Countdown for Shuttle Medical Mission Begins

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. —  Countdown clocks began ticking Saturday for the space shuttle Columbia’s scheduled blastoff Wednesday on an unprecedented medical research flight featuring seven astronauts, 30 doomed rats and 2,700 tiny jellyfish.

Columbia’s four-man, three-woman crew is scheduled to take off at 5 a.m. PDT Wednesday to kick off a planned nine-day Spacelab mission to find out how weightlessness affects human physiology, research considered crucial for future long-duration flights to Mars.

Engineers began the ship’s intricate countdown on Saturday afternoon, earlier than usual because of the extra work required to load the rats and jellyfish aboard the day before liftoff.

In one of several “firsts,” civilian cardiologist Andrew (Drew) Gaffney will make the climb into space with a catheter snaked into his chest through veins in his arm to find out how the heart responds to the rigors of blastoff and the onset of weightlessness.

It is the first in a battery of medical tests expected to provide the best look yet at how the human body reacts to the absence of gravity and how it adapts after the return to Earth.

“The human body is showing that it’s able to adapt pretty well to space flight,” said astronaut James Bagian, a physician. “In fact, many of the things we’re looking at . . . are when we come back, the rapid transition to a weighted environment like we see here on Earth.

Joining the seven human members of the crew will be 30 rats and 2,700 tiny jellyfish. Scientists hope to gain insights into how weightlessness affects the human inner ear by studying how it affects similar “gravity receptors” used by the jellyfish to orient themselves in the sea.

The rats will not undergo tests during the mission, but they will be decapitated after the flight so tissue samples can be studied to find out if rodents can be used to mimic the responses of human systems.

“Many of the studies done on us also will be studied in the animals,” said Millie Hughes-Fulford, a civilian chemist joining Columbia’s crew. “It’s an attempt to look at modeling on two organisms.”

Columbia’s launch will mark the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s third shuttle flight in 47 days, which would beat the previous launch processing record, set in 1985, by a week.