“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, the home of human spaceflight, stationed in Houston, Texas. We bring space right to you! On this podcast, you’ll learn from some of the brightest minds of America’s space agency as they discuss topics in engineering, science, technology and more. You’ll hear firsthand from astronauts what it’s like to launch atop a rocket, live in space and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. And you’ll listen in to the more human side of space as our guests tell stories of behind-the-scenes moments never heard before.

Episode 56 features Dr. Mike Barratt, NASA astronaut, physician and a flight surgeon, who shares his story of living in space. Barratt addresses five hazards of human spaceflight and why these challenges need to be addressed to make deep-space missions successful. This podcast was recorded on May 7 and May 23, 2018.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 56, Dr. Spaceman. I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. So, we bring in the experts here. NASA astronauts, NASA doctors, and sometimes astronaut doctors. And that’s what we’re bringing on today. An astronaut, and a medical doctor. I need to go back to school. Okay, so today we’re talking with Dr. Mike Barratt, who started his career at NASA as a physician and a flight surgeon. He flew to the International Space Station twice. Once on a long duration in 2009, and again in 2011 on Space Shuttle Discovery. He also served as the manager of the human research program that looks at the most prominent health and performance risks associated with human space flight. And to figure out what to do about it and make astronauts safe and healthy as possible. So, today, I talked with Dr. Barratt about the five hazards of human spaceflight. We work with the human research program to identify these hazards. We’re looking at radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, altering gravity, and hostile and closed environments.

To give a broad overview of each of them from a medical doctor/astronaut, who has actually flown in space. So, with no further delay, let’s go lightspeed and jump right ahead to our talk with Dr. Barratt. Enjoy.

[ Music ]

Host:Mike, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today to talk about your story and then, also these hazards.

Mike Barratt:My pleasure.

Host:All right. So, I kind of want to start with just growing up. I know you grew up in Washington state.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, so I grew up in kind of a farming community in southwestern Washington. It was impossibly beautiful; mountains, forests. Not that far from the ocean, and on the Columbia River. And it was just a really good upbringing for so many reasons. But, growing up on the farm, everything broke, and you had to fix it. And you were always doing chores and getting up early in the morning. And part of life that I really didn’t appreciate until I left it and found others couldn’t swing a hammer or turn a screwdriver and realized what an upbringing that was. But fortunately for a small school, we had some very inspiring teachers. Those that were very science and socially minded. And these guys were just incredibly formative in my choice of careers and I guess my lifelong really love of learning.

Host:It was definitely the schooling, then, that really introduced you to the passion in kind of STEM field, then.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, I think so. It was an interesting time because there were possibilities to do things with your hands that our teachers kind of inspired us to do. So, I was building telescopes and I was building little habitats for mice to live underwater in the lake that was next to us, which was probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons. And also, lofting them up in kites. And so, I think that inspiration just causes you to do things that can do. And a lot of us did that. It was just, you know again very formative.

Host:So, how much of that was you playing with sort of equipment and doing kind of these, were you tearing things apart and bringing them back together and that kind of, like that classic kind of engineering thing to do?

Mike Barratt:Yeah, it wasn’t so much that I was tearing things apart to see how they worked, it was really trying to build new things to follow an interest.

Host:Interesting. So, what’s interesting about that is you actually went into zoology when you went to college, right. That was interesting, why zoology.

Mike Barratt:Well, so I think to go upfront a little bit one of the things that characterizes us here in any astronaut office in the Johnson Space Center in general is that we have a lot of broad interests, and we followed a lot of different paths growing up. And the space program puts that all together. So, at various times in my life, I wanted only to be an astronomer and I was building telescopes, including grinding mirrors. Which I’ll never do again, but it was a great experience to do. And marine biology was my passion for several years. And so, I came out of high school with that as a career goal. And the University of Washington at the time, they didn’t actually have a marine biology track per se, but you could do zoology with a marine emphasis. And so, that’s what I did.

Host:Okay. Were you still playing around telescopes, then?

Mike Barratt:Absolutely. There was a lot more light pollution in Seattle than on the farm in southwest Washington. But sure, I mean I kept all these other passions alive and just looked for a way to combine them a guess.

Host:Yeah, now what’s interesting after that, is you know you finding a way to get into this marine biology field, but it was later that you decided to take a turn toward the medical route. What kind of influenced that?

Mike Barratt:Wow. Well, the truth of the story is that I met this cute girl in college who was going to medical school and she had that as her focus since she was in third grade. And so, I decided if I wanted her, I’m going to have to follow her to medical school. I tell you that’s at least half the story. But, as I was going through biology classes and just learning about the human body, anatomy and physiology and thinking about that in light of some of my other passions. which were astronomy, and space, and aviation. I had been through ground school by that time, and marine biology. I started kind of nurturing this interest in what the human is like in all these different environments. And so, it seemed to me that medicine might be a place to combine a lot of my interests. And basically, followed my wife to medical school. By the way, we just celebrated number 37 here recently, so.

Host:Wow, congratulations.

Mike Barratt:It’s been a lot of fun.

Host:All right. So, you followed the cute girl and then locked her down [laughter].

Mike Barratt:Yeah, absolutely.

>1> Very good. All right. So, you’re changing your path a little bit and then, eventually it sounds like you’re finding different pieces of influence that are kind of taking a left turn on your career path. You started with this marine biology, now you’re going into medicine. When did you start seeing aerospace medicine? It sounds like you were a pilot too, so maybe that was part of the influence. But aerospace medicine.

Mike Barratt:Well, to be sure I’d been through ground school.

Host:Oh, ground school, okay.

Mike Barratt:But I couldn’t afford flying lessons.

Host:Oh, I see.

Mike Barratt:But I think life gives us these little seminal events and coincidences and whatnot. And literally, one day while my soon-to-be wife and I were studying for the medical college admission test. We were in the library at the University of Washington at the Medical Sciences Library and I got up to wander around for a study break. And I discovered this journal, which was called “Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine.” And it was just sitting in the journal stacks. I had never heard of the journal. I had never heard of aerospace medicine. It was just very intriguing to me. So, I grabbed one of these and I took it back to my little study carrel and I read it cover to cover. And I had just never seen anything like this that combined all of these things. Atmospheric, science, hyperbaric, hypobaric, diving medicine, altitude medicine. All the extremes were all in one place. And I probably got about as excited about any medical discovery right then and there as I ever have.

So, interestingly I just started to talk to people and obvious there’s no Internet, then. So, you’re finding names and numbers in the phonebook and calling folks and speaking with those who are willing to talk to you, which most of them were. And that’s probably the event that started nurturing that interest in my senior year of college.

Host:What was it about the; you said they were extreme; combining all these extreme elements. What was that? What was the extreme part that was intriguing?

Mike Barratt:Well, you’re basically looking at the medicine of human performance in places we are not optimally designed to be. So, high altitude climbers, or war fighters at high altitude. Divers, how deep can you go? How do we adapt to different atmospheres? Radiation? All these things that induce environmental stresses on people were part and parcel to environments that we’ve chosen to operate in all these places that I mentioned. So, the idea of a discipline, of a medical science that takes a very methodical approach to helping people do this I just thought was amazing. It was about as cutting edge as you could get.

Host:Absolutely is it’s entirely about pushing the boundaries of what the human body can; you’re pushing it all these different, the word you used was extreme, extreme directions. How much you know; can it take this amount of pressure? How high can you go, you know? What are all these environments that you can really test the human body in?

