Peggy Whitson, the former head of the NASA Astronaut Office, believes NASA’s radiation standards are too restrictive and discriminate against female astronauts.

Whitson expressed her views at a workshop on Ethics Principles and Guidelines for Health Standards for Long-Duration and Exploration-Class Spaceflights, conducted by the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine. The story was reported by Space.com.

NASA limits astronauts’ lifetime radiation exposure to keep the probability of radiation-induced cancer death below 3%. The limit for NASA astronauts is higher than the limit for terrestrial radiation workers. Women are more susceptible to certain forms of cancer, however, so the limit for female astronauts is lower than the limit for male astronauts. A female astronaut can fly only 45-50% as many missions as a male astronauts, Whitson said.

Many of NASA’s astronauts are already limited by their lifetime radiation exposure. According to Col. Robert Behnken, who replaced Whitson as head of the Astronaut Office, only three of NASA’s 50 astronauts were eligible for the recent one-year mission to ISS, because of radiation limits. A mission to Mars is probably impossible within current radiation limits.

Questions for NASA

Three questions come to mind:

First, is NASA calculating the radiation risk correctly? At present, no one has good data on the biological effects of long-term low-level radiation exposure. Instead, the risks are inferred from data on the effects of short-term, high-level radiation exposure (collected from events such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki). This data is applied to low-level radiation using an extrapolation model known Linear No Threshold (LNT).

The LNT model assumes that a given dose of radiation will have the same effect regardless of the dose rate. It is a highly conservative model, which assumes the body has no way to recover from the effects of gradual, low-level radiation exposure over time. It ignores the usual principles of toxicology and much of what we know about the biological repair mechanisms. There is no scientific evidence to prove the LNT model is correct, but the government has adopted it out of an abundance of caution (the “precautionary principle”).

The LNT model has been criticized many times in the past, but environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists have resisted any attempted change. In space, however, the precautionary principle may cost NASA the chance to go to Mars.

Second, does the 3% fatality limit makes sense? The Shuttle had about a 2% fatal accident rate on each flight, as does Soyuz. Future launch systems may do better, but right now, an astronaut who flies multiple missions has a just of death that is significantly greater than 3%.

Third, is the male-female dichotomy really the best way to classify radiation risks? There’s no doubt that cancer risks differ between men and women, but gender is only one of many variables that affect cancer risks. With the development of modern genomics, we’re reaching the point where it’s possible to determine risks on a personal level based on individual genetic markers. This is part of an emerging field known as personalized medicine, which treats people as individuals rather than broad statistical groups. Inspiration Mars is looking at personalized medicine to help select crew members for its proposed Mars flyby mission. Is NASA doing the same?

These are questions which NASA needs to answer as it plans for future exploration activities.

 

Written by Astro1 on September 4th, 2013 , Space Medicine and Safety

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COMMENTS
    DougSpace commented

    > A mission to Mars is probably impossible within current radiation limits.

    This sort of perspective is practically irrelevant. No one would send crew to Mars with no mass — no propellant, no water-containing provisions, no equipment, and no heat shield. Those things will be present in any reasonable mission. The crew could spend their sedentary time positioned such that that mass would provide significant shielding. Nor will any reasonable mission fail to take precautions on the event of a solar storm. Whether in transit or at destination, a “storm shelter” of 10 cm or so thickness of water will be readily available and prediction and detection of a solar storm is a given. Once on Mars the crew could spend their sedentary time in an inflatable habitat which had been covered by regolith prior to inflation. To keep the spacesuits free of toxic dust, most EVAs would be conducted in a rover whose cab could have 10 cm or so of shielding. Using these common-sense strategies, the crew’s total radiation exposure could be kept well within career limits.

    Reply
    September 9, 2015 at 5:02 pm
      DougSpace commented

      We don’t need to go changing radiation standards when we can easily meet them.

      Reply
      September 9, 2015 at 5:04 pm
      Astro1 commented

      Why do you assume NASA’s calculations have not taken such obvious steps into account?

      Reply
      September 9, 2015 at 10:30 pm