Sustaining human life in space

On 20th July 1969, the Fresnedillas Control Station, near Madrid, received the first words of a human from the surface of the Moon. “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, was the historical sentence recorded from Neil A. Armstrong, commander of the “Apollo XI” mission. Nowadays, fifty years after Armstrong’s epic achievement, space exploration by humans is commonly recognized as a highly exciting and attractive challenge and a powerful booster for scientific and technological progress in order to improve the human life on Earth (NASA et al. 2018). This is true despite some criticisms (minority, but significant) that question the high costs that it entails (Rinaldi 2016). The establishment of permanent settlements in the Moon and Mars is becoming a realistic venture day by day. After a decade of successful rover explorations to the surface of Mars (Voosen 2018), both ESA and NASA, and more recently the agencies from growing economies in Asian countries, are working to promote a manned mission, first to the Moon, and then to Mars. The European Space Agency (ESA), of which Spain is an active member, adheres to these objectives and is strongly committed in supporting and participating in these programs. The main aim of space life science is to understand how the space environment, and specifically altered gravity and radiation, affects the morphology, physiology and behaviour of living organisms, and to design countermeasures to enable terrestrial life, and particularly human life, to develop outside Earth. That is, how they perceive and respond to gravity and radiation and adapt to the space environment. There is a variety of disciplines, such as genetics, molecular, anatomical or physiological fields, which use a range of technologies to address these issues. In order to understand adaptations at the functional level it is necessary to comprehend adaptations at cellular and tissue levels. Also, basic research analysing biomolecules, cells and