The teamwork that astronauts perform during remote missions – especially as the Canadian Space Agency targets the Moon – will likely resemble the Arctic experience of astronaut David Saint-Jacques.
Speaking at the virtual Canadian Space Exploration Workshop on Tuesday (June 14), Saint-Jacques recounted his time as a medical doctor and co-chief of medicine at Inuulitsivik Health Centre in Puvirnituq, Nunavik, an Inuit community on Hudson Bay.
Saint-Jacques put the ongoing Canadian Space Agency Deep Space Healthcare Challenge in perspective, talking about how it will help remote communities as well as discussing the changes that Moon travel will force upon astronauts more used to having a quick ride home.
“I was invited to talk today because of the perspective that I’ve drawn” from his experience in Hudson Bay, Saint-Jacques told attendees. Aside from the treeless region looking somewhat like the Moon in the winter, the bigger parallel he found was how he worked with Inuit first responders, bush pilots and local nurses in delivering family medicine.
“Health care is us,” he said of the team’s perspective in helping the community, “and the sense of responsibility and teamwork really carried me through later on in life.”
Saint-Jacques next shared some insights from his seven months in space during Expeditions 59 and 60 in 2018-19. The International Space Station, despite being a large complex, is still “in the middle of absolutely nowhere” as it is separated from Earth by 400 kilometers.
Being in this remote environment is the spur for Canada performing numerous health investigations during Saint-Jacques’ mission, and why the CSA is continuing to pursue medical matters in initiatives like the Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, which is ongoing after 20 semi-finalists were selected in May.
“Going to space is cool, and you float around, but it’s basically very, very bad for your body,” Saint-Jacques said. “There isn’t a system in your body that isn’t negatively affected by spaceflight. But the diseases that develop are conditions … in otherwise very healthy individuals. So we’re perfect guinea pigs for medical research.”
That side of the dangers of spaceflight is often emphasized among astronauts, but Saint-Jacques pointed as well to a lesser-known but still important risk: astronauts are in an “operator job” where they are exposed to radiation, and to “nasty chemicals” during experiments. This means that basic “health maintenance” like exercise is challenging, he said, and that the space station partners require “extra level requirements” for all components on station to keep astronauts safe.
Working in such remote circumstances with a small team also has psychological risk, which is mitigated through regular calls with family, time off in space, and other mental engagement opportunities for astronauts. “It’s basically a big trip with friends, but the responsibility … is conflict resolution management [for] personality and all that,” Saint-Jacques said. “There’s a lot of training that goes on to make sure that we stay at the top of our mental health.”
Saint-Jacques noted, however, that the Artemis missions to the Moon are going to be forcing a change in the astronaut corps. The Moon’s sheer distance from Earth is enough that the previous task of “selecting super-healthy people and asking them to be careful is not going to work.” Instead, he said, astronauts will need to have more advanced medical training to deal with the inevitable problems that arise from working in remote circumstances.
That’s where the semi-finalists of the Deep Space Healthcare Challenge might be able to help astronauts, as the selected experiments are largely providing artificial intelligence-levered experiments to do diagnoses of astronauts through tools like ultrasound, biomarker detection for cancer and heart tracking the fluid found between cells.
While Saint-Jacques did not allude directly to these experiments, he said the key for Moon and future Mars exploration will be more autonomy for crews and continued development in computer capabilities. Then these technologies will be repurposed for remote environments like the Hudson Bay community in which Saint-Jacques once worked.
“Hopefully, the dream of going to Mars and keeping astronaut’s health will spur a revolution in healthcare,” Saint-Jacques said. Speaking to the power of remote technologies, he added, “we’re all ready to bring health care to the people, and stop doing the other way around – bringing people to healthcare.”