Anil Menon is not your typical NASA astronaut.
Before training for spaceflight, he treated people injured after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. He took care of climbers in distress on Mount Everest. He became the first doctor ever hired at SpaceX, and was responsible for keeping astronauts alive.
On July 14, Menon was born in Minneapolis He has an Indian father and a Ukrainian mother. He will lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina.
The trio will spend nearly 200 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as part of Expeditions 74 and 75, and will return home in the spring of 2027. This is their first spaceflight.
The moment he reached orbit, his body would begin to make changes.
What is gravity doing to you, without you knowing?
Most people never think about what gravity does to their blood.
Menon will spend 200 days discovering, in precise scientific detail, exactly what happens when there is no gravity.
On Earth, it does something simple and basic: it traps fluid in your body. Your blood, the fluid that occupies the spaces between your cells, and the lymph that runs through your tissues, all remain largely pooled in the lower half of your body, pulled by the planet beneath your feet.
You would never notice this, because it was true every moment of your life.
When gravity is removed, the fluid drifts. Up, towards the chest, face, head. The medical name for this is cephalic fluid shift.
Cephalad simply means towards the head. It sounds clinical, but the effect is immediate and obvious: the face swells, the veins in the neck bulge, and every astronaut who has reached orbit describes the feeling as a constant cold in the head, except there is no virus, no infection, and no recovery.
Gravity caused this, and only the return of gravity will fix it. This is the lite version.
A syndrome that no one expected
Over the course of weeks and months in orbit, something more sinister unfolds at the back of the eye.
Menon would track it himself using ultrasound, becoming the first astronaut doctor to study a specific syndrome from the inside.
High fluid pressure is thought to cause a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, or SANS.
It’s a goofy name for something scary: the back of the eye gradually flattens, and the optic nerve, the cable that connects the eye to the brain, begins to swell. The result, for some astronauts, is blurred or distorted vision. Studies show that approximately seven out of ten astronauts on long missions show some signs of this.
No one understands the reason behind this, and no one has yet found a way to stop it.
This is what NASA sent Menon to study from within.
Using ultrasound, a scanning tool that uses sound waves to produce images of organs and blood vessels without cutting into the body, he will track exactly how his veins change, how his blood flow changes, and what his circulatory system looks like under conditions that no clinic on Earth can reproduce.
It would be, in the most direct sense, both world and object at the same time.
Understanding this is not only interesting. It is a prerequisite for Mars. A trip to the Red Planet would take months in each direction, in the same gravity-free environment that quietly rearranges each crew member’s vision. Without knowing what he is doing and why, no one can hope to protect the crew making the journey.
Distillation that must be prepared from scratch
The second mission carried by Menon into orbit is one of the quietest Space medicine.
It will attempt to manufacture intravenous fluids, specifically the sterile saline solutions that every hospital on Earth relies on, using the plant’s recycled drinking water.
Intravenous means delivering directly into a vein, bypassing the entire digestive tract: this is how hospitals rehydrate patients in emergency situations, deliver medications that might otherwise be destroyed by the stomach, and keep the body functioning when it can’t eat or drink normally.
Salt water is almost entirely water. Water, in spaceflight, is one of the most precious things in the universe. Every liter launched from Earth costs thousands of dollars in fuel alone. The Mars mission will not carry any resupply ship, pharmacy, or emergency option. A crew who runs out of medical fluids during a deep space flight has no one to call.
If Menon can prove that the crew can prepare their own sterile brine solution from water already on board, the implications will go beyond this mission.
This means a Mars-bound crew can carry water, recycle it, and reconstitute medical fluids on demand, saving tremendous weight at launch and, in true emergencies, saving lives.
It is, if successful, one of the least glamorous but most important experiments in human history Human space flight.
The doctor who always chooses difficult ground
Menon has been selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate for 2021. His career before that seemed like a deliberate search for the edges: seismic zones, high altitudes, and the world of operational operations. Commercial spaceflight. July 14 will be the first time it leaves Earth.
The irony in his experiences is subtle.
A doctor who has spent his career in places the human body was never meant to go will now spend 200 days in the furthest reaches of these places, carefully recording how a healthy body collapses in weightlessness, so that the next generation of travelers who go further than any human being has gone before can still be alive when it happens.
– It ends
