Precision Medicine for Long and Safe Permanence of Humans in Space- Chapter 10 : Women’s health in spaceflight

Historically, only 75 women have flown in space, and while this inequity has been recently addressed with astronaut candidates approximately 50% female, research defining female biological responses to spaceflight remains limited. NASA’s Artemis Campaign aims to land the first woman on the Moon for the purposes of scientific discovery, technology advancement, and learning how to live and work on another world in preparation for human missions to Mars. The need to understand how sex and gender affect a wide range of physiological functions, impacting numerous health outcomes, is critical. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize recent findings in women’s health in spaceflight, past studies examining female mammalian responses to spaceflight, and highlight the need for additional studies to reduce risk and enhance countermeasure development specific to female astronauts. The promise of artificial intelligence approaches for advancing the pace of research is discussed with the caveat that, at present, fundamental research on women’s health in space and sex specificity of response to spaceflight stressors is not sufficiently robust to achieve this goal.