{"id":518759,"date":"2026-04-08T02:47:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T02:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/518759\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T02:47:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T02:47:10","slug":"the-artemis-ii-crew-is-in-space-for-ten-days-how-will-their-bodies-cope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/518759\/","title":{"rendered":"The Artemis II crew is in space for ten days. How will their bodies cope?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was during a routine dinner aboard the International Space Station \u2014 as routine as dinner can be while orbiting one\u2019s home planet \u2014 that Mike Fincke was suddenly rendered speechless.<\/p>\n

Unable to speak for about 20 minutes yet fully conscious, aware and pain-free, the 50-year-old astronaut\u2019s health episode in January was sufficiently serious for his mission to be cut short and for Nasa to bring him and his crewmates home.<\/p>\n

\"AstronautsMike Fincke and Zena Cardman, part of the SpaceX Crew-11 mission cut short due to Fincke\u2019s health complications<\/p>\n

The incident underscored the precariousness of human life outside Earth\u2019s cradle, where the greatest danger may not be the emergency itself but the inability to get help fast.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re only 250 miles above us on the ISS and as we saw, if we need to evacuate them and have them come home early, it\u2019s a possibility. But we can\u2019t do that for Mars,\u201d said Steven Platts, chief scientist of Nasa\u2019s human research programme (HRP).<\/p>\n

That reality has implications for Nasa\u2019s Artemis campaign, which aims to build a sustained human presence on the moon as a precursor to Mars. Humans were not built to survive off their own planet and deep space<\/a> is a fundamentally more dangerous realm.<\/p>\n

\"AstronautsWiseman, Hansen and Koch show off the food they eat in space last weeknasa\/AFP\/getty images<\/p>\n

The journey home from the ISS takes a few hours. The moon, from where the Artemis II mission is returning after a flyby mission, is a four-day journey. Mars is up to 140 million miles away and takes six to nine months to reach.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor future moon and Mars missions it\u2019s super-critical that we understand the hazards and mitigate them,\u201d Platts said.<\/p>\n

The Artemis II astronauts are generating biological data as part of a shift towards personalised medicine in space, examining immune system changes, hormone levels and metabolism. Saliva-based diagnostics tools, wearable monitors and tissue-chip technology are tracking their health<\/p>\n

Space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, reduced gravity and enclosed or hostile environments are the five key hazards HRP identifies. Stress hormone <\/a>levels are elevated during spaceflight and the immune system altered. Changes in the gravitational environment can affect the bones, muscles and heart, and affect spatial orientation, balance, hand-eye co-ordination and locomotion.<\/p>\n

At the milder end of the hazard scale is space motion sickness. After Artemis II\u2019s crew \u2014 Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen \u2014 reached space on Thursday, Nasa\u2019s flight operations director, Norm Knight, suggested that some might not be feeling their best.<\/p>\n

\"AnKoch uses exercise equipment en route to the moonNASA<\/p>\n

More than 50 per cent of astronauts contracted space sickness, Platts said. \u201cIt\u2019s the first couple of days usually. We call it space adaptation syndrome and it\u2019s nausea, potentially vomiting, they\u2019d feel very congested. You also have this fluid shift when you go up into microgravity, so you have up to a litre and a half of fluid from your lower body that moves up into your chest and into your head.\u201d<\/p>\n

That shift can overpower one\u2019s sense of taste. Platts said: \u201cWe have to give them hot sauce or soy sauce and all these things to add to the food so they can taste it \u2026 If you can\u2019t taste your food you don\u2019t eat as much, then you lose weight, then you lose strength. We don\u2019t want that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crew will demonstrate cardio-pulmonary resuscitation techniques aboard their Orion spacecraft. Wiseman and Glover will also try out medical kit such as the thermometer, blood pressure monitor and stethoscope. All have a workout schedule despite the cramped space.<\/p>\n

Koch\u2019s place on the crew brings added value. \u201cEarly medical research treated women as small men and we all know that that is not true and it\u2019s really important to understand. Data will help us do that,\u201d Platts said.<\/p>\n

Orthostatic hypertension, a blood pressure condition, affects up to 25 per cent of male astronauts, but 80 per cent of women. \u201cAll of our research, all our counter measures, have to be designed to look at both sexes,\u201d Platts said.<\/p>\n

\"ArtemisThe crew\u2019s sleeping bags are lit up inside the craftnasa\/Getty images<\/p>\n

The mission is also investigating how the body responds to partial gravity. Scientists have an understanding of microgravity from three decades of research in Earth orbit and of Earth\u2019s gravity, but the moon\u2019s one-sixth gravity sits somewhere in between. No one yet knows where and the brevity of the visits made by 12 astronauts during the 1969-1972 Apollo missions was too short to tell.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a big debate,\u201d Platts said. \u201cIs one-sixth gravity closer to one G, or to microgravity? We really don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Orion, Koch suspends herself upside down to sleep \u201clike a bat\u201d, Wiseman said. On Earth, scientists are trying to simulate those conditions and more through tilted bed studies, isolation experiments and analogue habitats, where crews live under mission-like constraints.<\/p>\n

The Artemis II crew have private medical conferences and communicate with psychologists from space. \u201cThey can get any kind of support they need and a lot of that is just relying on them to be open and honest and say \u2018my wrist hurts\u2019 or whatever,\u201d Platts said.<\/p>\n

Non-transparency can be devastating to the team dynamic. In 1985, Vladimir Vasyutin, 33, a Soviet cosmonaut, was evacuated from the Salyut-7 space station with an inflammatory disease that it emerged he had hidden for months before the launch. Crewmates who had to leave early with him never forgave him for the cover-up.<\/p>\n

For Fincke, who said his still unspecified episode came \u201cout of the blue\u201d, colleagues sprang into action and administered an ultrasound scan that allowed doctors on the ground to direct treatment. Platts said: \u201cIt\u2019s really important that those teams function well. They rely on each other for their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was during a routine dinner aboard the International Space Station \u2014 as routine as dinner can be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-518759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}