- We're here in Boston at Brigham and Women's Hospital
and we're about to get a crash course
in how to deal with a medical emergency in space.
I'm terrified!
(techno music) (coughing)
(alarm blares)
- The smoke seems to be going down so,
(coughing) and the alarm stopped
so we should be--
(background noise drowns out voices)
NASA astronauts go into space
when they're at their peak physical ability.
But like the rest of us, they can still get sick.
And when that happens, it's not as if
they can just drive to the hospital.
Astronauts in low Earth orbit like those
on the International Space Station
still have constant contact with ground control
if there's a medical emergency.
A flight surgeon can talk them through it
and provide professional expertise.
Astronauts flying to Mars won't have that luxury.
They'll need to solve emergencies on their own
without much help from Earth.
And that's why we've come to the STRATUS Center.
It specializes in medical simulations
from doctoring robotic dummies
to using virtual reality to practice microscopic surgery.
STRATUS received funding from NASA
to build its own spacecraft sick bay,
where they run medical emergency simulations.
While astronauts are currently trained
in basic medical procedures, this program is focused
on how teams should behave during a medical emergency
on a deep space mission
and what it will take to work autonomously
without constant support from ground control.
So what I love about this center is
that we're in a regular old hospital hallway
and then we turn here and we're in space.
- Incredible, right?
- I have to hand it to y'all, it looks
like you ripped it straight out of a sci-fi movie.
- Thanks, well, we had a lot of input from experts
from NASA and it's based on the Destiny module
so it's the same kind of height and width
so it feels compact.
Just as in space.
- Weight is such an issue for launching
so how did you decide what tools you would need,
you know, what are some of the basics that you have to have?
- Heat load is a huge concern,
and even things like fluids, so we use a lot of IV fluid
in the hospital and it's so heavy to take fluids,
so you can't really do that.
And so we've got like a basic cardiac kit,
a respiratory kit, like a first aid kit that you would have
with bandages and gauze and so on.
It's a low resource healthcare environment.
- [Loren Grush] So it's not a lot of equipment
but it seems like you have a lot of different things
that could be used for different purposes.
- This has all of the medicine you'd need,
so this is like a medicine kit,
it has some key drugs for dealing with cardiac conditions
such as epinephrine, it has atropine, it has albuterol,
other drugs and this is actually what it really looks like.
They're in these little pouches
so what would happen normally is you'd open the door
and things would start to fly all over the place.
- Right, gotta keep things down.
- People come through here and they expect us
to have a switch
so we can flick thew gravity off and people will be floating
so we don't have that functionality.
- [Loren Grush] So, I suit up for the simulations.
We're gonna run through three of them.
A common emergency, a dire medical emergency,
and a full out meltdown situation.
The common medical situation we dealt
with first, was cardiac arrhythmia,
or an irregular heartbeat.
- [Woman On Microphone] How are her vital signs?
- The pulse ox is 96 and heart rate's about 140.
Blood pressure is 128/70. - Okay, can you get an EKG?
- So the stickers, it tells you where to put 'em,
so right, left, upper, and lower.
- It's nervous.
- [Woman On Microphone] I'm looking at the images
from the monitor right now and I think we're gonna need
to give her some medications.
- It takes one, two, three, medicine's in,
so we got a pause on the monitor.
And heart rate's back, it's slower, I think we're good,
she's looking much better.
- Whoo, we did it, I think.
(laughs)
Next we faced a more dire medical emergency.
Ripley had a collapsed lung and I got
to try out my shot-giving skills.
- [Woman On Microphone] You just go right in
and you should hear a rush of air.
- [Brett] Looks like the oxygen is
maybe a little bit better.
- You are really thinking now of how does the crew deal
with these events in a semi-autonomous or autonomous way?
If you have an acute episode and it's 20 minutes
to wait for a response from the flight surgeon
on the ground, you don't have that functionality.
- You need answers now. - You got to do it.
So the crew then has to work autonomously.
- But we're lucky in these simulations.
We have communication with ground control
to help us do these trainings.
And good thing too, because our last test,
we faced a critical emergency.
Toxic exposure, plus a ship malfunction on top of that.
Hi, we have an alarm going off,
it looks like we have a leak, maybe an ammonia leak.
An issue with the ship causes a toxic ammonia leak.
We need to put on our personal protective equipment.
- There's no time.
- We don't have time for that.
- [Woman On Microphone] Seems like your
solar panels are overheating.
- Oh crud, okay.
On top of all this, one of our
solar panels starts overheating,
which we have to address for the safety of the entire crew.
- [Woman On Microphone] Alright, we need to get
that solar panel shut down so it doesn't overheat
and cause more problems.
- Okay.
- Okay, I'm in the process of getting that going.
- [Female Crew Member] What should we do about this?
- Okay, hold on, can we put the solar panel on pause?
We need to talk about Ripley.
- Wait, no, we can't put that on pause.
- Okay.
What does Brett need to do to isolate
the solar panel problem?
- [Woman On Microphone] So he needs to go
into Control Panel Three.
- Okay, go to Control Panel Three.
- [Woman On Microphone] Section J
- Section J.
Alright.
(coughing)
- Okay, that's the sound that you're over.
(groaning)
- We failed!
These simulations help teams practice
better communication and learn how
to work together efficiently under stress.
If you're dealing with a new emergency,
you don't wanna be figuring out how
to work together at the same time
- In an extraterrestrial environment,
simulating things before they actually occur,
figuring out the ergonomics of how do you
take care of patients under very
challenging circumstances is a real opportunity
to improve the care that we provide potential patients
in a space mission.
- And you can't really go to space
all the time and practice.
- Unfortunately, you can't go to space
all the time to practice, so doing this is
at least the beginning of the work towards
improving the quality of care in space medicine.
- No astronauts have gone through these simulations yet,
but STRATUS plans to do more behavioral studies
and improve their sick bay simulations
and their methods could be incorporated
into astronaut training someday.
So, I think it's clear that I have
a lot more medical training I need to do
before I'm equipped to deal with one of
these emergencies in space.
I think it's clear that NASA does too.
They're gonna have to do a lot of simulations
like this one before they send astronauts to Mars.
NASA is still many years away from sending crews
into deep space, but when that time comes,
simulations like these will be critical
to training crews to work together so
that they'll be able to handle emergencies
without much help from home.
If you enjoyed this video and want more space content
with yours truly, you should check out and subscribe
to our new YouTube channel, Verge Science.
Thanks for watching!