Space Station Crews Are Not Alone In Space

[Guest guest]

Space Station Crews Are Not Alone In Space

By Woods

The Toledo Blade

9-4-2

The International Space Station (ISS) wasn't empty when the first crew

arrived in 2000. A welcome party was waiting to greet them.

Russia's Mir Space Station wasn't lifeless when it made that fiery plunge

into the Pacific Ocean in 2001. Mir was teeming with life after the last

crew abandoned ship.

Ignore the official crew counts on the next space shuttle flight.

Hitchhikers ride each shuttle into orbit.

Microbes have been the first, last, and most numerous inhabitants of manned

space vehicles since Yuri Gagarin blazed that new frontier in 1961.

Viruses, bacteria and fungi get into space vehicles during assembly on Earth

as workers breathe, cough, and touch surfaces. Crews bring more.

Microbes not only survive in space, they thrive. NASA experiments in 1968 on

Biosatellite II first showed that microbes grow better in space than on

Earth.

Mir became a showcase for the nasty situation. With cramped living quarters

and a hapless climate control system, Mir's air was so damp that moisture

condensed on the walls.

Human beings on Earth constantly shed dead skin, hair and tiny particles of

mucus in coughs and sneezes. In space, the flurry becomes a blizzard.

American astronaut Norm Thaagard, who spent four months on Mir, noticed that

callused skin on his feet flaked off because there was no pressure when he

stood.

In the damp air, Mir's microbes thrived on the cast-offs.

Mir went 15 years without a thorough cleaning. American astronauts

complained bitterly about the filth and stench. Foale, who spent 134

days on Mir in 1997, described interior cabin walls slick with a film of

mildew.

The microgravity conditions, and higher radiation levels, fostered mutations

or changes in the microbes' genetic material. New forms of the microbes

appeared - slightly different from those people encounter on Earth.

In 2001, Tulane University researchers confirmed that the environment in

Earth-orbit makes some bacteria mutate and become more virulent, or

dangerous in causing infections.

Russian cosmonauts often complained about coughs, skin boils and other

infections after returning to Earth. Nobody knows whether they were caused

by bacteria that evolved on Mir, or unsanitary conditions on Earth.

By the late 1990s Mir's littlest cosmonauts and astronauts were literally

eating parts of up the station.

One Russian scientist described " a green mat " of fungus and bacteria growing

on cables and electronic components. The fungus produced acid wastes that

damaged electrical equipment and even etched and fogged a window, clouding

cosmonauts' view of space.

The counterparts of these " germs from space " now are growing inside Mir's

successor, the $60-billion ISS. NASA, which built ISS with partners from a

dozen other countries, learned lessons from Mir's problems.

ISS has an upgraded climate control system, for instance, that filters out

many microbes and keeps the humidity low. Drinking water is super-purified -

a good thing since the source includes recycled astronaut urine and breath.

Astronauts swab down surfaces with germicidal wipes, and take other

precautions to discourage their microscopic crewmates.

NASA also is monitoring the space station for signs that microbes are

mutating into new strains that could pose a health danger to astronauts.

Long space flights weaken the human immune system, making astronauts more

vulnerable to infections.

Could astronauts bring alien germs back to Earth, trigging a plague from

outer space?

Stifle those smirks. Who knows?

The risk may be bigger later in the 21st century. Astronauts may be

returning from three-year missions to Mars, and lunar colonists may be

heading back to Hometown USA for a vacation.

ISS and its crews, big and little, are the laboratory and volunteers in a

real-life experiment that may help provide the answer.

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