0131-Deep-Space-20260102
Since human spaceflight started in the 1960s, space agencies around the globe have adhered to soft rules for exploration. The UN Outer Space Treaty, the ISS Intergovernmental Agreement, and more recently the Artemis Accords have laid out how we as humanity collectively approach space travel. But as more capabilities arise, who is thinking about what comes next? Well, there's a company thinking through space strategy, policy, analysis, community, and corporate engagement that thinks that they can provide a solution. This is T-Minus Deep Space. I'm Maria Varmazis. Recently, we've held a series of chats with Solamed solutions about their organization and what they hope to bring to commercial companies who are exploring the future of human space travel. Today's chat is with Charles Doran, Chief Operating Officer at Solamed, who shares insights from his experience with NASA to how he is approaching the problems that need to be solved with ethics for the future of space travel. My name is Charles Doran. I'm an emeritus professor at the University of Cincinnati and the Chief Operating Officer of Solamed when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. My parents took us to the Kennedy Space Center in 1968 and we took a bus out to the vehicle semi-building where they were assembling the Saturn V rockets and took us to the moon. We were able to get out of the bus and walk around. I actually looked up at the rocket that was taking the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. It would really be cool to work at NASA. Then all through high school and college, I wanted to go to medical school, but I found out very quickly that you couldn't do that with season chemistry and physics. Here I am now as an emeritus professor in the College of Medicine and having worked with NASA for 33 years. I always find myself in a unique position of being and working with physicians, both MDs and doctors of osteopathic medicine, learning about medicine and spaceflight, specifically space medicine, about being in a room sort of where it happened. Being the kind of person who somebody would say, "You need to get this done," and I would go off and do it. I always sort of, somebody once said, "You're like radar or Riley from MASH." The person would say, "Well, I wish I had a sink here to wash my hands." The next day there's a sink. So that kind of thing, I've had the opportunity to write a number of textbooks, almost 10 now, almost 500 manuscripts, book chapters, and so really been at this for a long time. With respect to my time at NASA, I started in 1990 and wrote all kinds of documents, the Strategic Plan for Telemasin, the editor-in-chief of the Telemasin Hill Journal, and traveled to 37 countries. So really, I've been around the world on the ground or in the airplanes, not in space. So that's sort of a very quick background from how I got to where I am. Yeah. Thank you so much for that great introduction and telling me the taster of your story. I'm sure it's scraping the surface on that one. We are in such a fascinating time for space exploration, but specifically space medicine. It has to have been just so fascinating from your point of view, just to see where we are now, just thinking back from where your career started to compare and contrast of what the kind of developments that we've been seeing and where we are today. Well, I think the most important part of healthcare today, in my opinion, to be able to see a patient where the physician and patient are not in the same place. And so if I think of Thomas Friedman's book, "Thanks for Being Late," in 2007, the most important invention was mobile phones, smartphone. And with that, come ushers in an environment where you have things like YouTube videos, you have the ability to do what we're doing right now, what we're doing at video conference. You have things like where you can order your food delivered to your house, so you can go online and find a date, or you can go and search Google to look at the best restaurant or where to park. So all these things really occurred in the last 30 years or so, 25 to 30 years. So here we are at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, and we have the ability to reach out and talk to one another remotely. Now, NASA has been monitoring its astronauts since the early '60s on the very first flight. And in fact, the Soviet Union, when they launched Sputnik II, Head Leica, which was a dog, went into space, and they were able to monitor her from space remotely. And so the idea of being able to reach out and have technology to do that, you know, now 60 or 70 years ago, today we can actually do that, and you can be anywhere in the world and talk to somebody. You can literally talk to somebody in the jungle on the top of Mount Everest, on the moon, although there is a time delay. And of course, on the way to Mars, there's even further delay of communication. So things like avatars, computer-generated images, the ability for AI. I mean, AI has been around for a long time. Think of laparoscopic surgery developed in the 1920s, but the hole in which to get the instruments in was the size of a softball. So that's open surgery because the camera was very large. And so now you can go through the belly button and do surgery. So this technology really enables us to do things and understand life's processes