“This was the first resistive exercise hardware that anyone had ever built for spaceflight,” he notes. NASA physiologist Michael Rapley worked with Francis on various iterations of IRED at Johnson. The SpiraFlex core units, or FlexPacks, were stacked inside dual IRED canisters, each with a spiral pulley system that provided linear resistance through the range of cable extension, enabling up to 300 pounds of resistance. “With NASA funding, we started into a fast-paced development process to take this technology and design a resistive exercise device that would fit NASA’s requirements and be able to be used on the space station,” Francis says.įrancis’ company worked through contracts with Lockheed Martin and Wyle Labs to develop the new NASA device, which became known as the Interim Resistive Exercise Device (IRED). There was no time for delays, as Billica and his team realized if they didn’t decide on a technology quickly, the first crew to live on the ISS wouldn’t have access to the right kind of exercise. He found the metal springs would start breaking at about 10,000 cycles, so he began designing parts with a mostly rubber elastomer that he developed into a spiral torsional spring he named SpiraFlex (Spinoff, 2001).įrancis reached out to Billica and eventually won the competition, after demonstrating SpiraFlex to a roomful of NASA medical officers, researchers, and astronauts. The architect-turned-inventor remembers sitting in a Kansas City coffee shop reading a newspaper about Lucid’s return to Earth, the loss of muscle mass and bone density, and Billica’s search for solutions.įrancis had been developing a new type of gym equipment, initially using steel power springs for resistance. That was the call that caught Paul Francis’ attention. Billica and his team decided to put out a call for countermeasures to address the problem. “It was clear that we needed resistive exercise,” Billica says, “something to mimic weightlifting against gravity.” Weights themselves obviously wouldn’t work in space, where they’d just float away. But these exercises alone weren’t maintaining the muscles people use to simply stand around on Earth, where we’re constantly working against gravity. Mir had a bicycle and two treadmills that required users to wear harnesses that could attach to the exercise devices with elastic cords. “It made us aware that muscle loss and bone loss due to prolonged weightlessness was a major problem.” “We were actively preparing for the International Space Station (ISS), and the NASA-Mir Program was a stepping stone for that partnership,” he says. “There wasn’t a good solution at the time,” recalls Roger Billica, who was chief of the Medical Operations Branch at Johnson Space Center from 1991 to 2001. NASA medical officers knew they had to find a better way for astronauts to keep fit on longer missions. Still, Lucid had lost muscle mass and bone density in space and was a little wobbly. When she emerged from the Atlantis Space Shuttle on September 27, 1996, largely unaided, it was a testament to her strict compliance with prescribed exercise routines and her self-diagnosed need for even more. Lucid’s goal was to walk off the Space Shuttle on her own two feet when she touched back down to Earth after the longest stay in space for any woman or American at the time. She started running extra kilometers, attached to one of the station’s two treadmills with bungee cords.Īt the time, it was normal for astronauts to be carried off spacecraft after lengthy stays in microgravity, due to loss of muscle and bone density. Although it was her least favorite part of living on Mir (“It was just downright hard,” she wrote later), toward the end of her mission she felt she needed even more than the daily Russian protocols she was following. NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid spent hundreds of hours exercising during her 188-day stay on the Russian space station Mir in 1996.
0 kommentar(er)