Mike Barratt:Right, absolutely.

Host:So, at what point did you find that NASA was a possibility.

Mike Barratt:Well, I think for a lot of us, growing up where I did when I did, NASA was this amazing entity that was soundly out of reach for most of us. It’s what the brightest and the best and all the cutting-edge people did. But as I got a little bit closer into it. As I got more research done and talked to more and more people, I realized that really the most fascinating aspect of all the environmental medicine out there was space. It was that the microgravity aspect. Potentially, hyper gravity when you’re launching and landing. Radiation. And that just kind of what I wanted to do as I went through medical school. And I think, you have to choose a medical specialty at the end of four years of medical school. And I really still didn’t know enough about aerospace medicine. But what I could tell of the literature was that if I knew pathophysiology well it would prepare me the best if I wanted a career in aerospace medicine. So, I made a deliberate choice to go into internal medicine at Northwestern in Chicago.

Just to learn that. To really learn pathophysiology, learn how the humans adapt to certain illnesses, and how do we keep people healthy. Which is a big focus of internal medicine. And it was during that time that I established some closer ties with the aerospace medicine residency, in particular in Ohio. Ad did finish up my pilot’s license and moonlighting to pay for flying lessons actually. And just gradually, over the years moved closer and closer to it.

Host:Was this whole pilot thing that you were kind of exploring, was it to, as you were kind of researching and learning about the pushing of the human boundaries, was it wanting to really just kind of see it for yourself maybe a little bit.

Mike Barratt:You know, is was partly that. I still kind of thought that it was way above me. But being able to do the medicine aspect of it. I thought I could do. And I thought it would be really, really interesting too. But again, this was a relationship formed over years of talking to people. And the closer I got, the more I realized that perhaps I could get a toehold in here. And I absolutely loved flying. And I think everybody I know that is a pilot is just passionate about being in here and controlling the machine and knowing how we perform up there. So, this was a natural progression.

Host:Yeah, it’s always just kind of described as like a naturally kind of freeing feeling. You feel above everything. Really, truly free. So, you have your residency in internal medicine, now you’re exploring aerospace medicine. And that’s where I think it was immediately after your aerospace residency right you kind of transitioned over to NASA. Through it sounds like talking to those people.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, that’s correct.

Host:So, what were you first doing at NASA?

Mike Barratt:So, when I first came down here, I was employed by a contractor which was Krug Life Sciences, at the time, which is now Wyle, KBRWyle to be precise. But that was at a time when we were still working towards the Space Station Freedom project, which was a Ronald Raegan era, Cold War, massive international project to be done in space. And already by that time, geopolitical influences were having a big effect on the space program and a lot of our careers. So, the Cold War was pretty much coming to a close when I first came here in 1991. And Space Station Freedom was really looked at for its potential contribution, both to science and geopolitical stability. The day I arrived here, which I believe was in May 1991, the house had just passed by one vote to continue Space Station Freedom in a very limited fashion. and you could tell that the support for it was waning. No question about it. And I came down here as a project physician working on the hyperbaric airlock for Space Station Freedom.

And over the course of that year, the Space Station Freedom Project pretty much folded. And we anticipated that, we knew that was going to happen. But there was a lot of misdirection and people were really not sure what was going on. That was a very good year for me though, in that I realized that whatever training I had had, which was 10 years beyond college, by the way, was not really suitable to start being useful immediately. There’s so much specific knowledge you need down here. It was easily a year before I felt that I was useful, that I kind of passed the breakeven point and was contributing more than I was learning. So, in a way that formative year helped me direct myself and helped, at a time that NASA was directing itself, helped us all kind of get on the same page. And so, I became a NASA flight surgeon in 1992, and at that time we were just starting the US Russian Program. And I had always been intrigued by the Russian Space Program ever since the Apollo-Soyuz mission that was done during the Cold War and showed what was possibly as corroboration.

And so, when people came and said who would like to go to Russia, or start working with Russia in Spaceflight? Boy, not too many people raised their hands. But myself, and another younger flight surgeon at the time were just enthralled by the prospect. And we started working really 1992/1993 with the joint US Russian program. And that was probably the biggest influence on the remainder of my career here.

Host:Yeah, so it was kind of your first steps into, or was it actually your first steps into international collaboration, and really travelling?

Mike Barratt:Certainly, for me.

Host:Yeah, so how was that? That introduction into that world?

Mike Barratt:It was amazing for me. It was very intriguing to meet our first Russian specialist, that was in 1992. And I can tell you, Igor Goncharov who I met in 1992. I started a friendship with and I will just tell you that it went a long time and he was at my landing in 2009 as a recovering medical officer. It was just an amazing relationship that we formed. And in 1993, I made my first trip to Russian and was one of the first Americans to be at a Soyuz landing actually at that time. Now, the irony is that we had already started thinking about using the Soyuz as a rescue vehicle from Space Station Freedom. And we had originally said, no, it doesn’t meet our requirements, and the answer was, well go anyway and see what it’s like. And we’ve since then, just formed a tremendous amount of respect for that vehicle. But to be there and to see it. And to be in Star City at a time when it still wasn’t on the maps. It was still kind of the secret city that everybody knew about in this post-Cold War era, was just an amazing enthralling thing.

Host:Yeah. You’re part of something much bigger. You’re part something kind of worldly I guess.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, we didn’t think about that at the time because there were so many things against us. We thought that our program would crash and burn, but we kept working at it pretty hard. And it just formed into something big. So, it was really quite wonderful.

Host:So, through this, you’re checking out the international relations. You’re really checking out all of these vehicles and understanding space flight from the flight surgeon perspective. Now, at what point do you start working with the crew? Because I know that there’s a point here where you start being a crew surgeon as well.

Mike Barratt:Right, so early on, in 1992, we started working with the first Russian cosmonaut, that was Sergei Krikalev, by the way, to fly on a shuttle mission. And so, since I was already forming ties with the Russian program, I became deputy crew surgeon for that mission. Which I think it was STS 60. So, we’ll find out. Ironically commanded by Charlie Bolden. And that’s how I got to know Charlie Bolden pretty well. And we knew that that was the first part of our exchange program. That we were flying Russian cosmonauts on shuttle, we were also going to be flying a US astronaut on the Russian Mir Station, that was Norm Thagard as the first person. And so, my first crew surgeon assignment as deputy on that mission was both an awakening really to what it’s like to care for and feed a crew, and to see them end to end. You’re the last to see them before launch, and pretty much the first to see them after landing. And you’re speaking to them every day. I mean it’s really quite exciting. And it’s an amazing part of a flight surgeon’s life. At the same time, healthy sprinkling of the international aspect of what we were doing, the US Russian.

So, for me, those two experiences developed; started and developed together. And I can’t think of taking care of crews that aren’t international because of that. And really that’s been quite a wonderful aspect of what we did. And so, after that mission, we started gearing up more towards flying Norm Thagard on the Mir Station, and he launched in 1995. So, between those two points, I spent a huge amount of time in Russia. Like, I think over a year getting ready for it, doing rotations over there, doing medical support for training and the field exercises, survival. And learn to get certified as a flight controller in the Russian Flight Control Center.

Host:Wow, really expanding your skills kind of all over the place. You know, we’re starting, I’m thinking back to where we started with your interest in marine biology, and now you’re going through all these different medicine operations, you’re looking at the vehicle itself. You’re kind of all over the place, this is quite fascinating to have such a broad perspective of things.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, well we were young and crazy. There were, all a team of us actually that included my partner, David Ward, who’s also a young flight surgeon interest in Russia. Peggy Whitson who in charge of the science aspect of our joint US Russian program and I was more the med ops lead. And John McBrian, who’s a legend around here, just a logistics person, well known to the international committee. And we had this small team that just figured that everything would work out and we just kept busting chops to make it all happen. And lo and behold, it did.

