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Doctors have poked and poked at NASA astronauts for years, and as government employees, astronauts have largely accepted their role as test animals to investigate how an alien environment – ​​outer space – affects the human body.

But professional astronauts have historically been a small part of humanity. Initially, they were selected from the ranks of military test pilots, who were white, physically fit men. Later, while NASA expanded its criteria, it still selected only astronauts who had exceeded their physical threshold.

But that may change as private spaceflights make room for a more diverse cross-section of humanity.

For scientists, the change will create a plethora of new data on how the human body adapts to space.

The Inspiration4 mission, launched Wednesday, shows how medical researchers can benefit from new commercial space travel. The four-person crew, none of whom are professional astronauts, will spend a fair amount of time in orbit advancing medical research.

One of the passengers, Hayley Arceneaux, exemplifies these possibilities. At 29, younger than most space travelers, he will be the first cancer survivor to go into space with metal rods implanted after a tumor was removed from his left leg.

“We’re going to learn some very fundamental things,” said Dorit Donoviel, executive director of the Space Health Translational Research Institute (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which coordinated the research during the Inspiration4 flight. .

Research to date has revealed that in the absence of gravity, fluids shift upward in the body – swollen heads, shrunken legs. Lack of gravity also weakens bones. Radiation in space not only hits DNA, creating mutations, but unusual weightlessness conditions cause some genes to turn on and others to turn off. The biological implications of these changes are not yet understood.

Each day, the crew aboard Inspiration4 will run 10 tests originally designed to measure the mental performance of NASA astronauts. The tests take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

A professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and principal investigator of this experiment, Dr. “It was supposed to be short because astronauts hate to do this kind of thing,” Mathias Basner said.

But in a dangerous environment like space, small mistakes can lead to disasters.

Dr. “That’s why we need our astronauts to always give their best performance,” Basner said. “Now, the problem is that people are particularly bad at self-assessment of performance abilities, especially in chronic exposure situations. If you sit in the same environment all the time, you think you’ll be fine, but in reality you aren’t.”

A test is a square that appears on the screen and someone has to tap on it. The square changes position and gets smaller and smaller. This measures reaction speed and hand-eye coordination.

Another measures what is known as psychomotor alertness. First, the subject looks at a box on the screen. A stopwatch suddenly appears inside the box and counts down the milliseconds until the subject presses a button. Dr. “It’s extremely sensitive to sleep deprivation,” Basner said.

Yet another test measures a person’s ability to identify emotions in other people.

The test shows 20 faces that show a variety of emotions – happy, sad, angry, scared, or not expressing emotion. In a study called bed rest — lying in space for long periods of time that mimicked many of the physical effects of weightlessness — subjects were still able to accurately describe most of the emotions. However, they took longer to describe them and their responses turned into more negative statements.

Mark J. Shelhamer, a professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine, is collecting data on how space flight affects the vestibular system – parts of the human body, particularly the inner ear, that maintain balance.

Its research consists of two parts, which will be done before launch and after returning to Earth. One will measure the postures of the crew members. Dr. “Sounds like it,” Shelhamer said. “It’s the ability to stand up. And the ability to stand up is based not only on muscle strength, but also on coordination.”

Inspiration4 crew members will hold a Windows tablet to their chests, put their feet together, and close their eyes. Accelerators on the tablet will measure how much they sway when they stop.

Dr. “It’s not that hard to do in the world,” Shelhamer said. “But it can be difficult after spending some time in space.”

Dr. Shelhamer designed a test using the tablet to examine whether weightlessness causes misalignment of the eyes. This may provide clues as to how the brain can become confused and impair the sense of balance.

What the researchers want to learn is how to predict who is sick in space. Surprisingly, there is no correlation between who gets sick on Earth — during a long car ride, or even during brief swimming events during parabolic airplane flights, in a boat bobbing back and forth — and in orbit.

Dr. “We don’t get that at all,” Shelhamer said. “It’s a shame, because we like to think they are the same underlying mechanisms — the fact that different sensory systems don’t match.”

Dr. TRISH, the organization led by Donoviel, not only protects the privacy of private space travelers in accordance with the requirements of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, but also allows researchers to compare data from different studies for a person.

For example, Dr. Shelhamer, an individual whose ability to stand upright without swaying after a trip to space has decreased, Dr. He might want to know if Basner also experienced cognitive slowdowns while doing his tests in space. That’s usually not possible with how NASA reports data collected about its astronauts, he said.

Inspiration4 team members also wear Apple Watches that measure their heart rate and oxygen levels. They will also test ultrasound devices that can monitor how the water in their bodies slides upward as they swim in orbit. This could help solve the puzzle that some astronauts experience of crushing the eyeballs and ultimately causing a shift in vision.

The research is based on how well the Inspiration4 team felt during their journey. Because there is no way to predict who is sick in space, it may not be possible for them all to be sick and do much research during the three-day voyage.

Dr. “My concern is that they won’t be able to enjoy their time in space,” Donoviel said. “They may not be able to perform the experiments we sent. So that’s a risk I take.”