better that will help us get to, we hope, a human exploration of Mars and beyond. I'm very curious as we look towards the future especially about what enabling technologies have you maybe most encouraged or most exciting to you. I mean, as you were mentioning about all the monitoring that we've been able to do, we're also, I mean, we're going, we have better monitoring abilities now, but also the ability to better interact and potentially perform remote medical procedures. I'm just curious what your thoughts are about that. When I was working with NASA, I was on detail as what's called an IPA back, in fact, for almost 25 years or so, spending 33 years actually with the agency. We did here at the university since I was on loan from the university to NASA headquarters. We did a series of experiments with the DaVinci robot and with the Zeus robot. These were two competing robotic systems and we did a program called NEMO, NASA Extreme and Mission Operations. And I heard many people in the military and many people within NASA saying we're never going to do surgery in space. So if we assume for a minute that we will one day send human beings to live and stay on Mars or perhaps on the moon, there's going to have to be things like surgical intervention. There's going to have to be the ability to do procedures to perhaps deliver a baby. Or even if you can actually, you can certainly conceive, but the question is whether you can actually carry a baby to term and then deliver a baby in an absence of gravity or a different gravitational pull. So these things allow us then to explore the capabilities of living and working and living in a distant place. So we know that during the age of discovery in the 15th and 16th century, that people got on boats and they disappeared into the ocean. They just sailed away from England or Portugal or China or wherever it was and they explored the earth. And they could stop along an island, get fresh water, maybe get some fresh vegetables or find some animals or whatever. But on a space exploration initiative, you have to take everything with you, which means we have to develop newer, more robust technologies that have limited human interaction. So is it possible to have a robot like they have on the space, international space station to help us do things? We certainly see AI now where you can talk to or even have a relationship with a robot, which in some ways is creepy, but it's possible. And so that's today. So if we think about jumping into the future, say 20, 20, 40, 20, 50, when you know, I'll be like 100 years old almost, I don't know that we'll be on Mars. But if we are, there are many, many different issues that we have to address between now and then. And those individuals who are doing that research are like six or seven years old. Yes. I was going to say that that is a burning question I have in my mind about what that gap is that we, I'm sure it would take us hours to address that. But top of mind for you, what are some of those gaps that we need to figure out between now and the day that we're on Mars? Here at the University of Cincinnati, I'm the director of the Armstrong Institute, Space Institute. And a lot of people believe when you talk about space exploration, they may go, it's an engineering construct. And that's true. There are engineering issues, right? So how can we get to Mars faster? Right now it's going to take six, seven, eight months, depending on the propulsion systems. And then from a human perspective, what are we going to do as individuals? I mean, how do you have five people in basically a fancy airstream trailer or Winnebago, you know, motorhome, or maybe tourist regrain on bus, you know, something that size, and you're in there for the duration, right, until you get there. So how do we address medical care? How do we develop better processes for making pharmaceuticals in our microgravity environment? How do we grow food? How do we address the ethics behind space? And we're going to talk about ethics in a minute with regard to Solamend. You have a huge opportunity for technology to completely change the way we live and work on the earth. And we see that now with things like AI taking jobs away, but creating new jobs. And so I think some of the technologies that we need don't exist today. You're certainly not going to be able to help pay someone's abdomen without a new technology. In fact, like I said, it's got to be 20 years or so ago, I saw a glove with all these like wires coming out and on the hand part were suction cups. And the suction cups would go on the abdomen on the glove. And we could push down on the abdomen and the person in Washington, D.C. could feel the patient's abdomen in California. But that was 20 years ago, right? And so we have things like avatars that allow us to interact. We have the ability to grow organs now, some with someone's T-cells. So a lot of these things are not, they're still experimental. They're not ready for primetime as it were. But I think you'll see that many of these technologies will lead to new technologies, which would then lead to new industries and new opportunities for ground-based research, ground-based manufacturing. But eventually, there'll be long-term, long-duration space exploration initiatives where they'll be maybe measured in hundreds of thousands of people. That will be a fascinating day. I hope to