Host:All right. Was it this, y our introduction to this kind of broader world and an understanding is that you really realized that astronaut was actually on the table?

Mike Barratt:Actually, it was probably even later than that.

Host:Really?

Mike Barratt:We flew the first mission, and it went very well. Not without a hitch, but it went very well. Of a US astronaut in the Mir Station. And the more I worked with Russia, the more I worked with long-duration, the more I realized that in the big picture of space flight, of exploration, of human expansion if you will. Long-duration flight is how we’re going to get somewhere. And in some ways, it was much more intriguing to me than the short duration shuttle flights that we were doing. Now, these were fantastic, make no mistake. These were short, and dense, and science packed, and very high profile. It looked like people were having a lot of fun. But the kind of the brute force reality of how the human adapts to weightlessness over months, of longer periods of times, commensurate with a deep space crew’s phase to Mars, for instance. That’s what really started to intrigue me. So, it was a combination of that and my role as an educator, if you will. Teaching the astronauts what their body is going to do in space.

So, in some ways, I kind of felt a little bit like a dork saying you know this is what’s going to happen to your body in space, but I’ve never been there so trust me. This is just what we know based on best available information and best stories we get from you guys. So, I realized that to fulfill my ultimate dream of understanding space medicine, I would really have to go there myself. So, I put my hat in the ring first for the 1998 selection. And I was massively busy at the time. And really just put that in very quickly. And I did interview at that time. I did not day get in. But I wasn’t dissuaded and just kept it in there. I still didn’t have any inkling that I would get accepted, that still seemed quite a bit out of reach to me. But that in the year 2000, well lo and behold, I got picked.

Host:Wow. All right, so that must have been quite an achievement for you to put it in a second time and finally get that call.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, well, there were certainly people got on their first time. And people who got in after six times. And so, I felt incredibly lucky, no question about it.

Host:So, going through the training, and we’ve talked about astronaut training a lot on this podcast. But, you know, a lot from you have a different perspective, being a flight surgeon first and understanding how the human body reacts and what you’re really training for, especially from a human research sort of perspective. What was your perspective as a flight surgeon turned astronaut, as you were going through the training, kind of maybe you had a different perspective than maybe other astronauts in your same class too.

Mike Barratt:Well, sure everybody comes with sets of perspectives.

Host:Sure.

Mike Barratt:There’s no question, based on their experience and their impressions. I will tell you that I missed my old job tremendously.

Host:Oh, really?

Mike Barratt:For the first few years. Don’t get me wrong, it was exciting to be in the astronaut office and I had an amazing class. The 17-member class of 2000. Best class ever, in fact. But wow. I was gearing up to get the medical system going for the ISS, which launched the first crew that same year. And so, after years and years of work and anticipation, and putting this all together, knowing the crews. Working with them in Russia. The US and the Russian crews and other international folks. All of a sudden, right on the cusp of launch I’m yanked away into the astronaut office. So, that was not easy. I will be very upfront about that. But, yes indeed I had a different perspective because I knew a little bit more about how the human performs. And I knew Russia. And I knew Russian. And there were a lot of aspects of the program that were very familiar to me. However, everybody comes with their own skillsets and deficits. And I’m not an engineer. So, a lot of what you’re learning is systems engineering in Astro 101.

So, we had to learn shuttle systems and station systems. And that there were certainly places where I was at an advantage. Those were not them. And so, certain things I could skip out of class and other things I had to work twice as hard as my classmates.

Host:Yeah, now that’s actually an interesting perspective. Because a lot of astronauts you talk to now, I mean Russian is one of the hardest things to learn. Just because you know, they’ve lived in the engineering time for a long time and getting used to that is maybe a little bit easier than it is for you. But you’ve actually had the Russian training. And so, extra Russian training was just, you know. Yeah, I guess it was a little bit easier of a transition than learning something out of, I guess your field.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, to a point. I think medical people are used to memorizing big reams of information quickly and used to communicating. And I was kind of a language dweeb anyway. So, I thought, yeah, I got this great advantage. I speak Russian. Well, that was an advantage for about 400 milliseconds when we started learning all the other stuff. The engineering and whatnot. Obviously, I did not have the advantage. So, we balanced each other out I think, quite well.

Host:Yeah, now you’re going through the training and then you finally launch to the International Space Station. Your first mission is on a Soyuz and it’s a long-duration mission. It’s one of the expeditions you were talking about. Where you’re up on the station for a long time. Now being a flight surgeon turned astronaut, what was that experience like for you?

Mike Barratt:Well, that was in 2009. I’ll preface that by saying I had actually finished and released the first edition of a textbook on space medicine the year before I launched in 2008. So, this is “Principles of Clinical Medicine for Spaceflight.” It’s not a “New York Times” Bestseller. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. But it did the best we could at the time to put a standard of care together for space medicine. And I had some very talented authors who are you know cutting-edge in the research and the practice of their time. And so, I launched with a lot of anticipation, thinking did I get this all right. What’s it really going to be like when I get up there? What’s the personal experience going to be like? And maybe 6.5 months later into flight I could say I got about 80% right. About 85% right. And knowing that there’s a big chasm between the book learning, which you may see realized and the personal experience. Which is often quite a bit more visceral and personal than you can describe in the book.

So, I was going up there with a naturalist’s eye. Trying to look at myself and look at others to see what adaptation was really like. And so, I think partly there were days where I thought, yeah, we got this right. And pats on our backs and we’re going to make this. And then there were other days where, boy we sure didn’t see that coming. We had no idea.

Host:Yeah, now 20% that’s a decent chunk. Now, living it, there’s all these things that you can anticipate, and research, and find out. But once you live it, it kind of surprises you. What were some of the things that really kind of, what was that 20%? That 20% that really surprised you?

Mike Barratt:Well, one thing right off was how well we adapt to be three-dimensional creatures. We have known that we don’t understand how the balance system, neuro vestibular organs and other parts of your body that determine your sense of position, your sense of motion control, mass handling. We knew that we didn’t really understand the mechanisms of that adaptation. And that we thought that to be a particular hazard that people could potentially get disoriented and cause erroneous commands. Because we’re not aware of our positional since when we’re either docking a vehicle or manning a robotic arm. In reality, over a period of days to weeks, we adapt incredibly well to be three-dimensional. We don’t know how. In fact, you could almost say we don’t know why we can do this. But after a period of a few weeks, and I think it takes about six weeks for a first-time flyer. We enter this stage of what my friend Shannon Lucid coned deep adaptation. Whereby you go into a module that’s clocked differently and you can immediately change your reference frame.

Or, you find people that just move upside down in a module and take their reference frame with them and are incredibly comfortable with this new three-dimensional environment or can manage things in three dimensions. You don’t just put something down on the table, it will float away. But you’re always mindful of where that thing is in three dimensions. There’s many other aspects to that, but we adapt quite amazingly to three dimensions, much more deeply than I would have thought possible. But really, the bit thing was, when I was flying, we kind of started breaking the story on a new entity, which has been called many things, vision impairment and cranial pressure, and now more recently spaceflight associated neuro ocular syndrome. But it was during our mission, myself, and one of my crewmates who’s also a physician Bob Thirsk, noticed that our near visual acuity was decreasing, deteriorating and we needed stronger magnification to read our checklists. And we heard stories of this before. We knew that we often had to fly glasses of stronger magnification for people.

