Life Support, Space Biology & Space Medicine
The human body did not evolve for space. This encyclopedia maps what weightlessness and radiation do to it, the technologies that keep a crew alive, and the countermeasures that will carry humans safely to the Moon and Mars.
Explore the human factor
- Disciplines
The fields of space life science — space medicine, radiation biology, psychology and human factors, and life support.
5 entries - Physiological Effects
How spaceflight changes the body — bone and muscle loss, fluid shift, vision changes, and more.
5 entries - Countermeasures
How crew health is protected — exercise, nutrition, shielding, lighting, and psychological support.
10 entries - Life-Support Technologies
The technologies that keep a crew alive — oxygen, carbon-dioxide removal, water recovery, food, and closed ecosystems.
9 entries
Disciplines
- Space MedicineDiscipline
The medical discipline concerned with keeping astronauts healthy before, during, and after spaceflight — studying how microgravity changes the body and how to protect it on long missions to the ISS, the Moon, and Mars.
- Space Radiation BiologyDiscipline
The study of how the radiation of space — galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles — affects living tissue, and how crews can be protected beyond the shelter of Earth's magnetic field.
- Space Psychology & Human FactorsDiscipline
The behavioural health and human-factors discipline — how isolation, confinement, altered day–night cycles, and workload affect crews, and how habitats and schedules are designed around human needs.
- Environmental Control & Life SupportDiscipline
The engineering that keeps a crew alive — generating oxygen, scrubbing carbon dioxide, recovering water, managing waste, and controlling the atmosphere. These technologies make up the Environmental Control and Life Support System.
- Bioregenerative Life SupportDiscipline
Life support that uses living systems — plants and microbes — to recycle air, water, and waste and to grow food, moving toward the closed ecosystems that long missions far from Earth will need.
Data & provenance
Each discipline, physiological effect, life-support technology, and countermeasure is a first-class knowledge-graph entity resolved through the Scientific Data Engine, reusing the ECLSS life-support system, the radiation environments, the space stations, and the astronauts already in the graph. Curated from NASA and ESA human-research sources. Quantitative figures are omitted unless well established. See source quality.