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NASA Prepares For Space Surgery and Zero Gravity Blood
Hugh Pickens writes "Draining an infected abscess is a straightforward procedure on Earth but on a spaceship travelling to the moon or Mars, it could kill everyone on board. Now Rebecca Rosen writes that if humans are to one day go to Mars, one logistical hurdle that will need to be overcome is what to do if one of the crew members has a medical emergency and needs surgery. 'Based on statistical probability, there is a high likelihood of trauma or a medical emergency on a deep space mission,' says Carnegie Mellon professor James Antaki. It's not just a matter of whether you'll have the expertise on board to carry out such a task: Surgery in zero gravity presents its own set of potentially deadly complications because in zero gravity, blood and bodily fluids will not just stay put, in the body where they belong but could contaminate the entire cabin, threatening everybody on board. This week, NASA is testing a device known as the Aqueous Immersion Surgical System (AISS) that could possibly make space surgery possible. Designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Louisville, AISS is a domed box that can fit over a wound. When filled with a sterile saline solution, a water-tight seal is created that prevents fluids from escaping. It can also be used to collect blood for possible reuse."
but damn does it look cool and tasty in slow motion.
Why don't they use an artificial centrifuge for surgical procedures (2001 style)?
why dont they create artificial gravity?
All SciFi books have this, why doesn't NASA?
Help eliminate stupid speeding tickets.
Robots and rovers are becoming so good that I think we should take all that manned mission to Mars money and re-purpose it to exploring Mars, and Titan, and Jupiter's moons with machines.
The only viable manned missions that I can see right now would be "one way tickets", and the politicians are too squeamish for those.
So, rovers and flying drones, or boats for Titan are the best way to go at the moment.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
You should start making plans for emulated gravity through rotational innertia type of vessels. The wasting of resources on this stupid, mindless, Zero-G mental masterbation project, is exactly why I do not feel even a little sorry for NASA's funding being cut. We don't need their bloated, bullshit projects. They are not making any advances.
The ability of humans to perform well on the surface of any planet after months of zero-g seems doubtful. Build the spacecraft big enough, and rotate it. Better yet, send two spacecraft, tether them together, and rotate both of them about their center of mass. It will solve a lot more problems than the relatively minor one of dealing with in-space surgery.
They should launch more crew members than they need, with the assumption that the ones that require surgery en route will be chucked out the airlock.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The problem with the washing machines is the forced center of rotation.
In a freely rotating system (such as two bodies attached) the center moves. As long as this doesn't cause extreme forces on one or the other body, this isn't a problem.
All that happens is the more massive body makes a smaller loop, while the less massive body makes a larger loop. The axis of rotation just moves along the connection between them.
Only becomes a problem if a designated center point is also the propulsion center...
If you assume there will only be 4 at arrival, you can send 10... and the 4 each the others.
Saves on food and other resources too.
"My job is rocket surgery!"
Considering surgery in space is good omen. At the very least, Someone is planning to be there one day.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It seems to me that any mission taking months of time, would use some kind of artificial gravity. Artificial gravity would be needed for the astronauts health and muscle tone as well as medical emergencies requiring surgery.
Research:
"help ward off the debilitating loss of muscle and bone due to weightlessness on long missions"
Here is the physics:
Simulated Gravity with Centripetal Force
Does anyone know of plans for the Mars mission (what kind of vehicle will be used)?
I have heard that in the early days of the space program, they flushed human waste out of the ships. Subsequently, one day when they were working in the space shuttle, they found grime (from the waste) basically lining the cargo hold. Of course, that wasn't in a pressurized cabin at temperatures conducive to bacterial growth...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Or, I am the EM-1 Emergency Medical Holograph. Please state your emergency.
If someone needs surgery on a trans-atlantic flight, they divert to the nearest airport near a hospital, which would usually be under one hour and rarely more than three. Most surgical conditions can wait 1-3 hours.
You can't wait 1-3 months though, as you would if a spacecraft needed to turn around
Just put 'em in the autodoc.
