INCLUSION & ACCESSIBILITY AT LUNARES SPACE HABITAT ANALOG

Inclusion & Accessibility at LunAres Space Habitat Analog...

25/6/2024

Author: Tomas Ducai

Biology (microbiology/genetics) graduate, Master's student Molecular Biology, University of Vienna - & Space enthusiast!

Inclusion and Accessibility have been much discussed terms for years. Institutions are working on numerous fronts and in numerous areas of everyday life to implement them in society. My name is Tomas Ducai, I am 24 years old, an active wheelchair user and am confronted with the more or less successful effects of the implementation of the above terms on a daily basis.
As a citizen of the city of Vienna, I enjoy the attitude to life in a city that has been described as the "most livable" in the world several times in a row - I can only confirm this from the position of an active wheelchair user. The fact that cities live and implement the credo of inclusion and accessibility may not sound entirely unusual - but the fact that these attributes also apply to organizations in the space sciences is quite extraordinary, innovative and gives physically disabled people with an interest in space, like me, hope to take part in projects in this area. I achieved this in March of this year when I took part in a simulated space mission in the so-called analog space habitat LunAres as the first wheelchair-using analog para-astronaut.

Simulated space missions are missions in which life (or co-existence) with other crew members on an (analog) space station on another celestial body (usually the Moon or Mars) and all related processes (including simulated spacewalks) are simulated and trained. The focus of such a simulated space mission can be on simulating the environment of the celestial body as accurately as possible in detail or on simulating isolation (from the outside world - social and physical). In the Polish analog space habitat LunAres, the focus is mainly on the latter scenario. The aspects described at LunAres are expanded to include the attributes of inclusion and accessibility (of the habitat and all processes) mentioned at the beginning, and for good reason - not only the current project of the European Space Agency (ESA), which selected an astronaut with a physical disability for the first time as part of the last astronaut selection, should be mentioned here, but also the simulation of space missions with physically impaired people, since it is likely, especially on longer (real) space missions, that otherwise healthy crew members will be seriously injured and will have to continue their stay in space - thousands to millions of kilometers from Earth - with impairments. Dealing with such scenarios requires, as one can imagine, numerous simulations in advance, in which LunAres plays a pioneering role - it is so far the only analogue space habitat that carries out missions with physically impaired crew members.

Our crew for the simulated, two-week Pegasus lunar mission was already diverse, apart from the fact that I was in a wheelchair. A total of six mission participants came from three continents, all with different academic backgrounds, with different tasks during the mission - the Commander and the Executive Officer were responsible for organizing the entire mission, had the final say on (critical) decisions and were in regular contact with the mission control center "on Earth". The Engineering Officer was the first point of contact for all technical questions about the habitat and was always on hand with "hands-on" access to help and advice. The Medical Officer looked after our medical well-being and monitored our most important medical parameters through measurements. The Communications and Outreach Officer was responsible for recording all impressions during the mission - a particularly valuable task in order to adequately present the activities during such a simulated space mission. I, the Biolab Officer, looked after the biology laboratory on the analogue space station and carried out experiments - I investigated the germination properties of spinach in conventional soil and "space soil" - ground meteorite powder - and was very pleased to see that the spinach itself germinated and began to grow in the "exotic" space substrate. I also supervised biological experiments by other crew members, while the Engineering Officer established new technical features on the "moon rover" Leo as part of our mission and generally took care of technical maintenance of our little helper during extra-vehicle missions.

All this is just a small insight into the diverse activities during our simulated space mission on the Moon, which also included simulated spacewalks (which I was able to lead mostly from the moon base), meditation, and cooking traditional Polish pierogi (dumplings). Above all, however, were the attributes I mentioned - inclusion and accessibility - which were lived not only by us, all crew members, but also by the mission control center (the organizers and inventors of the analog space habitat LunAres) to emphasize that space is indeed for everyone!