Our Baby Luna… in Space?
A literal and figurative question as I saw her headlining an article in Universe Today on a topic that is dear to my heart — will human reproduction work in space, or in lunar or Martian gravity? It has never been tested, with any mammal. It can’t be tested on Earth (you can’t make local gravity go away), but it could easily be tested with a small spinning ring in low Earth orbit. I have been evangelizing the need for this for a few years now. It would be inexpensive to send impregnated guinea pigs (chosen for their longer 60-day gestation period) up with food, water and webcams to record whether a live birth occurs. If all goes well, great, we might be fine. If not, it would motivate proper research. One special need is rapid payload integration and launch to minimize time wasted in 1g while pregant. And ideally, this could be within one of the new reusable tugs, so the samples could be brought back to Earth to analyze what went wrong and to head off PETA protests (they blocked NASA’s last program to study this).
Full article: https://www.universetoday.com/157511/we-still-have-no-idea-if-its-safe-to-be-pregnant-in-space/
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