We just didn’t know why. In fact, we call them anticipatory glasses, but we didn’t know why. So, we got out the old ophthalmoscope, which is this little item that helps you see the back of someone’s retina. And said, are we not physicians after all? Let’s take a look at each other. And lo and behold, it looked like there was a little bit of swelling of the optic disc for both of us. And we did some other tests onboard. And our ground crew fast-tracked some other equipment to us, high resolution imagery of the retina actually was what we really needed, and they gave us a little camera to do that within six weeks, which is a record. And we started unwrapping the whole constellation of findings that go with this syndrome that was really not described until that time. So, while we’re up there, we’re finding these findings like flattening of the globe of the eye, which changes your focus, which is a lot of why our near vision was deteriorating. We found swelling of the optic nerve sheath. The coating around the optic nerve. We found changes in the retina and little bits of swelling of the optic disc.

And these are big things. These are huge things. And the question is, is this Bob and Mike and something that’s going on with them? Or is this something that we’ve missed for all these years and now we have the tools to see it/ Well, as it turns out it’s the latter. And when you think about it, this is such a large thing that’s no doubt a manifestation of adapting to zero gravity that we just were seeing for the first time. What else is out there that we’re missing? This is a big thing. It effects very crucial parts of a person’s anatomy. And what else are we missing that we just haven’t had the tools to find? So, it was both a discovery and a realization that there’s still much more to learn. So, I think when I landed, I probably landed with even a bigger gap in the space medical knowledge than what I thought after maybe the first half of the mission that I was there.

Host:Yeah, more questions than answers. Kind of opens up this whole idea of yeah, right what else is happening?

Mike Barratt:Right, and by the way, that has been our second largest risk now, next to radiation, it’s one of our largest focuses of research since that time.

Host:Is that vision studies?

Mike Barratt:Yeah, absolutely.

Host:Yeah, yeah. No, well just from what you’re describing, I mean there’s a little bit of a positive and a negative right, the three-dimensional space. You’re like what is happening to the vestibular system that’s whether you know you’re oriented, how you do your balance, but it seems like you can navigate better than you originally thought. Upside down. You know where you’re going, you know where things are better than you originally thought. So, I guess that’s a positive thing. But the vision thing, that’s going to be a challenge.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, and by the three-dimensional awareness, you pay for that when you come home. Because you have to adapt the other direction, and what makes you incredibly adaptive in space becomes very maladaptive on day one when you land.

Host:That’s right. And this will be a consideration for space travel too.

Mike Barratt:Absolutely.

Host:Because you’re going to have to realize that you’re going from one environment, which maybe you know zero gravity, microgravity, whatever in transit to a planet. And then, once you land now you have to adapt to the gravity of this new planet. And so, does your balance.

Mike Barratt:Right, absolutely.

Host:So, you had a couple spaceflights and had these realizations. Now during the long-duration spaceflight what was the comparison to your next flight, the short duration?

Mike Barratt:Well, interestingly, I was assigned to the short duration flight before I landed from first long-duration flight. So, I knew I was going to have that data point. And it was a totally different vehicle. So, it was more than just the short duration in space. The launch, and landing, the vibe of that mission, the STS 133 was totally different. Everything was in English. Everything was at home. I didn’t have to travel. And I had this amazing crew of people. And we were asked to be chosen to be that the last space shuttle crew. And we had our pictures taken with Bob Crippen and John Yong as the first space shuttle crew. And we were lining up all that PR aspect of it all. Lo and behold Congress wanted two more shuttle missions after that. Which did a couple things. It meant that we weren’t the last, but it also took all the pressure and spotlight off of us and made for a very relaxed training flow. And the mission was just absolutely fabulous. But I’ll tell you, it was great to launch in the shuttle. It’s a very different vehicle. It was quite an honor, actually, to be on one of those last shuttle missions.

And to have that much room during the two-day chase. It’s quite a bit larger than the Soyuz. And to be back on station again felt like a homecoming to be real honest. It was about a year and a half between when I landed from the long one and when we launched. Not quite a year and a half. But when we opened the hatch, it just felt so familiar. It felt like a homecoming in many ways. I knew my way around. I knew how to get from one handrail to another. I know where you could go fast, where you needed to go slow. Where the food was. I mean the aroma when we opened the hatch was so familiar, it just felt like home and so that was really an amazing aspect of it. And it was busy. It was a two-week dock time period almost. We had a 13-day mission altogether. It’s an interesting perception for some people that the shuttle missions were sprints and the station missions were marathons. I do like to remind people that a marathon means you’re still running. And when we had our visiting shuttle missions, which were two of them when I was on my long flight.

We were actually working longer days than our shuttle counterparts for all sorts of reasons. But, again, you’re very effective when you’ve been up there for months. You can get a lot done in a day. And we’ve all kind of seen that now. And so, I thought about that a lot as a visiting shuttle member, subsequently, that I wanted to be a good guest. And that we wanted to make sure that we were all working together as a team and not be burdensome on the station crew. And I think that was a good realization at the time. But otherwise, it was just fabulous. There were about 12 of us on the station. Very international crew. Russians, US, an Italian, Paolo Nespoli. And a really fabulous mission.

Host:Incredible. So, Mike with that, you actually have some experience in HRP. We were working with HRP now to put together sort of the way they’ve done it, is they’ve categorized hazards of human spaceflight into five different hazards. And I guess they are sort of environmental hazards. They did it based on radiation, isolation, confinement, distance from Earth, altered gravity fields, and then the last one is a hostile or closed environment. And it’s sort of how this effects the human body, which you know, since you’ve actually been in space, but then also worked with HRP. So, let’s just go through those hazards and just sort of expand on that starting with radiation. The radiation environment of space. Why is that a hazard to us?

Mike Barratt:Okay, well, all of these physical hazards kind of account for the physiological changes and the medical changes we see. Each one of them cascades down along several lines, which can cause changes and sometimes harmful effects to us . Radiation is an interesting phenomenon because we sometimes think of space as being filled with radiation. When really, the correct way to think about that is Earth being a hardened shelter to radiation. We just happen to live and grow up in this bunker. Which shields us from what the rest of the universe is bathed in all the time. And so, if we want to be space farers, then radiation is just a fact of life. It’s how we’re going to get somewhere. Radiation can hurt us on many levels. We worry about solar flares, which can cause a large number of particles, charged particles, protons, electrons, alpha particles, which can actually cause acute radiation sickness. And depending on the dose, that can be very mild, like you never notice it. Or can be lethal.

Everything in between. And then we worry about long-term risk of cancer and increased risk of heart disease. And some other things as well. Including effects on the brain. So, there’s many ways that radiation can hurt us, but it is one thing that we absolutely have to solve. And when you think about being a spacefaring civilization, multi-planet, you have to envision yourself moving from one bunker to another. So that what we have on Earth that shields us from a lot of electromagnetic radiation, cosmic rays and solar particles, we will need to re-create the best we can, wherever we’re going. And so, for places without atmospheres and magnetic fields, will depend much more on matter, on say burrowing underground to get some material that shields us from that for most of the time that we live there.

Host:Yeah, you’re literally using, I guess the plant itself to sort of protect you, because there’s especially, you know, you’re talking about Earth being a bunker, you’ve got the magnetic field that’s really protecting you. But on Mars, not so much. On the moon, not so much. Yeah, you’re not going to have that same protection.

