But most of all, Mark, 50, knows Scott, 50—which is how it is with brothers, especially when they’re identical twins, born factory-loaded with the exact same genetic operating system. The brothers’ connection will be more important than ever beginning in March, when Scott takes off for a one-year stay aboard the space station, setting a single-mission record for a U.S. astronaut. / The biggest problem with our exploratory ambitions is, simply, us. The human body is a purpose-built machine, designed for the one-G environment of Earth. Take us into the zero-G of space or the 0.38 G of Mars and it all comes unsprung. Bones get brittle, eyeballs lose their shape, hearts beat less efficiently since they no longer have to pump against gravity, and balance goes awry. At least that’s what we know so far. “There’s quite a bit of data [on human health] for six months in orbit,” says space-station program manager Mike Suffredini. “But have we reached stasis at six months, or do things change at one year? Is there a knee in the curve we haven’t reached yet?” So NASA needs subjects to venture out and run the long-duration tests. In a perfect experiment, every one of those subjects would also have a control subject on the ground—someone with, say, the exact same genes and a very similar temperament, so you could tease apart the changes that come from being aloft for 12 months from those that are a result of growing the same year older on Earth. In the Kelly brothers—and only the Kelly brothers—NASA has that two-person sample group. “The twins study didn’t come up when we were selecting crew for the mission,” says Suffredini. “But it occurred to us later that we had this ground-based truth in Mark.” #NASA #ISS International Space Station
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 04:20:35 +0000
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