see it one day. You mentioned, I wanted, you put a pin in ethics in Solamand and I wanted to get back to that. What were you going to say about that? So Solamand is going to have a series of roundtables and there's a series of questions that will be asked of a core biothesis. And those core biothesis may or may not have a background in space exploration or space issues, but they're ethicists, right? So if you think about things like, well, who should fly, right? If you go to a amusement park and you get on a, like, I live in Cincinnati. So we have King's Island, which is just north of here. And they have a famous roller coaster called the Beast. There's one in King's Dominion. You obviously have space mountain down in Disney and so forth. So these roller coasters, do these fast rides say if you're pregnant, you have high blood pressure, you have a bad back, you're overweight, don't ride this ride, right? You ride at your own risk. Well, obviously some people, they don't want to, you know, because they don't want to die. And so the question with space exploration is, should we say to you, as a female who's going to go to Mars for three years, you must be on birth control so you can't get pregnant. We have to take your gonval area route. We have to take your appendix out. What are the ethics? What if you're, you're certain religions you require certain rituals before burial? What do you do with a deceased crew member? Who should fly? Who shouldn't fly? So these are ethical questions about how do we address commercial space flight, right? So company A and company B and company C may not follow the same set of guidelines or they may interpret them. In a different way. NASA, if you fly the International Space Station, you must follow the International Space Station protocols developed by the Multilateral Medical Operations Panel and the Multilateral Space Minus and Board. If you fly on Delta Airlines or American Airlines, those pilots also must meet certain criteria to be a pilot. But the people in the back do not, right? We don't say to somebody, oh, you know, you're schizophrenics, so we're going to allow you to fly in first class and freak out. Well, you don't know that, that somebody's going to do that. But you won't, we wouldn't want that person to be on a spacecraft with five other people and freak out. Yeah, right. So ethics is do commercial companies now do an analysis and do they evaluate people for that? We'll be right back after this quick break. What a fascinating question. I imagine for many people the assumption would be they would maybe follow NASA's lead and just sort of follow conventions that were there. But yeah, you wanted to add something to that. Well, no, I mean, I think that the NASA has its guidelines now forward facing. So they're not internal. And those guidelines, by the way, were developed in part beginning of the Spatial Program. So up until 1977, most of the guidelines and requirements were sort of had been developed and modified a little bit by the biostring program of the Air Force coming out of the 1950s. And so NASA didn't really develop its own set of standards until 1977 with the creation of a medical policy board standards for picking payload specialists and mission specialists for the Spatial Program. And those carried over, obviously, into the current ISS program. But remember, the ISS program is really the very first, aside from fighting a war, either on terror or World War II, you find that the International Consortium of the International Space Station then led us to the Artemis Accords, which really looks at how do we protect the people in space? How do we protect space itself? I mean, going again to ethics, do we have a cemetery on Mars? Do we leave human bodies on Mars? And if we have a, we don't want to call them a colony, but a settlement. If we have a settlement where human beings are living on Mars, do we have a cemetery? Do we have a crematorium? And I ask somebody once, why some societies are better off than others? And it's like, well, if you think about the development of the United States as a nation, the question was, why is America, the United States specifically a higher standard of living than others is because the person answered was the British brought their wives, which sounds kind of corny. But if you think about that, if you think of a family coming, you want to live in a community where there's a grocery store, there's a library, there's a movie theater, there's a fire department, police department, cemetery, a park where you can go throw a frisbee or whatever. And so when we think about exploration and development of settlements on Mars where people are living, you have to create a sense of society. We've done this a little bit in the Antarctic, about no one stays in the Antarctic. No one's buried there. They bring them back because you don't want to pollute the environment. But how do you bring, I mean, maybe there's a death star or something. I don't know. I mean, where you have a floating crematorium or a floating cemetery. But the point here is that whatever we do is a world, that's what the Artemis Accordes are about. What do we do as a world to create that opportunity? So when you think of Solamen as an organization, as three pillars, we have concept of operation, we have the educational thing where we're going to do things like summits and so