The Spaceflight101 Blog

How Closed-Loop Life Support Systems Teach Us About Sustainable Design By Dr. Nadia Kovac A conceptual biosphere module where plants and technology merge to recycle air, water, and nutrients. Picture a sealed capsule drifting through the void. The people inside are breathing air molecules that left someone’s lungs months ago. They’re drinking water that has…

I have spent the past week trying to write a single paragraph about Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome, and I have failed seven times. The first draft said SANS is “a condition in which astronauts develop swelling of the optic nerve.” A colleague who reads retinal scans for a living circled the word “swelling” and wrote in…

I still remember the first time I studied the schematics for the International Space Station’s life support system. It wasn’t just a collection of pumps, filters, and tanks. It was a metabolism—a synthetic one, sure—but a metabolism nonetheless. The system didn’t simply scrub the air or recycle water. It intertwined them, passing molecules back and…

Muscle atrophy usually conjures a single, stark picture: a hospital bed, a frail frame, limbs thinning under the weight of stillness. But the same biological machinery that shrinks muscles in aging or illness also hums inside the finely tuned bodies of elite athletes—during an injury layoff, a post-season break, or even a long-haul flight spent…

There’s a quiet shift in how we think about resources. It doesn’t happen in a boardroom or at a policy summit. It happens inside sealed chambers where every breath, every drop of water, every scrap of organic matter gets counted. These are closed-loop life support systems—engineered ecosystems built to keep people alive where resupply isn’t…

When we think about muscle atrophy research, two very different pictures usually pop up. One is an astronaut, drifting in the quiet vacuum of the International Space Station, their body finally free of gravity’s constant tug. The other is an older person, maybe sitting in a sunlit living room, moving a little more cautiously than…

The Common Thread in Muscle Loss Walk through any rehab ward and you’ll feel it before you see it—the heavy quiet of bodies stuck in one place. A hip fracture patient sits by the window, leg elevated, quadriceps softening day by day. In a setting that couldn’t be more different, a sprinter sidelined by an…

The Common Thread Between a Sprinter and a Grandparent I often start my lectures with two photographs. One shows an Olympic sprinter mid-stride, every fiber taut and purposeful. The other shows an octogenarian gripping a walker, knuckles white, willing their legs to cooperate. The audience sees two completely different realities. I see a single biological…

Muscle loss conjures two very different pictures. One is an astronaut back from six months on the International Space Station, legs shaking as gravity reasserts itself. The other is an older person, hands gripping the armrests, trying to stand up from a kitchen chair. On the surface, these look like separate worlds—one a high-tech frontier,…

Picture an astronaut stepping off a capsule after six months on the International Space Station. There is no heroic stride. Instead, you see a wobble—a cautious, almost bewildered relearning of how feet meet ground. Now shift your gaze to a hospital room. An 80-year-old, a week into bed rest after a hip fracture, tries to…