Distance: Hazard Far From Home

A human journey to Mars, at first glance, offers an inexhaustible amount

of complexities. To bring a mission to the Red Planet from fiction to fact, our Human

Research Program has

organized some of the hazards astronauts will encounter on a continual basis

into five classifications.

The third and perhaps most apparent hazard is, quite

simply, the distance.

Rather than a three-day lunar trip, astronauts would

be leaving our planet for roughly three years. Facing a communication delay of

up to 20 minutes one way and the possibility of equipment failures or a medical

emergency, astronauts must be capable of confronting an array of situations

without support from their fellow team on Earth.

Once you burn your engines for Mars, there is no

turning back so planning and self-sufficiency are essential keys to a

successful Martian mission. The Human Research Program is studying and

improving food formulation, processing, packaging and preservation systems.

While International Space Station expeditions serve as

a rough foundation for the expected impact on planning logistics for such a

trip, the data isn’t always comparable, but it is a key to the solution.

Exploration to the Moon and Mars

will expose astronauts to five known hazards of spaceflight, including distance

from Earth. To learn more, and find out what our Human Research

Program is doing to protect humans in space, check out the “Hazards

of Human Spaceflight" website. Or,

check out this week’s episode of “Houston We Have a Podcast,” in which host Gary Jordan

further dives into the threat of distance with Erik Antonsen, the

Assistant Director for Human Systems Risk

Management at the Johnson Space Center.

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