Suborbital Vehicles to Study Transition Adaptation to Spaceflight – Why Biologists Should Care About the New Suborbital Flight Opportunities

The advent of the new generation of suborbital space vehicles is opening up a new and exciting realm of space science that should be of great interest to biologists. These vehicles make it possible to explore biological responses and adaptations that occur in the first few minutes of entering spaceflight and also in the first few minutes after return from space. Historically these transition stages in spaceflight have simply not been available for research, especially within human-rated vehicles. Given that complex biological responses are seldom linear over time, and that essentially all current experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) are conducted after stabilization on orbit, biologists are missing the chance to understand the pathways that lead from terrestrial existence to successful spaceflight adaptation and back. Studies conducted on suborbital spacecraft can therefore be an innovative approach to filling a substantial gap in knowledge regarding the temporal dynamics of biological responses to successful spaceflight physiological adaptation.