Producing Knowledge about Astronaut Health Risks: Navigating Interdisciplinary Actor-Networks

When astronauts return from a space mission they smile for the cameras, but behind the scenes they undergo grueling rehab to recover from the effects of space and may face long-term health consequences. Space flights lasting more than thirty days are considered long-duration and may impact astronauts' long-term health due to space exposure; this requires the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop new scientific, medical, and space operational knowledge to counteract and mitigate harmful effects. Understanding how knowledge production occurs is an important analytical and policy issue at NASA.
This dissertation explores knowledge production about astronaut health risks using structured and unstructured interviews conducted at Johnson Space Center, the home of mission control for NASA. Applied Actor-Network Theory using a stage analysis shows how various human and non-human actors create this knowledge, constructing, combining, and passing facts across disciplinary boundaries about health risks. A normative analysis of informant statements demonstrates how knowledge and values regarding their understanding of long-term astronaut health risks impact the actions and policies developed at NASA. Steven Hilgartner (1992) suggests that risk research has done very little examination of the social construction of risk objects. He further suggests (1992) that studies fail to systematically examine the construction of causal attribution networks that link chains of risk objects to harm. (Hilgartner, 1992, p. 40-41) This study remedies that lack concerning space medicine by filling in the intellectual, social, and institutional processes that link space flight characteristics to physical harms.