In January 2020, I drove from San Francisco, California to Houston, Texas excited for an opportunity to work at Johnson Space Center in the Spacecraft and Software Engineering Branch. Home to the NASA’s Mission Control, the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, and NASA’s astronauts, Houston is also the destination for Space Health Research.
Although not part of the job description, I wanted to build a course on Space Medicine. Duke allows undergraduates to submit a syllabus and teach a House Course on any subject. The only restriction - no prerequisites.
As someone who is only medically trained as an EMT I worked a series of fantastic collaborators to make the course possible. If you would like to watch any of the lectures from me or any of my guests, the course material is avaiable on the TRISH Orbit Platform.
The Course
To first learn about space, we need to study aerospace. In my very first lecture, I use the story of the Icarus to warn against over enthusiasms of wanting to immediately jump to space. Instead, before we learn to blast off, we need to first learn how to fly. And this is the story of space medicine; much like NASA evolving from NACA, space physiology is an offshoot of extreme physiology and research that dates back to the 17th century.
The course is structured as 12 weeks of education. The front half of the course is loaded with information regarding the basics of astrobiology, anatomy, and the unique hazards of aerospace and space travel.
TRISH
With Baylor College of Medicine’s Translational Research Institute of Space Health and Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, the lecture series is being hosted online. This first semester is very much a test run and all the lectures will be rerecorded in spring of 2021.
However, we want students to be engaged and consider their ability to get involved in the human spaceflight program!
Follow along with the lecture as it is updated for all the material.
My Collaborators
This course would not possible without the help from doctors, astronauts, and astrobiology researchers, all over the world!