NASA

Doctors’ Rx for NASA: more human spaceflight

NASA issued a press release yesterday to announce that the American Medical Association (AMA) had unanimously passed a resolution at its annual meeting in Chicago last month supporting human space exploration. The NASA release is short on details, other than to say that the resolution “also reaffirmed support for medical research on the space shuttle and International Space Station.” (Well, good luck with that, especially on the shuttle.) The resolution in question appears to be this one (Word format) that primarily plays up the medical research that has been performed in space to date, the medical spinoffs from spaceflight, and previous AMA support for spaceflight, and adds that the AMA has yet to make a formal statement regarding the Vision after more than three years. The resolution, which came from the AMA’s Medical Student Section, calls on the organization to “reaffirm Policy H-45.994 which supports the continuation of medical research on manned space flight and the international space station” and “support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s new commitment for manned space exploration of the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies for the benefits to medicine and advances in patient care.”

8 comments to Doctors’ Rx for NASA: more human spaceflight

  • Kirby Runyon

    After reading the AMA resolution, it’s clear people are shooting themselves in the foot (almost literally) when they oppose the VSE.

  • anonymous

    It’s a goofy argument. There’s no doubt that a good number of medical advances, especially in the medical devices field, have spun out of the biomedical research and systems NASA develops to support its astronauts. But we can efficiently and effectively support medical advances without tacking the enormous costs of human space flight. It’s silly to argue that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on STS or ISS are justified by medical spin-offs. If medical advances are what we’re really after, then those dollars are much better leveraged by simply doing more and better biomedical research, not by building and flying rockets and pressure vessels.

    Who goes to an aerospace engineer to get a prescription for their sore throat?

    Ugh…

  • Adrasteia

    The hundred billion dollar spending bill for human spaceflight merely gives the researchers a vehicle to tack on their million dollar biomedical research grant to sneak it through a clueless and scientifically ignorant congress.

  • Kirby Runyon

    “Anonymous'” flaw in reasoning is that he doesn’t realize that spaceflight gives a direction to medical (among other fields) research. In other words, without the unique venue of spaceflight some people arguably wouldn’t even think of some research areas to pursue–they (and we) would be paralyzed be a failure of imagination. An example: would the SSME-derived heart pump have been realized without the archetype SSME? Spaceflight provides a unique and imaginative framework on which to “hang” different research areas.

  • anonymous.space

    “‘Anonymous’ flaw in reasoning is that he doesn’t realize that spaceflight gives a direction to medical (among other fields) research… An example: would the SSME-derived heart pump have been realized without the archetype SSME?”

    The example doesn’t support the argument. There was no “direction” to create medical benefits when the SSME was designed and developed. It was an accidental happenstance that some of SSME plumbing was applicable to heart pumps.

    If we want a program to design a better heart pump, then let’s fund a program to design a better heart pump. There’s no reason to go through the enormous costs and effort associated with building a new rocket engine that may or may not have any relevance to heart pumps.

    “In other words, without the unique venue of spaceflight some people arguably wouldn’t even think of some research areas to pursue–they (and we) would be paralyzed be a failure of imagination.”

    I buy into this argument at some level — that the challenges of human space flight stretch biomedical technologies in ways that pure medical research do not. But I buy into at the margin — that maybe a few extra taxpayer dollars should be spent on the challenges of human space flight because of their biomedical spin-offs. I certainly don’t buy into this argument at the multi-hundred billion dollar level. We can’t justify the huge costs of our human space flight program based on accidental biomedical spin-offs (or any other spin-off for that matter).

    If the real policy objective is to create new biomedical technologies, then those human space flight dollars are much more effectively and efficiently spent on directly developing new biomedical technologies.

    FWIW…

  • Paul Dietz

    An example: would the SSME-derived heart pump have been realized without the archetype SSME?”

    Very likely yes, or something like it. The pumps in the SSME are not radically new technology completely unlike anything else that already existed; turbine pumps have been around for ages. Most technology doesn’t have unique antecedents, and arises multiple times when demand appears, and people have been working on cardiac assist devices for decades.

  • Kirby Runyon

    Anonymous.space – You misunderstood me; perhaps “direction” wasn’t the right word. My gist is summed up in “without the unique venue of spaceflight some people arguably wouldn’t even think of some research areas to pursue–they (and we) would be paralyzed be a failure of imagination.”

    “I certainly don’t buy into this argument at the multi-hundred billion dollar level.” That’s faulty reasoning. If you look at any program for a long enough period of time it’ll reach into the multi-hundred billion dollar level eventually.

    In addition to the spinoffs, there are the “it’s in our nature to explore yada yada” arguments I admit I buy into.

    Taken together, I think $17.6 billion PER YEAR is very reasonable for the United States.

  • anonymous

    “without the unique venue of spaceflight some people arguably wouldn’t even think of some research areas to pursue–they (and we) would be paralyzed be a failure of imagination”

    This is a gross overstatement. There’s a huge difference between not realizing a couple potentially interesting lines of inquiry in a research program and being “paralyzed by a failure of imagination”. If NASA disappeared tomorrow, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. medical devices industry would hardly suffer from “paralyzed… imagination”.

    “That’s faulty reasoning. If you look at any program for a long enough period of time it’ll reach into the multi-hundred billion dollar level eventually.”

    What does the timespan of the investment have to do with the argument? Space Shuttle cost something in the low tens of billions to develop and has cost $4-5 billion per year every year to operate since 1982. How can a marginal improvement in a heart pump, or any other medical device, justify the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Space Shuttle?

    “In addition to the spinoffs, there are the “it’s in our nature to explore yada yada” arguments I admit I buy into.

    Taken together, I think $17.6 billion PER YEAR is very reasonable for the United States.”

    That’s an entirely different argument. I’m just arguing that we can’t justify the enormous costs of NASA’s human space flight program on the basis of their medical spinoffs. If we want to argue about what the rationales for NASA’s human space flight program should be and what kinds of dollars those rationales justify, we should start a whole new thread.

    FWIW…

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