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Wired has a story about the challenging (and largely unexplored) area of surgery and traumatic injury in space.
Currently shorter term, near earth missions concentrate training on how to stabilize and restrain injured astronauts, and then contact a specialist on the ground and work out a plan to get them home for treatment.
However as longer term Moon and Mars missions become a more realistic prospect this is an area where the need to deal with major injuries in space, and handle the communications lag to specialist support, introduce a new set of problems.
Over decades of Apollo, Mir, Skylab, space shuttle, and International Space Station missions, astronauts have had medical concerns and problems—and, of course, there have been deadly catastrophes. But no astronaut has ever had a major injury or needed surgery in space. If humans ever again venture past low Earth orbit and outward toward, say, Mars, someone is going to get hurt. A 2002 ESA report put the chances of a bad medical problem on a space mission at 0.06 per person-year. As Komorowski wrote in a journal article last year, for a crew of six on a 900-day mission to Mars, that's pretty much one major emergency all but guaranteed.
The article also contains a link to an article on the ISS medical equipment, obtained by Vice through a Freedom Of Information request.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 20 2017, @05:59PM (4 children)
"for a crew of six on a 900-day mission to Mars, that’s pretty much one major emergency all but guaranteed."
It seems to me that most volunteers/candidates for a Mars flight are mature people. Additionally, many of them are not aerospace experienced. Throwing a bunch of aging people who have NOT spent their lives testing the limits of aerospace will probably yeild different statistics than the historically typical crew.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday August 20 2017, @06:44PM
*All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy*
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KiloByte on Sunday August 20 2017, @07:35PM (2 children)
On the other hand, there's no way they won't send at least one full medical doctor. It's (relatively) easy to teach a person how to operate a spaceship, while it takes many years to learn medicine. Obviously, at least one remaining person will also have paramedic training, while every single person will know the basics.
And given how interesting space biology is, two doctors in a six-person crew isn't out of question. Geology or astronomy could be done well with automated rovers, there's no way to research how human body behaves outside of LEO other than to actually send human bodies outside LEO.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday August 21 2017, @04:18AM (1 child)
Don't forget the botanist, someone has to grow the potatoes.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Tuesday August 22 2017, @11:56AM
Phew, thanks $DEITY. I was afraid we'll have to drink some shit distilled from algae or other junk.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.