Who will be the first person to be buried on Mars? Nick Brookes / flickr, CC BY-NC

It’s 50 years since humans went to the Moon – and now people are so focused on getting to Mars.

But what happens when another planet becomes home, when the first generations are born, live, and just as importantly, die in space?

I often think the first death in space is going to be a big turning point for how we relate to it. There haven’t really been any so far. There was the unfortunate USSR Soyuz 11 mission to Earth orbit, where three cosmonauts died when they left the spacecraft – but they were recovered on Earth. [The crew died on their descent back to Earth after a technical fault caused their Soyuz capsule to depressurise.]

There have been other deaths, for example on the tragic Space Shuttle accidents, but they haven’t actually been in space.

It’s something people often overlook when talking about the prospect of settling on Mars. The risks are so great. People are going to die. They’re probably going to die if there’s any human settlement on the Moon as well.

So how will that impact how we look at space?

You may remember Tang – the sugar-sweetened orange-flavored drink mix – as the official beverage of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon fifty years ago this month. But, according to a new report published in Frontiers in Physiology, the first men and women who set foot on Mars might be better off choosing a nice merlot.

Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have demonstrated that resveratrol – a naturally occurring ingredient in grapes and blueberries – can preserve muscle function and mitigate muscle atrophy under conditions that mimic the gravity on Mars – which is about 40 percent as strong as that experienced on Earth. The team’s findings suggest that supplementing future astronauts’ diets with resveratrol could help maintain their musculoskeletal health even on a long-term mission to Mars.

“Resveratrol has been extensively studied for its health benefits, including its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and anti-diabetic effects,” said senior author Seward B. Rutkove, MD, Chief of the Division of Neuromuscular Disease in the Department of Neurology at BIDMC. “Resveratrol has also been shown to preserve bone and muscle loss, however there’s a lack of research regarding its effects on the musculoskeletal system in partial gravity. We hypothesized that a moderate daily dose would help mitigate muscle deconditioning under conditions that replicate the partial gravity on Mars.”

The HERA XIX crew completed training and is ready for a 45-day mock mission to Phobos. Crewmembers are Barret Schlegelmilch, Christian Clark, Ana Mosquera and Julie Mason.
Credits: NASA

Space is hard on humans – it’s just not what we’re used to, because it’s very unlike this Earth most of us generally occupy for most of our lives. That’s why researchers do plenty of experimentation to figure out what it’s like for people to live and work in space, like a new experiment underway as of May 24 in which a crew of four will be isolated in a spacecraft for 45 days living and working together – but without ever leaving the confines of our planet.

In fact, the crew, which consists of Barret Schlegelmilch, Christian Clark, Ana Mosquera, and Julie Mason, won’t even leave the confines of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. But that’s the point – confined living and working space, for a simulated mission to Phoibos, one of Mars’ two moons. The experiment is what NASA calls a “Human Exploration Research Analog,” which is a contrived acronym that nets you HERA, the greek goddess of family, and basically means a simulated crewed spacecraft mission.

To be clear, the ‘crew’ participating in this experiment aren’t actually astronauts, they’re volunteers who “micic or emulate the type of people that [NASA] select for astronauts,” according to Human Research Program’s Flight Analogs Project Manager Lisa Spence in a statement. And these astronaut analogues will be monitored during the simulated spacecraft mission, with observers specifically looking to check out the impact, both physiological and psychological, or extended confined missions.