Last month was supposed to be marked by the first all-women spacewalk — an event that NASA was forced to put on the backburner because of a shortage of suitably-sized spacesuits.
So instead of NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch suiting up and venturing outside the International Space Station, Ms Koch accompanied fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague.
When Ms Koch donned the spacesuit and exited the hatch, she became be the 14th woman to spacewalk. It would’ve been nice to have the all-women spacewalk milestone passed — and NASA says an all-women spacewalk is inevitable. But it’s also an excellent time to think about how being in space affects men and women differently, said Mallika Sarma, a space human biologist at the University of Notre Dame. “And in light of this cancelled spacewalk, these questions become so much more important because there are all these presumed differences between men and women that people think they know.
Medical testing in space — and on Earth
Astronauts and cosmonauts are subjected to a battery of tests before, during and after flying, which have yielded plenty of insights. Some of the differences between genders adapting to spaceflight, including experiments on male and female animals, were highlighted in a swag of papers published in 2014. None of these differences are so critical that one sex should be chosen over the other. “Thus far, the differences between the male and female adaptation to spaceflight are not significant,” physiologist Liz Warren wrote in a NASA blog post.
But, the papers conceded, male-dominated data means that plenty of sex-specific questions are yet to be answered. So they made six recommendations, the first being “select more female astronauts for space missions”. While more women astronauts are being trained, there’s plenty of work in this area happening on Earth. Situations that simulate the isolation of living space, called analogues, are scattered across the globe, often locking teams away for a month or more to see how they cope.As part of her PhD studies, Ms Sarma used wilderness trips as an analogue of being in the new and stressful environment of spaceflight.
Her analysis is, so far, preliminary — Ms Sarma presented the findings at the Women in Space Conference in February — but she also collected data about how women and men differed in, for instance, their immune response and stress hormones. She’s yet to analyse that data. And this is just one study. Even with all the data gathered so far by space agencies about human health in space, there’s a long way to go before we truly understand how men and women adapt to space.