Space tourism poses challenges on health

The world may be on the brink of a vast new frontier of tourism - and that could raise a few odd, and at this point unanswerable, questions for doctors.
Such as, "What is the maximum time my patient with osteoporosis can spend on a vacation at a space hotel?"
That is exactly a question posed in a paper released Friday, proposing that the medical community needs to start thinking now about how to treat and advise the space tourists of the future.
"If someone's dream is to fly, we want them to fly," said Dr. Marlene Grenon, a UCSF vascular surgeon and co-author of the paper published in the British Medical Journal. "This field of space tourism is being created as we speak. It's going to be important to discuss the medical challenges now."
So maybe it'll be a few years - or decades, if we're talking about hotels - before space tourism takes off in the United States. As of now, only seven non-astronaut travelers have made it to space, all of them on board Russian rockets that carried them to the International Space Station for tens of millions of dollars each.
But the American space tourism industry is blooming, with half a dozen aerospace companies building aircraft to take regular folk into space - be it on two-hour suborbital adventures or multiday cruises around the planet.

500 ready to go

Virgin Galactic, the best known of the space tourism companies, has more than 500 reservations - at $200,000 a ticket - for its first suborbital jaunt, which could take place in the next year or two. Just last week, a California state senator introduced legislation to give tax breaks to companies that build spaceports for launching spaceships.
With space tourism on the cusp of becoming a real possibility for people who don't have the health and fitness of a NASA astronaut, now is the time to think about medical guidelines, said aerospace medicine experts.
There's a wealth of information about the effects of space travel on career astronauts - from the symptoms of space sickness to the long-term repercussions of lengthy stays at the International Space Station. But the effects on the average person with imperfect health are unknown.
"If you're going into space for minutes, or even for a day or two, I would think the impact would be relatively small for the average somewhat healthy person," said Dr. Peter Lee, a Stanford heart researcher who has conducted experiments on muscle atrophy in space.
"The question is if you get into patients with mild heart disease or pulmonary disease," Lee said. "No one with those diseases has ever been allowed to fly. So some of it will be a little bit of trial and error, and initially (the space tourism companies) will probably be conservative."