We Don't Know How Deadly It Is To Spend Lots of Time on the Moon. NASA Can't Wait To Find Out.
An interview with NASA's Human Research Program's head scientist shows a man who has to worry about an incredible assortment of ways for humans to die in the least hospitable environment known to man.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. The sight of the night sky still gives me chills and you’re damn right I stood on the street wearing dorky glasses to stare at the recent eclipse. Scuba diving is the closest I’ve been to flying - I imagine the microgravity of space must be dozens of times more thrilling.
And yet commercial space travel holds no attraction for me. In fact, it scares the living shit out of me. I believe in my lifetime tourists will go to the moon. The article below explains why I will never, ever be one of them.
When the Artemis III mission carries American astronauts back to the moon’s surface, they will be in almost constant mortal danger.
Spacecraft mishaps aside - and let’s remember that getting strapped to thousands of pounds of high explosive and being shot into an environment with no air remains an incredibly precarious situation within which one can find oneself - a legion of NASA support staff have compiled a list of things that can kill the crew of four.
To start, there’s the moon dust itself. It sounds like a whimsical substance, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that breathing it in could cause the lunar version of a coal miner’s black lung. If that sounds like a strange thing to worry about, remember that Artemis III - currently scheduled to lift off some time in late 2026 - is not only the first manned mission to the moon in over half a century, but also NASA’s first step towards establishing long-term bases on the surface. Two Artemis astronauts will spend just under a week living on the moon: those that follow will spend considerably longer up there. A little moon shmutz getting into the bases and ships is not a far fetched proposition.
Respiratory ailments from breathing in alien substances are just one concern. Here’s a few others: The weightlessness of space can lead to reduced bone density - what happens if a femur or ulna breaks? What if astronauts aren’t doing enough cardio? Space has been found to change the chemical makeup of urine - what if that causes some poor astronaut to develop painful kidney stones?
These are the possibilities that can keep Steven Platt up at night. As the head scientist for NASA’s Human Research Program, he’s dedicated his life to thinking of everything that can go wrong in a human body when it spends time in the harshest, least welcoming environments known to man.
While humans have been going to space for over 60 years, there is still much we don’t know, especially as the goals have begun to get even more ambitious, Platt told The Messenger. While NASA has a good handle on the health challenges faced by astronauts aboard the International Space Station, “As you look at Moon and Mars, each one of those missions has, different things about it, whether it's the gravity on the moon versus Mars, or what the radiation exposure might be like, things like that,” he said. “So, those levels of risk shift.”
What complicates things even more is that while much is known about how the human body reacts to a period of months in the microgravity of the ISS in low orbit around Earth, little of that knowledge is applicable to the moon or, in the next few decades, Mars.
“So we have essentially one g, which we're all born and grow up in,” said Platt. “And then we have microgravity, which isn't like zero, but you know, it's zero-ish, and then lunar and Martian in between. The thing is we don't know the shape of that curve. The changes in the human body are rarely linear.”
To that end, Platt’s team has identified 22 major health threats, but they’re not the only ones thinking of these problems. India, China, Russia and Japan have all recently attempted to land probes on the surface, a preclude to manned missions. In a paper published in November, Marianno Bizzarri, a professor at the University of La Sapienza’s Department of Experimental Medicine in Rome laid out the daunting challenges ahead. Living in microgravity, where astronauts are exposed to a fraction of the gravity the human body has evolved to thrive in, can lead to everything from reduced bone density and muscle mass to issues with blood circulation. With no atmosphere to protect them, the astronauts can be bombarded with cancer-causing radiation - a threat that rises during unpredictable events like solar flares. Even something as mundane as a regular sleep schedule can be disrupted in space.
“The cumulative effects of these factors when considering prolonged exposure, are for now, largely unexplored,” Bizzarri told me in an interview.
In his paper, Bizzarri makes a few suggestions to help bring the risk level down. Some are common sense - developing better telehealth protocols so that doctors back home can talk astronauts through any health emergencies in space - while others, like artificial gravity, are in the realm of sci-fi. (For his part, Platt said that NASA has toyed around with some possible artificial gravity technology akin to what’s seen in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but “you can imagine the physics of getting a vehicle across space while it's rotating, so it ends up having to do a corkscrew type of motion through space, just the fatigue on the metals alone is daunting.”)
Going to the moon isn’t completely unexplored territory, but when the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon in the 60s and 70s, they stayed there for less than a day. By the end of the program, Apollo spacemen were spending up to 73 hours on the surface during their missions. Artemis III astronauts are expected to remain there for twice that and future missions could last much longer as permanent bases become a reality.
“Iit was a long time ago,” Platt acknowledged, but NASA was still able to record heart rates and other vital signs that can give a baseline expectation of how bodily systems will respond to the lunar environment. The Apollo missions have also provided some less obvious data: it’s impossible to totally recreate the moon’s environment on Earth, but video of how Neil Armstrong and his colleagues walked while up there has allowed the development of devices to simulate how they moved.
“We can try and replicate that gait and figure out the best ways of having the crew move,” said Platt. “That's important for suit design too, because you want to put the weight in the right spots.”
The number of things that can go wrong, healthwise, in space is endless. There are even signs that being up there too long may cause some very sensitive problems for male astronauts when they return to Earth.
“We’ve been able to learn a lot from the earlier missions, but this time because we're going to be there longer, and we're gonna have more people and a more diverse group of people on the surface of the moon,” said Platt. “We're really looking forward to the new research we're gonna be able to do.”