WASHINGTON — Medical researchers and commercial spaceflight advocates are working to begin a new effort to study the health issues and risks that space travel poses to a more diverse population of private astronauts.
Virgin Galactic is scheduled to perform the latest flight of its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane Jan. 26 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The Galactic 06 mission will carry four customers along with two pilots, a change from earlier flights that flew three customers and one astronaut trainer. The company has not disclosed the identities of those customers.
The Virgin Galactic flights, along with other suborbital flights by Blue Origin and several orbital missions by SpaceX, have allowed dozens of private astronauts to go to space in the last few years. Many of those people would likely have not passed strict medical standards used by NASA and other space agencies for professional astronauts.
Examples include Jon Goodwin, an 80-year-old man who flew on a Virgin Galactic mission last year despite having Parkinson’s disease. Hayley Arceneaux, a member of the Inspiration4 Crew Dragon mission in 2021, is a cancer survivor with a prosthetic leg bone. Actor William Shatner went on a Blue Origin suborbital flight in 2021 at the age of 90, making him the oldest person to go to space.
“There’s going to be more and more and more,” said Jim Bridenstine, former NASA administrator, of such private astronauts in remarks at a two-day workshop this week in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that he helped organize. “When we think about these activities, we’ve got to absolutely keep people safe.”
The concern he and others at the meeting discussed is a lack of information about health risks to populations much broader than professional astronauts. Commercial spaceflight in the United States operates on an “informed consent” regime where prospective private astronauts are informed of the various risks and then consent to accept…
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