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5 Hazards of Human Spaceflight

Astronauts encounter five hazards as they journey through space. Recognizing these hazards allows NASA to seek ways that overcome the challenges of sending humans to the space station, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

NASA Moon to Mars Selfie

About the Five Hazards

A human journey to Mars, at first glance, offers an inexhaustible amount of complexities. To bring such a mission to the Red Planet from fiction to fact, NASA’s Human Research Program has pinpointed five hazards that astronauts will encounter on their journeys. These include space radiationisolation and confinementdistance from Earthgravity (and the lack of it), and closed or hostile environments. Scroll down to learn details involving each hazard.

Pooling the challenges of human spaceflight into categories allows for an organized effort to overcome the obstacles that lay before such a mission. However, these hazards do not stand alone. They can feed off one another and exacerbate effects on the human body, which are being studied using ground-based analogs, laboratories, and the International Space Station. These locations all serve as test beds to evaluate human performance, as well as the effectiveness of strategies that could keep astronauts safe and healthy in space.

Through meticulous research, NASA is gaining valuable insight into how the human body and mind might respond during extended forays into space. The resulting data, technology, and methods serve as a knowledge bank from which scientists can extrapolate to multi-year interplanetary missions.

Explore the five hazards of human spaceflight below:

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