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tonyPick writes:

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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