Disciplines

The medical discipline concerned with keeping astronauts healthy before, during, and after spaceflight — studying how microgravity changes the body and how to protect it on long missions to the ISS, the Moon, and Mars.

The study of how the radiation of space — galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles — affects living tissue, and how crews can be protected beyond the shelter of Earth's magnetic field.

The behavioural health and human-factors discipline — how isolation, confinement, altered day–night cycles, and workload affect crews, and how habitats and schedules are designed around human needs.

The engineering that keeps a crew alive — generating oxygen, scrubbing carbon dioxide, recovering water, managing waste, and controlling the atmosphere. These technologies make up the Environmental Control and Life Support System.

Life support that uses living systems — plants and microbes — to recycle air, water, and waste and to grow food, moving toward the closed ecosystems that long missions far from Earth will need.