forth. And then you have the space medicine education component. So you have these capabilities that allow us to bring forth probably only outside of NASA, probably the largest conglomeration of individuals with experience in measuring perhaps in hundreds if not thousands of years of experience. You have former flight surgeons, you have former astronauts, you have former policy makers, you have former chief medical officers. You have a lot of momentum there to work with the commercial companies because remember the commercial companies are all separate. They're ruled by the rule as wrong. They work with the FAA. So the question is, here's the question, is what defines an astronaut? Yeah, that is the question. If you go above the Karman line, which is the differentiation between the blackness of space and the blueness of the atmosphere, if you pass over that, now you're an astronaut, but you only up there 10 minutes. So these six women that went up in space five, six months ago, awesome capability to do that, but that wasn't really researched. That's like going on a fast ride. You enjoyed it. I mean, you got to see the curvature of the earth, but that's not the same as Neil Armstrong going and sitting on the moon. No, no, definitely not. So the question comes up is how can Solamad work with companies to establish the standard criteria across all the space companies so that you follow a common set of standards and create an opportunity where, because you know if an accident happens, I remember this. Have you ever been to Florida, to the Kennedy Space Center? In Florida, but not yet to Kennedy Space Center. I've been to Cape Canaveral, but not to KSCs. So you see the VAB is a big building with a big flag on it. So if you go there, as the rockets are taken out of that to the launchpad, 39A and 39B were built for the Apollo program. The 39A is operated now by SpaceX and is a high-fencer, so you can't get near it. And they're very particular about who has access to it, but if something happens, like a rocket blows up, NASA will be on the front page of the newspaper, not SpaceX. Yeah, that's true. It has nothing to do with NASA. There's no NASA astronauts on there. And the question then is who then is responsible for the MISAP itself? So I actually worked with NASA on creating the MISAP manual and working with the chief medical officer. So you have this opportunity to create, and there's a wealth of knowledge, but how do you share that knowledge? How do you create a consensus around this, rather than say, well, we're going to try and do it so we can get as many people in space and make as much money as possible? That's sort of a commercial, I mean, Delta Airlines is about safety, it's about experience. And you see their commercials, I fight Delta all the time. That's why I'm using Delta. But United and American, Lufthansa, they all are the same, is that they want you to get from point A to point B comfortably, but they'll charge you for everything. They'll charge you for baggage, and so when does the commercial space industry get to that point? But again, if you think about it, this is only 17 years old. And yet that has transformed absolutely everything. It sure has. I remember life before them, and it's just wild to think how much things have changed since. Well, Chuck, you've given me a lot to think about honestly, because I honestly never thought about just as one example about what do we do with bodies, with people when inevitably people will die on other worlds, and thinking about burial on the moon, which was, as we know, extremely controversial in the news last year with the human cremains potentially being sent to the moon and all of the controversy about that. So I'm so glad that people are thinking about these things. But in addition to it being a fascinating conversation, it's such a complicated, as it should be, complicated number of issues on every level. There was a book written in 1949 by Werner von Braun, and he was the one who built the Saturnfly rocket. And he was at odds with the Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower didn't really like the fact that we had former Nazi scientists and so forth. And yet he wrote this book about a Mars colony. And that Mars colony was under the direction of one man. You know what that man's name was? Gosh, I don't remember. No. His name was Elon. So Elon Musk, I'm not saying I'm not denigrating him, but the point here is that you have most of the last 150 to 200 years, technology has been driven by government funded activities. Yes. The British did a lot of research during the American Civil War with high altitude balloons. We have the Wright brothers, you know, they invented flight or they invented, they didn't invent flight. They invented the airplane with, you know, pitch roll on yaw would allow them to control the aircraft. And then aviation took off. But remember, aviation didn't really take off in the United States. They went to Europe. So all the speed records were set in Europe, not here, right? Because we thought it was going to be more of a circus act or, you know, and then somebody said, you know, you can drop things from airplanes like mail or things that go boom, boom, right? And so aviation took off. And so that took probably a good 50 years. I mean, it's literally 60 years from the Wright brothers to new arms staying on the moon, both