Menstrutation in space

Since this topic has come up befo

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...ruate-in-space

Basically, "it's no big deal". Which as he points out, most women would
have pointed out.


It seems that the medics have been overly paranoid on just about every
concern they had before it was tested.

Did any of their concerns really end up having any merit?

Did any predict the bone loss issues in the beginning?


--
Greg Moore
Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC.

"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" writes:


Since this topic has come up befo

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...ruate-in-space

Basically, "it's no big deal". Which as he points out, most women would
have pointed out.


It seems that the medics have been overly paranoid on just about every
concern they had before it was tested.

Did any of their concerns really end up having any merit?

Did any predict the bone loss issues in the beginning?

Uhm ... hm. Fair question. I get the feeling that the medical
concerns have been passed down to us in a distorted form because it is
funny to think that, like, someone was afraid that eyeballs would pop
out of sockets when people were in orbit, or something like that.

Unfortunately, I don't see the sort of nice clean summary of
what space flight was thought particularly likely to cause. Working
from _Space Medicine In Project Mercury_, SP-4003, offers these
thoughts:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4003/ch4-2.htm

The problems of biomedical support for the short-term
Project Mercury flights were relatively simple, it was believed,
and could be solved through existing technology which would
provide adequate life systems for man's survival in orbital
flight. This orbital path would lie below the Van Allen belt,
so that radiation would pose no great problem. There were,
however, other problems which would be involved both in the
relatively limited Mercury mission and in extended missions.

The first of these was the problem of acceleration and
weightlessness. On the basis of extrapolation from data on
humans flown in Keplerian trajectories, animal experiments
utilizing V-2 and Aerobee rockets, water-immersion experiments,
and experiments involving sensory deprivation, it was anticipated
that the principal difficulties would be in the central nervous
system and organs of position sense. The chief consequences were
believed to be disorientation, hallucinations, and psychological
adjustment failures, of which disorientation was the most
difficult to assess.[4] A second major problem was that of
combined stresses including noise, launch, and reentry tolerance.
The third was the problem of toxic hazards in the spacecraft.
Fourth was the danger from ambient space radiations.[5]

These, then, were problems involving basic biological
research and development, testing, and validation, as Project
Mercury got underway.

(The footnotes lead to an abundance of references, dating to
between 1949 and 1962, which I imagine are probably not online in any
organized fashion.)


Later it goes on to categorize expected sources of stress on
the human participants:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4003/ch6-2.htm
Four categories of stresses could be expected: (1)
Those caused by motions or forces, or their absence; (2) those
caused by the space environment itself; (3) those caused by the
spacecraft environment; and (4) those caused by the mental and
physical activities required of the astronaut. Stresses caused
by motions or forces included acceleration, weightlessness,
noise and vibration, and oscillatory motions. Those caused by
the space environment itself included radiation, micrometeoroid
impact, and illumination. Those caused by the spacecraft
environment. included the atmosphere of the spacecraft,
isolation, nutrition and waste factor, and other comfort factors.
Finally, those stresses caused by the mental and physical
activities of the astronaut included orientation ability, task
complexity, and psychological factors.


It still comes across a little funny to think that people were
worried about hallucinations (although, for example, an auditory
hallucination in which you thought you heard a warning system would be
problematic and not at all amusing at the time). Still, I'm not sure
how to judge the success in forecasting problems. After all, it was
with these potential problems in mind that the spacecraft were designed,
operational procedures developed, and training done.

There's clearly a rich and messy research paper to be done on
this topic. Just sorting out what were the General Opinions of the
NASA medical staff, and what were the hunches about what might happen
from well-informed people, and what were the wild predictions from
people expecting wild stuff to happen could consume a grad student or
two. Add in figuring out what issues were determined by ground work
to not be important and what was still thought credible up until the
long-duration space flights ... I don't know how to sort it all out.


I bet _The Human Factor: Biomedicine In The Manned Space Program
To 1980_, NASA SP-4213, should speak more on topic but I haven't even
skimmed it before.
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4213/sp4213.htm

--
Joseph Nebus
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