The question is not "how can we learn to do a thousand difficult tasks in zero gee?", but "how can we provide artificial gravity so we don't have to?" We've spent tens of billions of dollars learning to do everything imaginable in microgravity, and mere millions trying to develop a workable centrifugal gravity system for long-duration spaceflight. And Robert Zubrin, divisive as he is, is probably right about why: there's an entire industry of NASA scientists working on solving microgravity problems, and they're not interested in solutions which make their work irrelevant.
Ah NASA, always choosing the most complicated method for something with a hundred simple solutions. Suctioning the surgery area is something that is has been done for decades here on earth, it would probably need minimal modifications for use in space. As far as free floating blood just put a high flow cotton air filter next to the wound. That should collect most free floating fluids, and if a few get loose so what? Its blood not Plutonium-238? The only real advantage I can see with this is that it would help limit blood loss and POSSIBLY allow use of any blood that did escape. But for 99% of the surgeries that would likely be required in space the minimal amount of blood loss wouldn't deed to be replaced anyway.
Needs to be large enough to remove alien parasites
This isn't even about the lack of surgery, but an unknown increase in risk for others, should one take place. Rather than identifying the risk and mitigating it (is it only from infected blood touching the bulkheads?, or microscopic blood pieces being respirated?), the solution is to spend billions eliminating the risk. If the "solution" was as simple as put everyone in "disposable" surgery suits, then after the surgery, everyone goes on a spacewalk while the inside is sterilized with high-power UV or a toxic aerosol, would that be cheaper than the surgery-box?
Then do the work to get that certified for space flight. Cheaper, easier, more reliable, and available now, with no development cost.
Learn to love Alaska
This isn't even about the lack of surgery, but an unknown increase in risk for others, should one take place. Rather than identifying the risk and mitigating it (is it only from infected blood touching the bulkheads?, or microscopic blood pieces being respirated?), the solution is to spend billions eliminating the risk. If the "solution" was as simple as put everyone in "disposable" surgery suits, then after the surgery, everyone goes on a spacewalk while the inside is sterilized with high-power UV or a toxic aerosol, would that be cheaper than the surgery-box?
Then do the work to get that certified for space flight. Cheaper, easier, more reliable, and available now, with no development cost.
Unexpectedly respirated blood or infectious fluids is a pretty serious problem. Most of the worst diseases you can get are the result of normally fairly harmless bacteria getting into unusual places in the body.
Every single time a story about manned Mars or Moon missions comes up here on Slashdot I am compelled to remind everyone that there are going to be no manned Mars or Moon missions in the next 50 years. The only entities that could do it (theoretically) are the federal governments of the USA, the former Soviet Union (which still exists as far a space exploration goes), and China (people's republic of, if you one of those people who still insist that there are two Chinas).
All these governments are broke or broken. The Americans are completely broke, so much that for most the past 30 years they have had to borrow money to pay for their government expenditures. They talk a lot of trash, but when it comes time to cut Medicare, war budgets, or bail-outs to banks too-big-to-fail in order free up the funds to send people to Mars, well, it's just not going to happen. They are broke and have too many more important commitments.
The Russians are broke also. And they are living on resource extraction and sales to Europe, the USA, and China. They will deliver people to the space station, but that's the last stop on the railroad line.
The Chinese are in space for the 'me, too' glory of it. They MIGHT send a man to the moon in order to show the world that they can do what the Americans did 60 years ago (it will be at least that by the time that they can do it). But when they realize that there's no international glory in doing some stunt (which, to be honest, is all going to the Moon and coming back with a bag of rocks is) that was done long ago. Plus they have internal pressures the Americans and Russians don't have.
So there it is.... Make plans and dreams, but don't expect real manned Mars missions to actually happen.
This is more insanity from NASA. Do they have any systems analysts, operations analysts, or economists in that organisation?
First; I call on NASAs odds. How many man-days on the ISS and the Moon without injury, let alone serious injury? Plus, any injury will be occurred dirt-side, where you have gravity, not during the long cruise phases.
Second; so what? Worse case: you lose an astronaut. Big deal. As if there were not 1,000 larger risks where one can lose the entire crew. It is this ridiculous focus on minutae and risk-avoidance that has crippled NASA. We need risk management, not risk avoidance.
