As humans travel deeper into space, scientists and doctors are facing a new challenge: keeping astronauts healthy in the stressful environment of outer space.
The effects of radiation, zero gravity, and the isolation that comes with living thousands of miles away from Earth creates risks unlike anything on our home planet.
That's why the United States Navy has its very own program for aerospace medicine. Jason-Flor Sisante, a cerebrovascular scientist, Naval medical officer and recent graduate of the Kansas City University Medical School, is the newest future space doctor to be accepted.
Though his profession is in the medical field, Sisante has always been fascinated by space. He has even spent time as an intern and later as a volunteer educational outreach recruiter for NASA.
Sisante told KCUR's Up To Date that he realized that aerospace medicine was an actual career path back in the late 2000s during a family vacation to Orlando, Florida.
"We decided to take a trip to the Kennedy Space Center, and they were showing the rebooted J.J. Abrams Star Trek series. And it dawned on me," he explained.
The character Dr. McCoy, who serves as a chief medical officer in the iconic science fiction series, inspired Sisante to wonder whether that kind of job could exist in real life.
"So, I did some Googling at the time, and (it was) actually a field, and that really just piqued my interest," he said.
Right now, NASA has a dedicated person on astronaut crews who are in charge of medical care, even if they are not actually a doctor themselves.
"All astronauts get about what I believe is 40 to 60 hours of medical training, just so they could, you know, take care of themselves if the worst shall happen," Sisante explained.
"Now, ever since we moved away from the Gemini and Apollo eras, we have been accepting more citizen scientists into the astronaut corps, and a lot of these citizen scientists are physicians, and so there are there's a good cadre of astronauts right now that are also board certified physicians."
In the future, long missions to Mars will necessitate a doctor to be on board the spacecraft for the "two and a half to four year" trip.
As for whether Sisante would want to participate in such a mission, he told KCUR he "wouldn't mind" doing it.
"I would have to check with the missus," Sisante.
- Jason-Flor Sisante, aspiring space doctor
