Volume 11, Number 2 • Summer 2003 • Welcome

Partnering Allows NASA to Reach Further

By Guy Fogelman
Director, Bioastronautics Research Division

NASA’s vision calls for us to improve life here, to extend life to there and to find life beyond. The researchers of NASA answer this call by working together to accomplish goals that enable space exploration while benefiting people on Earth. To this end, NASA’s Office of Biological and Physical Research (OBPR) recently partnered with the Aerospace Technology Enterprise to host a Medical Technology Summit. OBPR is particularly excited about this summit because it offered an opportunity for our programs to continue working with other NASA offices and industry to extend the duration and boundaries of human space flight while creating opportunities for exploration and discovery.

The goal of the summit was to forge partnerships between NASA and the medical device industry to speed the development of technologies NASA needs, while helping create a new generation of medical devices that will enhance medical diagnosis and treatment capabilities for use by astronauts and by people here on Earth. The Medical Technology Summit was an opportunity for the medical device industry to learn about NASA, our capabilities and how our technologies can assist them with developing new devices and increasing the capabilities of existing technologies. Partnering with industry allows NASA the opportunity to reach further by leveraging the additional expertise and resources that industry has to offer.

NASA has provided an abundance of technology transfers throughout our history that have aided the medical community. Since the first space missions of the early 1960s, countless Americans have benefited from technologies that resulted directly from NASA’s space program. The monitoring systems used in intensive care units and in heart rehabilitation wards are descendants of the systems used to monitor the heartbeats of astronauts during those early missions. During the 1980s, NASA researchers pioneered 3-D simulations that visualized portions of the body’s balance organ in the inner ear to model physical adaptations in space. This software is now being used in hospitals around the country to aid surgeons in planning facial reconstructive surgery. America’s space program continues to revolutionize the practice of medicine through improvements in ultrasound scanners, automatic insulin pumps, portable x-ray devices, MRIs, bone analyzers and a wearable heart rate monitor.

As humans continue to embark on missions of greater duration and distance, we must extend our current capabilities to work effectively in space. We must guarantee crew health and safety to allow space explorers to perform their duties throughout the mission and assure a safe return to Earth. OBPR is committed to forming partnerships with industry, business and academia to bring entrepreneurs in engineering research and technology development to space. These partnerships benefit businesses by offering opportunities to conduct research in the space environment, where processes and products can be researched, fabricated and tested in absence of gravity. Such research is not possible on Earth and may enhance industry’s development of better manufacturing practices and products.

OBPR contributes to the Agency’s vision by sponsoring its research to answer the following questions

  • How can we assure the survival of humans traveling far from Earth?
  • How does life respond to gravity and the space environment?
  • What new opportunities can our research bring to expand our understanding of the laws of nature and enrich lives on Earth?
  • What technology must we create to enable the next explorers to go beyond where we have been?
  • How can we educate and inspire the next generation to take the journey?

The current scope of OBPR includes developing products to support human exploration, such as
radiation-protection strategies, new biomedical knowledge, procedures and tools, as well as technologies that sustain humans in the harsh environment of space. NASA can use the expertise of the US business community to turn research results into usable products that allow humans to venture into and explore space beyond where they have been. Understanding how humans and other life forms adapt to the effects of space flight is essential to providing appropriate medical tools that maintain human health. The biomedical, biological and engineering research communities will continue to be the centerpiece on which we rely to conduct the research and technology development that has high merit, significant benefit on Earth and direct relevance to the long-term success of space exploration. Q

 

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