by the way from Ohio. Right. And so we are the heart of it all. But the point here is that you have the ability to develop technology. And it is sort of like, if I say, well, I don't really, you know, think I need to develop anything new. I mean, think of the light bulb also develop in Ohio with Thomas Edison. So you have these devices is like, how can we, I asked somebody once, remember the PDA? Oh, yes, I do. And so I said to this one guy, I said, why can't we, because remember, the phone used to have the antenna you pull up, right? Yes. I said, why can't you put the antenna back here, like a circle and have the PDA and the phone on the same device? Not possible. I don't have any extra property on that one either. I was going to say, what a missed opportunity. I'm so sorry. Right. And so Steve, I think, right. So you've had the ability now to create things. And so now you see more companies in more individuals developing faster, better, cheaper, right? This is one of the things that Dan Golan said many years ago when he was the administrator of NASA is now you have the ability to launch a rocket and land the rocket back on a platform in the middle of the water. And the crew gets up and crew does whatever it does, comes back, they get out there, reuse the spacecraft, right? It's not a one and done kind of thing. And so that's where you'll see, you know, economy of scale, where you'll see like, I mean, you don't want to take, you know, Boeing 777 from here to say, Tokyo, and then they destroy the plane. I mean, that would be stupid, right? So you have the ability to reuse and refurbish. And so that, in and of itself, will create, you know, a wealth of opportunity. And so now, when you think of movies like Star Trek or Star Wars, where they're futuristic, the Star Trek, the more recent series of movies, isn't all that far fetched, creating, you know, platform where you can launch things from here. In this case, it's an Iowa where Captain Kirk, you know, was then Chris Pine. Yep. He actually goes to that bar and it gets recruited to go up into space. But, you know, there's, it's possible you can have these space ports. All right. Now the question, again, looking at developing space ports all over the world, is how much does that influence the environment? Right? I mean, how much does that affect the environment? So all the, all this knowledge that we've gained over the, these number of years are actually amalgamated in the soul of it. Right? You have people like Sarah Lynn Mark as a physician. You have a number of other, Smith Johnson as an example. I don't know who, how many people have you talked with? You've talked with two. You are my third, yes. Who were the other two? Sarah? I did talk to Sarah and Dr. Haley. Oh, okay. So you have this, this group of people that have come together with extreme knowledge about, about the things that we've been talking about. But I think that the most important part, I think, for people to walk away with is that space is inherently dangerous. However, it's the frontier where jobs, opportunities are going to be created for those, our young boys and girls who are studying STEM education to can provide them an opportunity. You know, a seven-year-old today, he or she has no idea what they want to do when they grow up. I mean, they might say, I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a firefighter or a policeman. We understand that we were all there a long time. But if you can now, you know, mold those students into something career-wise, then you have a huge opportunity to create new wealth. And I don't mean in dollars and cents, but the wealth of knowledge and capabilities that helps us usher in a change in the geopolitical atmosphere that we are currently living in around the world, that when you look at the earth from space, all you see is a blue dot, blue marble. You don't see the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians or between Russian, Ukraine or Democrats and Republicans. You don't see any of this, right? All you see is a changing world. And we're changing the world for sure. But how do we then go off world and create new settlements? A, is it possible? Is it sustainable? And will it actually happen? And I think the answer is yes, yes, no. I mean, right now, I don't think that we're going to be able to extend life beyond earth without a huge investment collectively around the world, not just the United States. And, you know, half a dozen has to be the entire world. And there's so much wealth of knowledge out there that's not even tapped. And universities and academic institutions around the world sometimes are stuck in the old ways of doing things. And they're not thinking of the future. And so when you start looking at future needs as nations and as a world, then you start being able to develop new technology, new capabilities and new opportunities for all. That's T-Minus Deep Space brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Or you can send us an email to space@n2k.com. We're proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies, N2K helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you, the people, the technology and the ideas, shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm T-minus host Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. [Music] (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