Mike Barratt:Right, so unfortunately, the places of interest to us don’t shelter us quite as much as mother Earth. And I think it’s a good point that finding a Goldilocks planet that affords everything they we’re used to as we grew up and developed here is pretty unlikely. So, we’ll be settling for aspects of the fundamental aspects that we live under that we can live with and then try to make up for those that we don’t have. So, radiation shielding might be one of those.

Host:So, let’s start with sort of low Earth orbits, since that’s actually where you did spend some time. What’s the difference between the radiation environment of low Earth orbit, and say around the moon?

Mike Barratt:Well, so in low Earth orbit, you’re above the atmosphere, which is highly protective of radiation. So, you lose that. However, you are still underneath the magnetic fields, the geomagnetic fields that protect our planet are held in place. They’re basically, I think of it as a fire shield. It’s basically charged particles held in a magnetic field that if you get too close to you get burned, but the fire keeps the bad things away. So that the high energy galactic cosmic rays are largely stopped by that geomagnetic field, certainly at the latitudes of the orbits that we fly in. So, that’s very helpful. Once you get out of those magnetic fields, then you are vulnerable to the full force of galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events. In fact, from a human standpoint, we sometimes consider that extra-geomagnetic space. Because it gives you that clear delineation that we are now outside of our little shielded area.

Host:So, what exactly? You said, you know, from small effects to you know lethal effects of radiation. What exactly is radiation doing to the human body?

Mike Barratt:So, when we think about spaceflight radiation, we’re mostly concerned with charged particles, which are electrons, and protons, and some heavier particles that are basically stellar products coming from supernova explosions and energized gas clouds. And the I’ll have to caveat that by saying we also have issues with neutrons. Because those can be formed by interaction of these heavy particles with structure. But these are traveling very fast. And they possess a lot of energy. And so, when they hit something that’s of value to us, such as macromolecules, like DNA, they can actually induce direct damage. And if you get a large enough dose they can actually kill cells. It’s some of those smaller doses that we’re a little bit concerned about. Because they can damage DNA in such a way, in fact many different ways that can potentially cause cancers, cause the lethality from cancers. Many years after your exposures. And there’s a lot of uncertainty about what does and what charged particle will affect, will cause what effect on the human body.

And so, that’s one of our major areas of interest in research.

Host:Do we have radiation studies on the International Space Station?

Mike Barratt:Absolutely. So, just like a radiation technologist or nuclear energy worker, we have a very highly monitored environment. And every crew there were the radiation badge just like any of those people in those industries that I mentioned. We have area detectors which map out the radiation exposure of each area of the Space Station. And we have, furthering our suite of detectors, charged particle directional detectors. Which tell you what the charges are and from what direction they come. And those are the particles that that come in from the sun and from galactic cosmic rays. And of course, we have our ground observations. We composite all those together, along with satellite data as well. And we get the best picture we can of the radiation environment for low Earth orbit.

Host:So, sticking with the International Space Station, moving on to this this next hazard, which is isolation and confinement. This is an interesting one, because you are isolated, and I guess confined on the Space Station. It’s a relatively large structure, especially for a space structure and historically the ones that we’ve actually flown on. But how is you know, how is that an isolated and confined environment and then versus what we can be looking towards for future missions?

Mike Barratt:Well, it’s an interesting question because when we look at the ISS as a space platform it is, by far the largest space platform we’ve ever had. And are likely to have for a long, long time. You know I lived on the Space Station for nearly 200 days in 2009. And really loved living there. There’s no question about it. But I was lucky enough to come back in about a year and a half. And one of my classmates, Steve Bowen was with me. And he is a submariner by training. He was a Navy officer on the Virginia Class attack boats. And he and I flew around the station the first day after we had docked the Shuttle Discovery to it. And I just asked him, if this were one of your submarines, how many people would you have been in a volume this size. And he thought for a minute and said about 130, or so. So, our standard crew size on the station is six. And boy, and we have zero gravity, which means you can use the volume in three dimensions. So, we really have it pretty good up there. So, there’s many aspects that make the station extremely habitable.

Largely its size, it’s big and there’s plenty of space. If you want privacy you can have it. It’s possible to go for hours without seeing another person, if you are very concentrating on an experiment or doing some of your work that just keeps you in one place for long time. The other thing about it though, is that if you look out the window you have this magnificent view of mother Earth. And so, there’s a bigness and there’s a closeness. And not only are you overwhelmed by the proximity of the Earth, you also know that you can get there fairly quickly if you need to. If, God forbid we ever had an emergency on the station, it caught fire and became uninhabitable, we know we can be home within hours. And safely. And that gives you a lot of comfort and it gives you a lot of closeness to Earth. So, it is large, and confined in that you can’t go outside anytime you want. You can’t always just come home anytime you want. But still you have those factors I mentioned that make it very habitable. Now, one other point I like to make is people think we’re a long way away, and they use the term outer space.

Even my mom said I was in outer space for six months. But you know, we’re not that far away. I mean, we’re 240 nautical miles above the surface. Which is about I don’t know, maybe a little more than from here to Austin. And what separates us is not so much that distance barrier, as a speed barrier. A velocity barrier. Because to be in orbit, we’re traveling 17,500 miles an hour. And we had to accelerate to get there. And, conversely, to come home, we have to decelerate. We have to slow down from 17,500 to 0. And so, it’s really not the distance barrier so much as the speed barrier that that separates us. And that will become very different when we break orbit and I head for Mars.

Host:Did you ever feel isolated on the Space Station, or maybe because it’s so close that maybe you felt pretty connected.

Mike Barratt:I think that the only times I ever felt isolated up there was when I knew there were events going on on the ground that I really wanted to be a part of. Mostly family events. Other than that, not really for two reasons. You know, number one, all those habitability factors that I mentioned. But number two, where you are is just so magical. I mean, it captivates you. You are mostly feeling how amazing it is to be where you are and feel what you’re feeling and see what you’re seeing than you are wishing that you were elsewhere.

Host:So, you said, I mean there was only six people on this giant spacecraft, and you had a lot of rooms and you had three dimensions of room too, you know you don’t have to worry about just walking on the floor, you have all surfaces to work with. So, confinement doesn’t really seem like much of an issue from your perspective on the Space Station. Now, if you’re going further out, is there an optimal level of space, I guess that you would need as a human to operate and feel comfortable in the spacecraft for long-duration missions? Especially on a Mars transit that can go somewhere up to nine months in a single spacecraft without really having the ability to go outside for a walk and some fresh air.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s safe to say just holistically that as soon as you break orbit and head for Mars, all those habitability factors start going downhill for all sorts of reasons. Now of the Station is huge. It’s much larger than anything we would be throwing to Mars or any other exploration venue anytime soon. And at the Human Research Program level we actually had a research focus on what we called minimum habitable volume. In other words, what’s the minimum we would need to maintain a crew’s health and performance in some of these deep space conditions. Now, I will point out that there is no maximum habitable volume that we’re trying to determine. So basically, the bigger the better. That’s not our problem. That’s not the end where we have our issues. Obviously to throw a mass to Mars is going to be highly constraining. And so, the ship that goes to Mars, not only will it be truly isolated, you can’t be home in several hours. There is no real-time communication. You don’t have that tremendous view of mother Earth, always there just making you feel connected to your home planet, but your volume will be quite small by necessity.

