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.
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 radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, gravity (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:
Watch Videos
Space Radiation
This hazard of a human mission to Mars is the most difficult to visualize because, well, space radiation is invisible to the human eye. Radiation is not only stealthy, but considered one of the most hazardous aspects of spaceflight.
Isolation and Confinement
Behavioral responses occur among groups of people isolated and confined in a small space over a long period of time. Crews must be carefully chosen, trained, and supported to ensure they can work effectively as a team for months or years in space.
Distance From Earth
Mars is, on average, 140 million miles from Earth. Rather than a three-day lunar trip, astronauts would be leaving our planet for roughly three years. Planning and self-sufficiency will be key to successful deep space missions.
Gravity Fields
On Mars, astronauts would need to live and work in three-eighths of Earth’s gravitational pull for up to two years. Throughout this time, their bodies – muscles, bones, inner ear, and organs – will be adjusting to new gravitational loads.
Hostile/Closed Environments
A spacecraft is not only a home, it’s also a machine. The ecosystem inside a vehicle plays a big role in everyday astronaut life. Important habitability factors include temperature, pressure, lighting, noise, the presence of microbes, and more.
