At a time when several firms are developing spacecrafts to take ordinary citizens on short trips into space, scientists have outlined the risks and challenges involved in human commercial spaceflights.
The key for a safe space travel will be to develop wearable biomedical monitoring equipment for spaceflight participants and create a medical and physiological database during test flights, authors stressed.
"One of the most important areas of our research is to determine whether there are biomedical conditions that would disqualify ordinary citizens from a short ride to the edge of space," said professor Scott Hubbard from Stanford University.
"Our rigorous, peer-reviewed work on a broad range of volunteers indicates most people can take that brief space trip," added Hubbard, who wrote the piece "Space Biomedicine -- Who Can Travel to the Final Frontier?"
In addition, space technology firms need to take into the account the risk of electromagnetic interference and ionizing radiation to implanted medical devices, they noted.
The paper appeared in the journal New Space.