And coming up with that minimal habitable volume is a bit of a daunting task because there’s a certain amount of subjectivity to it. So, the answer is from a habitability standpoint as big as possible, but that will be severely constrained. And so, what I think we’ll get is a reasonable volume envelope based on the mass we’re able to throw, and the life-support systems we have to accommodate. And with that volume, we’ll try our best to make it as habitable as possible.

Host:Now you have to assume that the astronauts going on that mission to Mars are going to be, you can assume the best of the best. They’re going to be a great crew; well, we can hope [laughter], we can home. And they’re going to be able to get along with each other and I think that’s a big component as well is being confined in a space where mass is a huge constraint, space is a huge constraint for these long-duration missions. Now, you’re not only talking about confined, habitable volume and livable volume, but livable volume with other people.

Mike Barratt:Right, that’s absolutely right. But I think that a couple of things. You will be building expectations of the crew that goes to Mars in a way that will prepare them for this experience. And they’ll know what they’re getting into. Just as we do on Space Station. And NASA has been working very hard to develop training scenarios that build these expeditionary behaviors. One of those is coping with relatively small volumes. And getting along with each other. There’s no question about it that you will have to do some special preparation. But I’m actually fairly confident that that is something we can do. Because that’s been done in history before. Certainly, in Arctic stations and small oceangoing craft, we’ve proven as a species that we can tolerate fairly austere conditions as long as we’re prepared and can get along with it. Now, I think building some degree of privacy is prudent. But I think we can do that in a much smaller space than we have with the ISS.

Host:Okay. Now in terms of isolation, as you get further and further away from Earth so does the time it takes to communicate with Earth. On Space Station, it’s relatively easy, almost instantaneous, really close to it. So, talking with people is easy. As you go further and further away now you have this delay. Is there a certain level of; well we’ll start with this. Is there a certain level of communication that’s needed to maintain the crew’s health? And feeling like they’re still connected and not so far away from Earth?

Mike Barratt:I think that as we move towards exploration of deep space we have to actually look backward not forward for the answers to some of these problems. Now, if you were to look at what I consider one of the greatest voyages of discovery of all time, Captain Cook’s circumnavigation aboard Endeavor, where they were lucky to find a merchant ship or a whaleship that might be going to their homeport, maybe years into their voyage. The crew would draft some letters hand that to them and hold that the ship would make it there safely sometime in the next year. And that letter writing campaign was kind of how things were done. If you were to tell them they, hey look, we’ve got a system where given a few minutes to several hours you can get a message back to Greenwich and then they can communicate with you before the day is out. They wouldn’t have believed you. So basically, what we have is a revolutionary capability compared to the means that supported exploration missions for centuries.

And so, can we do it? Of course, we have. We can do that. Now, we have to crew, and we have to design accordingly. And really move toward more mission autonomy. And we’ve spoiled ourselves in a way, by having such broad bandwidth and real-time communication for the Station. But Station is a laboratory. And it is designed to produce as much science as possible. And that really depends on a real-time communication, whereas heading to Mars and some of the other deep space destination, we’re not in that paradigm. We are really all about exploring and what we need to do in maintaining the ship, and maintaining the crew, and supporting the mission. Most of that responsibility has to really be given to the crew. Certainly, for any immediate responses that need to happen, that all has to be the crew. Just like it used to be.

Host:Yeah, and it blends in nicely to this to his next hazard, which is distance from Earth. And I think, you know, we sort of already talked about that the further you are away, the more delay there is communication. So, communication is one of the factors that goes hand-in-hand with distance. The further out you go, the longer the delay of communication. What are some other factors whenever you’re talking about the human body, the human really being further, and further, father away from Earth.

Mike Barratt:Well, I think there’s that many aspects to that. One I have to kind of think about the medical issues that we know our crews are going to be healthy when we launch them and we’re going to do our best to keep them healthy during flight with countermeasures and diet and medical monitoring. But if an acute event happens, somebody for instance starts clutching their lower abdomen and peeing out blood and we think there’s a kidney stone, you know that could definitely happen. So, in this case, instead of getting a panic call to the ground, asking immediately to talk to the surgeon, what we may get is a report saying, crew member so and so was clutching their abdomen, in very bad pain. We pulled out the ultrasound, we found a stone. We think it’s passing. We’ve given pain meds and they’re resting comfortably. That’s the kind of paradigm that we’re moving to. So, that the crew members, again, are able to respond to an event and handle it the best they can. And give us reports and ask for advice. So, to speak. Consultation, rather than real-time guidance. And that again, is very exploration-oriented.

And if we have a whatever, settlement, or colony, or outpost n on Mars, that’s the paradigm. So, that begins with the exploration transit.

Host:Yeah, there’s a lot of factors that go into that. Now, you have another base of knowledge that you have to have a baseline for whenever you go out. Because instead of calling immediately to the ground like you said and getting the aid, the knowledge of the experts on the ground instantly. Now you have to know sort of what to deal with. And then, that mentality of not working together, the mentality of doing it yourself, and reporting the progress.

Mike Barratt:Which, truth be told, I think even crew members on Station right now, we understand that we’re trying hard to produce science and having more consultation with the ground is really important. But more crew autonomy is recommended by almost every crew who returns from Station. Partly to enhance efficiency and partly for peace of mind. But it is something that crew members really, I think naturally want and will move into quite nicely. I have to think, I had a very small combustion event on the Space Station while I was up there, really almost nonconsequential. But that piece of hardware on the Russian segment started bellowing smoke and overheating. And of course, we were able to immediately call the ground. And they knew about it immediately because of smoke detectors and whatnot. And in this paradigm, it would have been a call back that maybe they would have found out between 8 and 22 minutes later that we have this little combustion event. We pulled the circuit breakers. This is what we found. Everything is fine now. We replaced the part that was burning, and we are in normal ops recovery.

How was your day. So, again that’s kind of the paradigm that we’ll get to with exploration.

Host:Now, as we also go further out, you’re talking about sort of your trajectory to get there is not flexible. So, if you’re going to Mars, that’s it. If you already lit your engines and you’re on your way to mars, that’s it, there’s no turning back if there’s something. So, I’m assuming that that’s part of living in that sort of environment, is knowing that once you’re on your way to Mars, you’re dedicated.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, absolutely. And that, again, is something you prepare crews for ahead of time, that when you light those engines for your trans-Mars injection, there is a state of readiness at all levels. All of your systems and your crew as well. And so, that decision has already been made once those engines fire. And that expectation is burned in. And you know, there’s an understanding that it will be a long trip, and you can’t turn around, and you can’t sightsee, or pull off to the side. But that’s mixed with the anticipation that you’re going to Mars. And that’s pretty cool.

Host:Yeah, that is pretty cool. And magical. It’s really, just to know that you’re on your way is a fantastic step.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, absolutely.

Host:So, you know, based on that let’s go to topic number for, which is altered gravity fields. You’re talking about for the International Space Station microgravity is what you’re really operating. Now, you’ve got sort of a similar environment on the way to Mars, but then you have to adjust on this six to nine-month journey to Mars, you have to adjust from that gravity, now down to Mars’ gravity. And we’ve learned from operating on the International Space Station and doing these long-duration missions that there’s some significant effects on the human body whenever you’re talking about gravity.

