NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The Human Research Program (HRP) is focused on investigating and mitigating the highest risks to human health and performance in support of NASA exploration missions. ESMD and Constellation documents provide the mission architecture definitions, mission concepts of operations, vehicle, habitat, and space suit performance requirements, and other technical information needed to focus the HRP efforts for specific exploration missions. HRP conducts research, develops countermeasures, and undertakes technology development to inform and support compliance with NASA's health, medical, human performance, and environmental standards.

The goal of the HRP is to develop and provide human health and performance countermeasures, knowledge, technologies, and tools to enable safe, reliable, and productive human space exploration.

The specific objectives of the HRP are:

1. Develop capabilities, necessary countermeasures, and technologies in support of human space exploration, focusing on mitigating the highest risks to crew health and performance;
2. Define and improve human spaceflight medical, environmental, and human factors standards;
3. Develop technologies that serve to reduce medical and environmental risks, to reduce human systems resource requirements (mass, volume, power, data, etc.) and to ensure effective human-system integration across exploration systems;
4. Ensure maintenance of Agency core competencies necessary to enable risk reduction in the following areas: Space medicine, Physiological and behavioral effects of long duration spaceflight on the human body, Space environmental effects, including radiation, on human health and performance and Space human factors.

To enable the program to accomplish these objectives, HRP contains six program elements that manage the biomedical deliverables in support of the exploration architecture:

1. Space Radiation
2. Behavioral Health and Performance
3. Exploration Medical Capability
4. Space Human Factors and Habitability
5. Human Health Countermeasures
6. ISS Medical Project

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06.19.08
In spring 2008, NASA's Human Research Program and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute selected 33 research proposals to help investigate questions about astronaut health and performance on future space exploration missions. + Read More

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08.01.08
NASA's Human Research Program will fund nine proposals from six states to investigate questions about the affects of space radiation on human explorers. The selected proposals from researchers in California, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, New York and Texas have a total value of approximately $13 million. + Read More

+ More on The Human Research Program