Since mankind first ventured into space with Yuri Gagarin on April 12th 1961, the medical profession have been intimately involved with keeping the human in human spaceflight functioning. The team of medical professionals is traditionally led by the flightsurgeon. The flightsurgeon although a highly trained specialist, is concerned primarily with maintaining the astronauts health and prevention/risk mitigation of any medical conditions that may arise during the mission. He does not actually fly into space, is not resident on the space station and is not trained to actually himself treat medical diseases or emergencies.

 

The Crew Medical Officer (CMO), is the astronaut on a mission who locally manages medical issues. This person is more often than not an engineer with less that 48 hours of paramedic training. Together the Flightsurgeon and CMO effectively manage the status quo medical philosophy of “stabilise and evacuate”. Stabilise and Evacuate, basically refers to the concept of treating minor ailments onboard the spacestation/shuttle, for any serious medical condition or an emergency that the crewmember survives, the plan is to stabilise the individual and return him to earth at the earliest opportunity for definitive treatment. It is estimated that once stabilisation has occurred, time to an institution for definitive treatment would be less than 24 hours. This philosophy has served the space agencies well over the last few decades, where apart from apollo all human spaceflight has been to low earth orbit (LEO).  

 

However, human exploration of the solar system is back on the agenda, The United States with its Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), The Europeans with their Aurora Programme and programs by Russia, China and India, all show a push for putting human beings back on the moon with a permanent moonbase by the end of 2020 and sending human beings on to Mars by 2030. The duration of return to earth from the moon at a minimum is three days and possibly longer, and once begun, a mission to mars could not return to earth for a few years, therefore the medical status quo of “stabilise and return” can no longer be applied.

 

Medical problems will have to be treated, cured or permanently stabilised during the mission itself. The medical specialist who is to undertake this task will have to be uniquely trained, he will need specific skills and knowledge not just of the human body, diseases, medical emergencies, but also of spacecraft systems and the space environment.

He will need to have the capability to respond to and manage unforseen medical events. The crew medical officer with less than two days training would not be upto to this task, infact any doctor trained in a traditional existing speciality on earth would also be found lacking. A traditional specialist here on earth is a master of only one field of medicine and has almost limitless resources of both manpower and other specialists around him, which would be very different to the mars bound spacecraft or moonbase. Medical expertise will therefore need to be developed that allows a single individual (the SpaceSurgeon) to diagnose, treat and rehabilitate any medical emergency both foreseen and unforeseen that may arise.

 

We are an open forum and group whose aim is to develop the medical capability of this new speciality of onboard Space Medicine and whose practitioners will be called the SPACESURGEON.

 

we plan to do this by

 

1. Initially identifying the skillsets and knowledge base of the spacesurgeon

2. Subsequently developing a training programme for the spacesurgeon