Physiological effects of weightlessness: countermeasure system development for a long-term Chinese manned spaceflight

Abstract

The Chinese space station will be built around 2020. As a national space laboratory, it will offer unique opportunities for studying the physiological effects of weightlessness and the efficacy of the countermeasures against such effects. In this paper, we described the development of countermeasure systems in the Chinese space program. To emphasize the need of the Chinese space program to implement its own program for developing countermeasures, we reviewed the literature on the negative physiological effects of weightlessness, the challenges of completing missions, the development of countermeasure devices, the establishment of countermeasure programs, and the efficacy of the countermeasure techniques in American and Russian manned spaceflights. In addition, a brief overview was provided on the Chinese research and development on countermeasures to discuss the current status and goals of the development of countermeasures against physiological problems associated with weightlessness.

Keywords

countermeasure / physiological effects of weightlessness / effect evaluation / long-term manned spaceflight

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the native English-speaking scientists of Charlesworth Author Services and International Research Promotion for editing our manuscript. This work was supported by the Chinese Manned Space Flight Project, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81571845) and the Key Project of Logistics Research (No. BWS14C024).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Linjie Wang, Zhili Li, Cheng Tan, Shujuan Liu, Jianfeng Zhang, Siyang He, Peng Zou, Weibo Liu, and Yinghui Li declare that they have no conflict of interest. This manuscript is a review article and does not involve a research protocol requiring approval by the relevant institutional review board or ethics committee.

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