Unexpectedly respirated blood or infectious fluids is a pretty serious problem.
Hence why I explicitly put it in the risks list. But they didn't explicitly state it as one, so I don't know if it was that or something else/additional. Masks do a good job of blocking things, and they should be used in just about all cases anyway, both to protect the wearer and to protect the patient.
I'd hope the problem was worse than just that, otherwise they are working on a multi-billion dollar fix to save them $3 on a dozen disposable paper masks.
Learn to love Alaska
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Harry_Stine, who also worked at White Sands back in the 1950's and published fiction under the pen name "Lee Correy", gave plenty of other good examples in a novel "Space Doctor": ...) while still leaving the patient unencumbered enough for the doctor to access whatever parts of the body they need to get to?
1) how do you get the bubbles out of a syringe in zero-g?
2) how do you keep the doctor close to the patient for any procedure that involves exerting force against the patient (intubation, chest compressions,
3) how do you do an IV "drip" when zero-g doesn't let anything drip?
and tons more.
He's got two great responses for all the yahoos here who think the answer is to never, ever let people get more than an hour or two away from Mercedes-luxury spaceships or stations:
1) accountants. ('Nuff said?)
2) industrialization. Stop with the limited-vision thinking that the frontier of space is only accessible to a privileged few. Like the frontier of the New World was once accessible only to those financed by kings and queens then eventually tackled by lesser-heeled merchants, one day the frontier of space will also house industrial construction workers and some version of oil field workers (sent there by merchants, of course). Blue-collar workers will be out there mining for rare minerals or building solar energy collectors so we can feed new resources in to keep growing our world economy and, as always, they will be driving the equivalent of Ford trucks and living in the equivalent of mobile homes because it's industrial construction and field work, durn it.
If mankind is to keep growing and avoid Malthusian predictions then we'll need to grow into the space frontier and that won't happen without an ability to live in zero-g and micro-micro-gravity for months on end and more than two hours away from our earthly cradle.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairwoman and Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairman jointly signed a letter stating their willingness to not provide needed care to military veterans injured on-duty. That covers both ends of the political spectrum.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/10/military-veterans-committee-leaders-open-to-VA-cuts-101711w/
So... imagine this in a battlefield or even on the street. Someone gets hurt, a medical technician straps this on the wound. It stops the bleeding, controls the infection, and a surgeon could remotely start working on the wound. <sarcasm>Yeah, that seems like a dumb thing to be working on.</sarcasm>
Thanks for the correction.
We've already been avoiding Malthusian predictions for decades.
Well in Zero-G you have issues like vapor dispersion of fluids. The human blink reflex is pretty good on Earth with large droplets and gravity - in space a drop let floats around until it gets broken up into smaller things, so I imagine it's a serious concern that reasonably heavy particulates which normally aren't much of a problem would just be dispersed in the normal atmosphere.
If that is the problem, and there was no problem stated, then I'd solve it with a ventilation hood and a full face covering of some kind. That tech exists and is essentially free today.
Without any stated problem, they seem to be solving for an unknown and unstated risk of something, anything, they don't know. Doing too much will cover any risk, but it makes more sense to state the risk and address it. Stating "there could be a risk, lets eliminate it" isn't a risk assessment.
Learn to love Alaska
You could do research like this without even considering zero gravity. The DoD does it.
We need space surgery research. It's going to happen at some point. But, what we also need is faster spacecraft. Nuclear powered ships can cut the journey to Mars and asteroids down to months or even weeks, with even heavier payloads, and are designs that are viable. We could have artificial gravity by spinning wheels, arriving quickly at other places in the solar system, and know how to do surgery in zero g conditions. But, nope, instead we're going to have any number of earth bound pet projects.
This is my sig.
We've already been avoiding Malthusian predictions for decades.
We've also been "avoiding" Global Warming predictions for decades. If you're short sighted enough to believe that either problem was going to happen in just one or two generations of human history, then you're part of the problem (both of them)
Indeed, artificial gravity by rotating an Apollo vehicle with a counterweight was actually performed in the early stages of the program.
I'm not really sure how this can be considered too daring now, but also here in Europe nobody is considering it anymore...
Herve S.