![]() ![]() ![]() In the next 2-2 ½ years, we will have five companies launching humans into space. NASA’s involved in work on eight different vehicles right now. This is an edited version of our conversation. Polk to talk about his ongoing work and the agency’s planned mission to the moon and then to Mars. Polk returned to NASA in 2016 after leaving the agency in 2011 to join the Department of Homeland Security as principal deputy assistant secretary before becoming dean of medicine for Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Official portrait of James Polk at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Aug. “We have to make sure each vehicle is built to medical standards that we have for transit from Earth to space,” Dr. Polk is also the health and medical technical authority for the agency, overseeing a team that serves as experts on the health specifications for new vehicle development at NASA. Polk wears multiple hats at the space agency, where he is in charge of the health of all NASA employees-including its astronauts, who are monitored for life. Polk, DO, has had a totally cosmic career trajectory.ĭr. He ran a privately funded project at his foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and invited 25 different women pilots to come out and take the same tests he had given with his team to the Project Mercury candidates, to see how women would do.As NASA’s chief health and medical officer, J.D. So he was very curious about whether women could physically withstand the forces that would be necessary for them to participate in spaceflight. And he’s thinking that if you’re going to have a large orbiting space station with dozens of people on it, that would normally - in that kind of military setting - include women as secretaries, telephone operators, laboratory assistants, nurses. ![]() He was envisioning huge orbiting space stations that would be able to do reconnaissance, that would do science research. Before any human being had flown into space, he was very curious about what would be coming. Lovelace was a medical doctor who had done the physical testing for NASA in the selection of the Mercury astronauts, who were announced in April of 1959. So women had very little access to that new technology. That, for women in aviation, is a significant change because it’s really only at the end of the Second World War and into the 1950s that jet planes come into use first in the military. And so they ended the Women Airforce Service Pilots and gave those jobs back to male pilots. As the opportunities for flying in combat were shrinking, at the same time, there were more male pilots available for flying roles. The highly successful program was disbanded in 1944 as the war was wrapping up. That was a civilian program of over a thousand women that was run during the Second World War as a way of relieving male pilots for combat roles during the war, by having well-trained women pilots take over domestic flying, ferrying aircraft, towing targets, training, transporting aircraft from place to place. Women had been banned from military flying after the end of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in 1944. The decision to choose the first astronaut candidates from the ranks of military-trained jet test pilots meant they were drawing from a candidate pool that could only include men. ![]()
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