Abstract
To the Editor:
I thoroughly enjoyed your recent Special Issue on Space Medicine. 1 In 2003, because of my interest in wilderness medicine, NASA asked me to help with designing a medical kit for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. Apparently the kit had not been updated in many years. The Medical Advisory Board consisted of medical specialists, flight surgeons, and NASA officials. We were given a list of potential medical conditions and were tasked with designing a medical kit to cover those conditions. The first thing we did was eliminate 75% of the conditions. Most of them were appropriate for earthly medicine but not for space. For example, distal radius fracture, ulnar dislocation, navicular fracture, lunate dislocation, and perilunate dislocation all became “wrist injury.” The contents had to be “flyable” in space, and we tried to make the weight and cube minimal. To do this, we tried to find drugs and equipment with multiple uses. We came up with 8 antibiotics that covered all the infections that we thought likely. The crew medical officer had to be trained on the kits, and everything had to be blessed by NASA. We worked on the kits for several years, and they were designed for low-Earth orbit. The potential for expedition flight to Mars and beyond probably will call for a new design and a physician on board.