Age of space series#

VAN HORN, TEXAS - JULY 20: The New Shepard Blue Origin rocket lifts-off from the launch pad carrying Jeff Bezos along with his brother Mark Bezos, 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, and 82-year-old Wally Funk prepare to launch on Jin Van Horn, Texas. “The only thing… that was of concern when they did those studies was really anxiety and definitely claustrophobia.” “They were fine, they were perfectly fine,” Donoviel said. At 5G, a 200-pound person feels like they weigh 1,000 pounds.ĭonoviel pointed to three specific studies that saw people - with a broad range of ages, physical conditions and ailments - endure up to 6G. When the centrifuge is stopped, passengers inside could be said to be experiencing 1G, or normal gravity on Earth.Īt 2G, they feel like they weigh twice their body weight. That faster it spins, the higher the g-forces pressing into the passenger grow, much like the carnival rides that pin passengers to the wall of a spinning circle by rotating the circle at high speeds. Subjects were strapped into a small capsule attached to a massive metal arm that can swing the capsule around in a circle. Researchers put people with pre-existing medical conditions, including elderly men with heart conditions, into a spinning centrifuge to simulate the g-forces the body is subjected to during a trip to space.

Age of space series#

William Shatner is now the oldest person ever to go to space: 'The most profound experience'Ī series of studies in the 2010s sought to answer such question. So is it really safe for just anyone, even a 90-year-old, to go to space?įrom left to right: Chris Boshuizen, William Shatner, Audrey Powers, Glen de Vries. But Americans are used to imagining astronauts as people in prime physical condition, siphoned out of competitive selection processes like those overseen by NASA. Private space companies have pledged for years to open up spaceflight to more people. I was trying to smile but my jaw was pushed back in my head.” “So we literally hit the atmosphere and stopped, and it was about 5Gs…I’ve never experienced that. “When a stone hits a lake, it stops and then it sinks,” Boshuizen told reporters. And Shatner’s oldest-in-space record bested the one set only a few months earlier by Wally Funk, who was previously denied the opportunity to fly by NASA in the 1960s before she joined Bezos on a his own Blue Origin flight in July at the age of 82.īut while Shatner described the payoff of floating above the Earth as “profound,” getting there isn’t always the most comfortable.Ĭhris Boshuizen, a co-founder of satellite company Planet Labs who flew alongside Shatner, said that as their Blue Origin dove back into the Earth’s thick atmosphere from the vacuum of space, it was as if they were a stone slamming into a body of water.

Shatner became the oldest person ever to travel to space when his vessel - a suborbital space tourism rocket built by Blue Origin, the company funded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos - brushed the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere and vaulted him into weightlessness. In that moment, at least one thing became certain: Yes, a nonagenarian can be an astronaut. “But if the mission goes on for longer, it can actually be a bad thing for you,” said Nawanaji-Enwerem.William Shatner, the 90-year-old actor of “Star Trek” fame, endured a 10-minute, rocket-powered ride to the edge of space, which put his body through crushing g-forces that his fellow passengers described as face-bending - only to step out of the vehicle and immediately begin waxing poetic about the experience and dodging a champagne shower. The findings show that space mission duration will lead to a slower aging process, which looks like a good thing. To fill in the gap, Nawanaji-Enwerem and his team members took the novel step to look at epigenetic biomarkers such as DNAmPhenoAge, a robust marker of disease risk, and DNAmGrimAGE, a predictor of mortality risk. Studies on long-term space travel often measure aging biomarkers such as telomere length and heartbeat rates, not epigenetic aging. In space, people usually experience environmental stressors like microgravity, cosmic radiation, and social isolation, which can all impact aging. The study reviewed data from the six participants of the Mars-500 mission, a simulated space travel and residence experiment launched by the European Space Agency in 2010. Nawanaji-Enwerem, Berkeley Public Health postdoctoral fellow and first author of a study published in Cell Reports in November 2020. But there’s also been a lot of research that has shown the opposite,” said Jamaji C. “Many of us assume that being exposed to radiation or other harm in space would be reflected by increased aging.