Farnborough Air Show: Space experiments on ISS will trial 'countermeasures' to ageing

British astronaut Rosemary Coogan tells The National about space station mission to study the body, plans for lunar landings and the search for dark matter

European Space Agency astronaut Rosemary Coogan hopes to be part of space study team looking at developing countermeasures to ageing. Thomas Harding / The National

Advanced studies that could help slow down the ageing process will be carried out on the International Space Station, a British astronaut heading there has told The National.

As one of only five people to get through a selection process involving 22,000 applicants, Rosemary Coogan will spend six months in orbit, with studying the human body as her main project.

Ms Coogan, the third Briton to go into space, will most likely investigate how the body degrades in zero gravity, coming up with “countermeasures” to combat it.

Ageing countermeasures

Rosemary Coogan, centre, with fellow ESA astronaut candidates at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany. Photo: ESA

“When we go into the microgravity environment, the body reacts very similarly to how it does when we age, for example, a deterioration of our muscles and bone degradation,” she told The National. “The really active area of research is how to develop countermeasures for that, that can be then used on Earth.”

While it was “not necessarily about slowing down the ageing process” it could provide a remedy “of how to stay as healthy as possible on Earth”, said the astronaut.

“By understanding the human body from a different angle, taking gravity out of the equation, you always learn more about it.”

Another area of experimentation will be growing and developing the space station’s protein crystals project used in a lot of medicine.

Moon possibilities

If successful on the ISS, Ms Coogan could then set her sights on Nasa’s Artemis programme, whose Lunar Gateway will be humanity's first space station in orbit around the moon as efforts towards colonisation ramp up.

“Through the Lunar Gateway, there'll be opportunities to have surface landings on the moon and we are working our way down in that direction,” she said, speaking at the Farnborough International Airshow. “The moon is the next target and we are already on our way back.”

It also had possibilities for the future as “there’s a huge amount on the moon that we haven't done or explored yet”.

Dark matter

Ms Coogan, 33, is an astrophysicist who also specialises in using space telescopes looking deep into the ether to discover the origins of the universe.

Part of that is examining “the very nature of dark matter and dark energy”, which makes up more than 70 per cent of the universe but cannot yet be seen.

“In my mind, one of the biggest questions we have outstanding is what the universe is,” she said. “It's absolutely fundamental to how we came to be and what the future of the universe looks like.

“We now feel confident that dark matter exists but we really don't know what it's made of. And I think that's an absolutely fascinating question, as it’s really fundamental to showing how far we've got to go to understanding the universe.”