TRISH to conduct space health research on New Shepard space missions

The Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), a consortium led by Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Space Medicine with partners Caltech and MIT, announced today its initiative to conduct biomedical research on consented passengers flying on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. 

This addition of TRISH science to Blue Origin’s crewed missions increases human health data made available to the scientific community through its commercial spaceflight research program, EXPAND (Enhancing eXploration Platforms and ANalog Definition).  

“This initiative enables TRISH to further our research in space medicine by collecting valuable human health data,” said Jimmy Wu, TRISH deputy director and chief engineer and assistant professor at Baylor. “New data from suborbital flights builds our understanding of how the human body responds to spaceflight. This holistic view is key in keeping humans healthy and safe in space.” 

By collaborating with space companies like Blue Origin, TRISH can study biomedical changes in private astronauts. This adds to the space health research community’s understanding of how the body reacts to spaceflight and gives scientists access to data and samples they need to drive medical innovation to improve healthcare in space and on Earth. 

The NS-28 mission will be the first Blue Origin flight to contribute biomedical data to the EXPAND Program. It also is the first set of EXPAND data to be captured from a suborbital flight.  

The EXPAND Program collects pre-, in- and post-flight human health and performance data, environmental parameters and biosamples from multiple commercial spaceflight missions and houses them in a centralized research database and biosample repository. Samples and data will be made available to scientists with hypothesis-driven questions to advance space health research.  

To capture this physiologic data, the mission crew will wear a BioIntelliSense medical-grade BioButton® wearable device for continuous remote monitoring of vital sign and biometric trends. 

The NS-28 mission is set to lift off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One on Friday, Nov. 22.  

TRISH is a lean, virtual institute empowered by the NASA Human Research Program to help solve challenges of human deep space exploration. The Institute relentlessly pursues and funds novel research to deliver high-impact scientific and technological solutions that advance space health and help humans thrive wherever they explore, in space or on Earth.