Mike Barratt:Right, well there certainly are. So, it’s very interesting because we grew up in one G, one gravity. And our human body is quite amazing in its capacity to handle different orientations to gravity. We lie down, we stand up and we maintain our blood pressure to our brain. We maintain fluid regulation. We’re able to move with different loads. We can run. We can walk. We can swim. We’re really quite amazing. And when you get into zero gravity, the fact that we adapt to zero gravity is also quite amazing. But it’s a little bit easier to go from one G to zero G. Because you’re going from a loaded state to an unloaded state and your balance gets wacked, but you can’t fall because nothing falls up there. It actually becomes a lot more exciting when you come from zero gravity back to 1G. Now, the good news is that of the main problems that result from prolonged exposure to microgravity, and those being musculoskeletal weakness and problems with your heart pumping blood to your head, to your brain.

Which is what we call orthostatic tolerance, the ability to handle that gravitational challenge on your blood column and balance. Two out of those three, we’ve actually made tremendous progress on over these years. Largely because of some of the work we’ve done on the International Space Station. So, because of our new countermeasures; heavy resistive exercise, heavy aerobic exercise, we come down pretty fit and strong. And we have people coming down after six months with negligible bone loss. Sometimes a few percent but certainly we’re in a bracket now that has kind of revolutionized our understanding of maintaining a body in zero gravity. And we have countermeasures for the orthostatic intolerance, which is caused by some of those adaptive changes; low circulating blood volume and lower red blood cells, and the conditions that in zero gravity decondition your neural circuits that let you stand up. We have countermeasures. We can fluid load. We can increase your vascular volume a little bit.

We put on garments that squeeze our legs and keep the fluid where we want. And there’s other things we can do. Interestingly, the balance issues that come from problems with our vestibular organs, which are our balance organs, and many other inputs that your brain integrates to determine where you are and what your motions like, those are things we don’t really have countermeasures to. And interestingly, now we’re worrying quite a bit about those. But I am amazed that we have the luxury of worrying really just about that one, whereas, we used to worry about three pretty handily. So, not to trivialize that. That is a big issue. It’s very difficult to move, to walk to do some of the most simply motor functions after a prolonged period in zero gravity. Now, the good news is that the Mars is less gravity. It’s a little bit more than 1/3 of Earth’s gravity. And the big adaptive phase where it’s very difficult to walk and whatnot, is a fairly short one on the order of a few days.

Certainly, several hours to a few days. And so, we can wait it out, if we’re careful and our landing craft on Mars is big enough to allow us to stick around. And there may be some countermeasures that we can still develop. And if the gravity field is quite a bit less, which one would expect would lessen the implications of it, and certainly would lessen the chances of injury on falling. But one thing is you cannot expect people to land, put on their spacesuit and hike 5 kilometers to the lander that you’ve pre-staged there within the first few hours.

Host:So, there’s going to have to be, built into the mission, and probably the hardware too, some sort of period of adaptation whenever you land on Mars to sort of, and you’re talking about the order of a couple of days it seems like, to sort of get your new land legs, your Mars legs before you actually exit the capsule and start, like you said, put on your spacesuit and start walking around.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, that is a certainty. I think a period of postlanding adaptation is an absolute certainty, which unfortunately drives a larger sized lander. So, that does change your mission architecture. Until, or unless we develop some type of magical countermeasure to those neuro vestibular problems that we are going to need to have. And frankly, I don’t think we have anything definitive on the horizon for that. You cannot load yourself out of this problem, like you can with muscle and bone loss, and even blood loss. You can load those back. But this we can’t. And it’s more than just the post landing period. We’ve also wondered what are the human capabilities for piloting a spacecraft through the atmosphere of Mars, and that is very highly dependent on motor function. And we definitely saw with the shuttle missions, which were short, but we definitely found that even the longer of the shuttle missions, which would have been a little over two weeks in duration, you could correlate with slightly decrease performance on manual landing tasks of the shuttle. And we know that accumulates over time.

So, months and months of spaceflight, that’s probably not a good time you want to have manual control of a spacecraft entering the atmosphere.

Host:Now, let’s say you land on Mars and you’ve gone through this adaptation period. Now your neuro vestibular system is back in balance and you’re able to walk. Is there still, I’m assuming, there might be exercise requirements whenever you’re on the surface of Mars. You still have 1/3 G and you have that constant load, but I’m assuming, you know, regular exercise will still be helpful, I wonder just how much.

Mike Barratt:Well, that’s a great question. So, we exercise in zero gravity, mostly because we know we’re coming home. I mean zero gravity is great, unless you want to come home. And so, keeping bones and muscles, and cardiovascular system conditioned is really all about coming back to your home planet. And it will be the same on Mars that you will absolutely want to exercise. Because you know that eventually you want to come back to 1G, until we end up staying there for a little bit longer. Now, the good news is that 1/3 of a G is quite a bit more than zero. It’s quite a bit more than lunar G. But, the important mechanical aspect of that is that it’s all, we would say linear. It’s basically the center of the planet, there’s a line between that and your belly button, your center of mass, around which you’re going to orient your body, and carry loads, and do your exercises. So basically, it’s like being in familiar territory, you just have to dial up the loads more than you would have on the ground.

So, that if you had a universal gym, you just rack in more weights. More likely we’ll have bags of Martian regolith and we’ll just pack those and lift those. But it’s all along the same vector that we’re used to. So, it vastly simplifies your performance of countermeasures.

Host: Oh, that’s right because instead of bringing weights with you, you use kind of the environment around, because mass is a huge concern just to get there.

Mike Barratt:Right, there’s plenty of mass there, and we often, we think about artificial gravity in long transits in deep space and giving us that rotational centrifugal force which would put back some of those gravitational forces. That’s problematic in a lot of ways, with a spinning structure. But once you get on the surface, you’ve got fractional gravity, but it’s all linear, it’s kind of nature’s way, if you will. So, that gives us something much easier to work with.

Host:Yeah, now how about, just real quick, you know, Mars mission there’s a lot of concerns but we’ve already been to the moon. Now, if you’re talking about a moon, you know, let’s say we have a habitat on the moon and we’re living there for long-duration missions to sort of test out going even further out. Now, what would that look like as compared to you know, adjusting from gravity. Because the trip is much, much shorter.

Mike Barratt:Well, it’s true we’ve already been to the moon, but you could also say that’s similar to say, we’ve already been in low Earth orbit during the Gemini period. And so, we knew that people could handle the environment and that most likely they could go longer. But boy, there was a lot we didn’t know until we start flying people long duration on Skylab and the Russian programs. Mir station and ISS> so, the same will be true with the lunar gravity. We will be able to work quickly there. We’ll be able to walk and explore. We know that because of Apollo. What we don’t know really is what are the long-term effects of 16G and what are the countermeasures that we will in turn need. And we’ll add all sorts of other hazards with that. There will be a vigorous EVA schedule. Which is why we’re there. We’re there to explore. But it will be there in a gravity field with dust, and sharp edges, and tools, and all sorts of things that don’t have to worry about with spacewalks on the Station right now. And so there will be many different and new levels of hazard that we will have to learn very carefully on as we go.

Host:Yeah, and that kind of blends in nicely to this last topic, which is hostile enclosed environments. Now you’re talking about if you’re going out for an EVA, now you’re right. You don’t have the; you have to sure watch out for any micro meteoroid impacts or anything, but now you’re talking about sharp regolith that you have to sort of deal with.

