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posted by martyb on Sunday August 20 2017, @05:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the What's-up,-Doc? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 20 2017, @06:11PM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 20 2017, @06:11PM (#556734) Journal

    I had a shipmate who developed kidney stones at sea. This wouldn't have been a really big deal in calm weather - just radio the carrier, the carrier sends a helicopter, and the patient is medevacced to the carrier, and the care of real doctors equipped with state of the art equipment. Unfortunately for Bill, the weather was far to rough for helicopters, which meant that boats were out of the question. The man laid in his bunk for days, suffering, before he could be medevacced.

    Submarines? An attack boat probably has almost all the same options our destroyer had. Boomers, I'm not sure about. The cold war is over, so they may not risk a crewman's life to keep their location secret. Or, they might.

    We can be pretty sure that there will be lives lost, simply because we don't know how to treat injuries in space. Eventually, we'll figure that stuff out, but it's going to take time. If fuel is allocated for potential emergencies, the crew can make some pseudo-gravity with thrust. Maybe enough to deal with the emergency, anyway.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 20 2017, @06:18PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 20 2017, @06:18PM (#556735) Journal

    We could create a billion dollar robotic medical system capable of carrying out various surgeries remotely.

    One benefit of being on the ISS rather than a submarine is that your health is very closely monitored [nasa.gov], since investigating the effects of microgravity on human health is one of the main goals of the ISS. So they might be able to catch problems earlier and have more time to get the astronaut back to Earth.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @07:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @07:19PM (#556760)

    Boomers always go on patrol with a medical officer aboard. Submerged appendectomies and trauma treatment are not uncommon.

    The biggest medical threat to submariners is STDs.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 21 2017, @02:58AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 21 2017, @02:58AM (#556853) Journal

      You make a claim that almost sounds like it might be correct. Then, you make another claim about sexual proclivities that you almost certainly know nothing about. Go away, troll. Despite congress' progressive attempts, I'm not believing that the crews of boomers, or any other ships, are all flaming faggots. At most, gays only make up about 2% of the population, and the military has always reflected the demographics of the US population at large. Well, except for the very rich. Medium rich become officers, and very rich sit back and laugh, using the military as pawns on their big chess board.