With the final flight of NASA's shuttle Atlantis due to take place later this week, it will bring with it an end to the capability of the USA to send its own astronauts into Space. I'm sure it is going to be a very sad day for many when Atlantis makes its final landing after a 12 day mission to the International Space Station (ISS), and many people I am sure will be left shaking their heads in disappointment. 

Yet another problem with long term Space travel has been highlighted this week, following the release of results for a study by NASA researcher Lakshmi Putcha and her colleagues.

Need a medication here on Earth? No problem – simply visit your local chemists or look in your medicine cabinet at home where simple medications such as pain-killers or antibiotics, if stored correctly, have a shelf life of up to a couple of years and retain most of their potency in that time. However, astronauts in Space it would seem might not be quite so lucky.

Longer duration Space travel, such as to Mars, may require astronauts to spend up to 2 years on board a space craft, and so the need to take greater volumes of medication will be required. Little is currently know in relation to the potential effects that the Space environment can have on these – an environment subject to such factors as microgravity, radiation, flight vibration, as well as variations in temperature and humidity.

Consequently, a study was conducted involving flying four boxes of drugs, each containing 35 medications up to the International Space Station (ISS). In accordance with good scientific practice, four identical boxes were also kept under controlled conditions at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, USA, to act as a control for comparison. The four boxes from the ISS were returned one by one, back to Earth after varying lengths of time, with one box returning after just 13 days and the last box returning after 28 months on the ISS.

The medications were analysed to see how they compared to the control kits and it was found that; less than third of the medications kept in Space met US requirements for levels of active ingredients; the longer the kits were in Space, the fewer the number of formulations that retained acceptable potency levels.

The authors conclude that "It is important to characterize space-specific degradation products and toxicity limits using ground-based analogue environments of space that include proton and heavy ion radiation, vibration and multiple gravity conditions.  This information can facilitate research for the development of space-hardy pharmaceuticals and packaging technologies."

Just a few short weeks after safely returning to Earth from her last mission STS-133 on March 9th 2011, the Discovery space shuttle is already going through the process of decommissioning before making her way to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, in Washington DC, USA.

Technicians from Kennedy Space Centre’s Orbiter Processing Facility are presently pulling her to bits to make her safe for the general public to play with!

Pictures below show the removal of the front nose where lies the forward reaction control system (FRCS), or in layman’s terms an array of tiny little rocket engines used to control the precise movements and orientation of the shuttle in Space. As such, these tend to contain toxic explosive material and so it all needs a good clean out. The engines will also be removed and replaced with replicas, and the originals put into storage for possible use at a later date with a future spacecraft.

Only two more space shuttle flights now remain, with Endeavour  due to fly on mission STS-134 on April 19th 2011, to be followed in June this year by the last historic shuttle flight ever by Atlantis. 

Click on the images below to enlarge.