Mike Barratt:Well, you’re talking about that, and frankly, I think your tools may be your biggest enemy. Because you’re going to be carrying tools to sample, or to construct, or to move, to repair, to build. And that will add a whole new dimension to what we’re doing. Now, some of it will be easier just because you’ll be able to keep track of everything. Not everything has to be tethered. And if you put a tool down somewhere in a safe place, it will stay there, and it will stay safe until you pick it up. However, it will add the added risks of potentially falling. Cycling your suit against a surface wear. So, your boots and whatnot. And one of the biggest factors that we’ll have to deal with is dust; lunar dust. And lunar dust is an amazing thing because even in our short-duration experience in the Apollo program, it was a big problem. And I think it will be a bit problem for us as well. Medically, probably the biggest hazard is how much that’s going to interfere with ecosystem valves, fans, anything moving, anything that requires precision fits, which is about everything in spaceflight could potentially be a problem.

And then, airborne lunar dust with the low gravity and the electrostatically charged nature of this dust. It floats and flies. And we’ve done some early toxicity studies. We don’t really know the combination of the factors of lunar dust, toxicity itself, and 1/6^th G and how that effects pulmonary ventilation and how those particles might distribute in the lung. And so, we’re now in kind of a new occupational medicine scenario, very similar to silica and coal dust in mines, were we’re going to have be very careful about monitoring the effects of dust on lung function.

Host:Right and that kind of goes along with this other part of this topic, which is the closed environment part. Humans are very picky compared to rovers that we’ve sent to Mars and to the moon, to really check out that environment, you really don’t need life support systems, now you need to deal with the closed environment systems that provide pressure and oxygen. And you need water. You need food. And you need to bring in all with you. So, that’s, I mean, that’s got to be one of the; probably the toughest things is that whole human element of exploring.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, well the good news is that generic to almost every space exploration venue we think about. So, we do need to develop that. There’s no question. Now, the moon is a good practicing ground for Mars, because there’s certain aspects that make the moon harder for long-term habitation. There’s less gravity, only 1/6 instead of a little over 1/3. There’s no atmosphere whatsoever. Mars is very thin, but it actually does provide some protection from both charged particles and ultraviolet. And boy, there’s a lot of potential learning that will happen on the moon, that if we crack and solve will make things better. We also, there may be water ice on the moon, which would be really great. But we know there’s water in abundance on Mars. If we learn to use what small amounts we find on the moon, it will definitely make us better for in situ resource utilization on Mars.

Host:That’s right. Actually, living off the land. Using your surroundings to.

Mike Barratt:The best we can.

Host:Exactly. Now, I think one of the more interesting things is the fact that now if you have a human presence on Mars and let’s say you have all your equipment, this is sort of I guess part of this topic being the hostile environment. But it’s a new environment. Sure, you could map your surroundings, but ultimately if you’re taking the steps towards this environment, this previously maybe mapped environment. It is going to be new and you don’t really know what you’re going to find.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, absolutely right. What I would like to say though is there is a combination for methods for learning that prep you for exploration. One of those is what we’re doing now. As much as we can, research ahead of time. But on the other hand, you can’t wait until you know everything to go, otherwise you’ll never go. And you have to have a mindset of learn as you go. And that has to be baked into your exploration. So that when you’re sending people up there, you know there’s going to be some uncertainties. What are the effects of 1/6^th g, I mentioned the dust particles and what those are going to do to us. So, you have to have a medical monitoring program baked into your exploration, so that you can find and collect these facts as you need to. Now, all of us need to be naturalist with notebooks when we go explore. And that includes dealing with medical problems as well. Now, you don’t want an obtrusive medical monitoring program. You know, we’re not going to make this a huge science program to start with. But it’s something they did quite magnificently I would say during the Apollo era. That learn as you go mindset.

That basically gave results based on medical monitoring we did with all the crew members. and as a result, we knew a lot coming out of Apollo, to a certain extent because of dedicated science, but to a large extent because of a very logical well applied medical monitoring program. And that is something we’ll absolutely need for going back to the lunar surface.

Host:Yeah, now in terms of the lunar surface, now jumping ahead to Mars, a closed environment. Sure, you know what’s nice about the moon I guess is that it’s relatively close. Not as close as the International Space Station but going back to this whole distance thing. Mars is pretty far, which means not only do your closed environment systems have to work, they have to work reliably. Because they have to work for years really. But, so, how do you make sure that a system can be reliable enough to carry a human for that long?

Mike Barratt:Right. Well, the operative phrase is reliable enough. And that means reliable enough to take the risk and just go do it. And try it. And the way you make sure is to test everything and field test it as much as possible. So that you’re not putting a cutting-edge system out there that doesn’t have years of space miles on it. That’s what you really need. And that’s one thing that the International Space Station is helping us with tremendously. It becomes in a way, I like to think of it as a low Earth orbit wind tunnel. Where you can take systems and really test them and shake them out. And leave them there for crews to use and abuse for months to years at a time and prove that field history. You know, we’re pretty good at developing new systems, and putting cutting-edge technology together into a logical package. But there’s always stuff you don’t know. And you will only find that out when you start using it over time. And that is exactly what we need to do before we send a system to Mars.

Host:I think that’s a perfect place to end it. It’s just the fact that all of this, I mean eventually, you know, journeys to explore the moon on long-duration missions and to Mars to eventually put human boots on Mars. There are hazards. And the hazards we sort of list. But ultimately, once we go and we learn. I mean that’s how you do it. That’s how you do it.

Mike Barratt:Yeah, absolutely right. I think there’s a lot of sentiment that we need to wait until we have everything done, everything together, everything figured out to keep crews healthy and happy on their way to Mars. But if you look at the exploration archives of our civilization, healthy and happy were not big parts of long sea voyages, or Arctic voyages, or anything where information was found, new discoveries were made of value to us. And so, we don’t expect that on our first exploration sorties. And we don’t want to wait for that. Healthy and happy is for the paying passengers that come maybe a generation afterwards once we have a settlement and a colony there. But the we want to get to a point where it’s reliable enough to take the risk and the crew is autonomous enough to handle most of those emergencies. And just realize that nothing is certain, but the benefits and the potential discoveries make it worth the while.

Host:That was great. Mike, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, and sharing your story, and really going through these hazards, especially from your perspective as a space traveler yourself. Really appreciate your time.

Mike Barratt:My pleasure.

[ Music ]

Host:Hey, thanks for sticking around. So, today we talked with Dr. Mike Barratt about his story traveling to the International Space Station and also his view of the five hazards of human spaceflight. That’s radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, altered gravity, and then hostile and closed environments. So, this was sort of a prelude because coming up soon we’re going to actually have episodes that dive deep into these five hazards. Each of them. One episode per hazard. We haven’t recorded them, so if you have any questions, please send them in. Use the hashtag askNASA. And just the make the note that it’s for “Houston, We Have a Podcast,” and we’ll actually put them into those episodes. And answer the questions associated with each of those five hazards. You can also listen to other episodes of “Houston, We Have a Podcast.” We call them episodes just for our sake, but really you don’t really have to listen to them in any particular order. Otherwise, you can check out our NASA podcast, “Gravity Assist” and NASA in the Silicon Valley. You can go to NASA.gov/iss.

That’s the International Space Station website to find out what’s going on on the International Space Station that helps us to identify these five hazards. Otherwise you can go to NASA.gov/HRP, and that’s the Human Research Program site. On social media, International Space Station is on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Again, use the hashtag NASA. Really, send in your questions. And we’re going to put them in these episodes. So, this podcast was recorded on May 7th and May 23rd, 2018. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Lori Abidee [assumed spelling], Brandy Dean, Bill Stafford and Mel Whiting. Thanks again to Dr. Mike Barratt for coming on the show. We’ll be back next week.