanoporous membranes printed with arrays of reagents arranged in rows,” the university stated. “When the assessments are completed, the spots in the array change color, providing visual results within minutes.”
There may be other science performed beyond examining the human body, although Inspiration4’s website gives little detail. Inspiration4’s official site says the crew will “conduct experiments designed to expand our knowledge of the universe,” and that Crew Dragon will carry “scientific equipment dedicated to microgravity research and experimentation.”