Emergency care in space: An interview with two astronauts

Abstract

When thinking about the next millennium, one cannot help but ponder life and health care in space. To begin to understand what it is like “up there,” I spoke to 2 astronauts who have been on missions in space. I first met James (Jim) Bagian, MD, when we served as medical and nursing consultants (respectively) to a medical technology company. I loved listening to his stories about the Shuttle missions and always had lots of questions. I contacted Jay C. Buckey, Jr, MD, via the Internet, after a colleague at my former flight program at Dartmouth told me that Jay had helped them celebrate the fifth anniversary of the program by presenting them with a DHART (the name of the flight program) pin that he had taken with him on one of the space shuttle missions. He jokingly said that it was the only helicopter to have ever orbited the earth. I interviewed Jay via cyberspace (on E-mail) and Jim via the good old-fashioned telephone.