When I was in Middle School, we wandered around and put tape on the phone, the lockers, the
toilets, our history teacher -- then we’d culture the bacteria.
They made us stop after we accidentally cultured strep throat.
Yo, what up?
The space station!
That’s what!
I’m Trace, thanks for continuing to watch DNews after that “joke.”
The problem with those tape experiments is we always assume it’s toilets that are the
grossest, but it’s more commonly things like shared landline phones or door handles!
If you watch movies about space stations you probably think of them as futuristic… and
the future?
Super clean, right?
The thing is… like anywhere else humans inhabit: space stations are super gross.
Even after a shower, there are potentially many billions of bacteria and fungi on your
skin; there’s no escaping them.
So, when you’re trapped in a canister above the Earth they exist there too!
During the 15-year flight of Soviet (then Russia’s) Mir, cosmonauts would regularly
clean the surfaces of the space station to fight the scourge of bacteria and fungi, but
in 1998 U.S. astronauts opened a “rarely-accessed panel” and found a “large free-floating
mass of water” the size of a basketball.
Without gravity, moisture had begun to coalesce, forming spheres.
The Mir crew then embarked on what must have been a truly disgusting hunt, and found two
more globules… and get this, they had color.
Two were brownish, and a third was “cloudy white.”
They sucked some up for samples, and found “amoebas and protozoa,” and “dust mites.”
Blech.
Space is a crazy place, it’s not like you can open the window and air it out.
Whatever lives on you or me, hitches a ride to what may be bacterial heaven… a PLOS
One study from November 2016 found bacteria loooove space.
They’re even better at forming biofilms, creating higher density populations, and may
even be more capable of causing disease up there!
Another study in PeerJ found Bacillus safensis -- grows 60-percent better in space.
Fun and scary fact: it got it’s name Safensis after it was found on spacecraft at the Kennedy
Space Center’s, Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF).
New species, all thanks to space exploration.
More recently, in a study of the Japanese module, Kibo -- that was basically like putting
tape around my school -- astronauts took samples from the incubator, an air intake, air diffuser,
and (bum-bum-bum) a handrail.
Their paper, published in npj Microgravity, noted that Staphylococcaceae and Enterobacteriaceae
were the most common on the space station -- normally they’re found on human palms,
and species of these can cause some nasty illnesses…
Salmonella is a type of Enterobacteria, and in tests done with mice, salmonella flown
into space killed the mice two days earlier than regular salmonella.
Wheee!
The space industry is taking this seriously.
In this study, they also found species related to the human stomach, as well as those from
water and land-based ecosystems.
Another study in Microbiome found Actinobacteria -- important for soil systems on Earth, but
also a possible cause of skin irritations and inflammations.
And this is a humans-in-space problem.
Before it was launched, Kibo was scrubbed with isopropyl alcohol, and had less than
200 bacteria per square centimeter, but after a few years in space, there were 50 times
more!
On Earth, bacteria have to compete with chlorines, soaps and other naturally-occurring chemicals,
naturally antibacterial minerals like copper, other predatory and competitive species, and
of course the never-ending UV blast from the sun.
In an effort to keep bacteria from taking over the football-field-sized flying hamster
tubes -- space-bound humans keep very clean and are tested, and space-bound equipment
is cleaned and sanitized… but as we said, that’s not always enough.
The problem with bacteria on space stations, is that we don’t always know what they are!
Species have to be collected, transported back to ground, and then DNA sequenced and
analyzed.
NASA is working on something called the LOCAD-PTS, the Lab-On-a-Chip Application Development–Portable
Test System, which will (hopefully) be able to test surfaces for pathogens in minutes,
rather than culturing in a lab.
As we look to asteroids, Mars, or beyond… we’ll need to figure this out.
If we don’t, we could end up with the nightmare scenario: a bacteria or fungus that naturally
lives in (or on) humans, that thrives and mutates in space, and causes a rapid onset
illness millions of miles from home.
It sounds like a movie plot, but top scientists are working making sure we never have to make
that biopic.
Ha!
Biopic!
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