Oct 14 1985
From The Space Library
At a news conference to discuss the recent flights of cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Georgiy Grechko, Soviet space officials said today that they expected to have a permanently manned space station by 1990, but that the Salyut 7 orbital laboratory would not be the spacecraft that hosted the rotating crews, the NY Times reported. Oleg Gazenko, head of the health ministry's Biomedical Problems Institute, which oversaw space medicine, said no unresolved problems remained to block development of the permanent station and that the crew rotation on Salyut 7 showed that incoming cosmonauts performed their research work better when they were spared the start-up operations needed to reactivate the space laboratory.
At about the same time, Soviet officials told a U.S. Congressional delegation headed by Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) [see U.S. Space Policy/International, Oct. 10] that it was building a new space station that would be ready for launch in 1986, Defense Daily reported. Because the Soviets did not want to have two space stations in orbit at the same time, timing of the launch depended on the condition of the orbiting Salyut 7 station, which was nearly doubled in size in September by the orbiting and deployment of a large new module. Nelson said the Soviets gave no details of the new station, which, if it is designed to be permanently manned, would beat the planned U.S. space station by seven or eight years. (NYT, Oct 15/85, C11; D/D, Oct 21/85, 259)
Wesley Hymer, a biochemist at Pennsylvania State University and one of 20 researchers who analyzed tissue samples from 24 rats flown aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in April, said today the rats suffered significant reductions in the release of growth hormones, the NY Times reported. The findings could signal a problem for astronauts, in that weightlessness could affect the ability of special cells in their pituitary glands to produce growth hormones that govern development and maintenance of muscle and bone tissue.
Richard Grindeland, a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center, reported the previous month that the same rats lost bone and muscle strength. Grindeland said that they “were limp, like dishrags,” and that dissection revealed “very drastic changes” in bone and muscle strength. However, researchers would need more test results before they could link growth hormone reduction to muscle and bone atrophy, Hymer said. But he added, “I think there's probably a good chance that there is a relationship.” After a battery of tests that included implanting normal rats with growth hormone cells from the space rats, Hymer noted a reduction of up to 50% in release of the hormone. “Something is radically changed in those pituitary glands as a result of the space flight,” Hymer said. And he added, “I think the surprising thing was these changes occurred so quickly. They happened in seven days in flight.” However, Hymer said researchers did not know if astronauts suffered the same kind of changes. “I can tell you that there are data that show that the blood levels of growth hormones in the astronauts from Skylab were reduced by a significant amount,” Hymer said.
Hymer planned to send growth hormone cells, some of which would contain inhibitory and stimulatory chemicals, on a Space Shuttle flight the following September. He said he also would like to see similar experiments on primates. (NYT, Oct 15/85, C8)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
