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For decades, spaceflight has captivated humanity’s imagination. A podcast called Quirks & Quarks capitalizes on that interest. Hosted by Bob McDonald, this podcast has brought the most cutting-edge discoveries in physics and natural sciences to its listeners for over forty years. They’ve explored topics ranging from the mysteries of gravity to pandemic virus research; fittingly, their website describes it as covering “the quirks of the expanding universe to the quarks within a single atom…and everything in between.” McDonald is an experienced program host and science correspondent, owing to his work at the Ontario Science Centre.
Quirks & Quarks recently hosted a particularly special segment for both its namesake and host—one that discusses the health risks of space travel. In this segment, McDonald explored the consequences of space missions on human health with a leading expert on the topic: Susan Bailey, a professor at Colorado State University’s Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences. Bailey has contributed extensively to the repository of research on the effects of space travel on health, including NASA’s famed twin study on astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly, which analyzed the physiological, cognitive, and molecular changes that space travel had on a human’s body. In total, the repository amounts to a collection of over forty manuscripts from more than twenty-five countries, all of which will provide answers to the intricate questions that arise about the relationship between space travel and human health.
In the nearly nine-minute segment, McDonald asked Bailey a variety of thought-provoking questions. For example, he wanted to know how quickly physiological changes could occur once the astronauts traveled into space. Bailey discussed the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission frequently, which provided insight into comparisons between civilians and trained astronauts, as well as the effects of short and long space travel times. Both McDonald and Bailey agreed about the implications of space travel on telomeres—protective caps on chromosomes that are crucial for cellular aging and have long-term consequences on health. It was found that no matter the length of spaceflight time, all travelers exhibited shorter telomere lengths upon returning to Earth.
Later in the segment, Bailey brought in an outside expert—Christopher Mason, one of the principal investigators in NASA’s twin study and a professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine—to discuss the limiting effect of radiation exposure. Radiation is one of the most harmful threats that spaceflight poses to humans, causing DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, and changes in the microbiome. These findings showcase that no matter what, the current technological capabilities do not allow for safe back-and-forth travel between Earth and outer space, at least for extended periods.
The segment ended on this slightly somber conclusion, but one note of hope rang through. “There’s no place like Earth,” McDonald said. And indeed, listeners are left to ponder that if humans were able to send rockets, satellites, and people beyond the confines of our atmosphere to explore outer space, it is only a matter of time before they are also able to find ways to do so more safely.