![]() Auñón-Chancellor, who is both a physician and a NASA astronaut. “I never pictured an inanimate object-a machine that works beautifully like the station-as having a microbiome similar to someone who’s alive, like a human,” says Serena M. In 1998-about three years before the station deorbited into the Pacific Ocean-scientists discovered several dozen species of bacteria, fungi and dust mites hiding behind a service panel. Take the Russian space station Mir as an example. ![]() But scientists are not only worried about the human microbiome-they are also worried about the spacecraft’s microbiome. ![]() It might not come as a surprise, then, that understanding how the microbiome behaves during spaceflight is crucial if we want to send astronauts on long-term missions to Mars and beyond. Most of these minuscule creatures are actually essential and have such far-reaching impacts on our health-affecting our immunity, our heart and perhaps even our mental health-that scientists often refer to the microbiome as an “invisible organ.” In fact, the microbial multitudes within us are so numerous that their total mass can add up to roughly the weight of our brain. “You can think of people as walking ecosystems,” says Pieter Dorrestein, a chemical biologist at University of California, San Diego. From the bacteria lining our guts to the too-small-to-see mites living at the base of our eyelashes, it is estimated that there are at least as many microbes on and within us as there are human cells. This effort at a space-based microbial census is the first step toward understanding, preventing and mitigating dangerous outbreaks-whether they arise onboard the station, during long-duration flights toward Mars or even back home in hospitals. Last month astronauts collected samples from across the interior of the ISS to build an unprecedented three-dimensional map of its microbiome. New studies, however, are designed to change that. We do not even know the full spectrum of spacefaring species living onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Yet we are still mostly in the dark about how these communities of microscopic hitchhikers react to microgravity. Each person voyaging off-world is accompanied by up to 100 trillion bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms, any number of which could jeopardize human health. The 10 ESA Member States participating in the International Space Station programme are: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.Astronauts never travel to space alone. All this while generating high-tech jobs in European industry and research institutions, contributing to the build up of Europe as a peaceful knowledge and information society, and to the greatest international cooperative project ever undertaken. Just that €1 has made it possible to develop and assemble in the Space Station, to build the ground infrastructure and to operate and use the Station for world-class research for more than 10 years. The European share, at around €8 billion spread over the whole programme, amounts to just one Euro spent by every European every year: less than the price of a cup of coffee in most of our big cities. That €100 billion figure is shared over a period of almost 30 years between all participants: the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 10 of the 20 European nations who are part of ESA. The good news is that it comes cheaper than you might think. ![]() High technology on the space frontier is not cheap. The cost of the International Space Station, including development, assembly and running costs over 10 years, comes to €100 billion. ![]()
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