I spent a fascinating hour recently with Dr. J.D. Polk, former dean of Des Moines University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, who in October 2016 returned to work for NASA to become the space agency’s chief health and medical officer. Polk had worked for NASA earlier in his career in several senior medical staff capacities before he was hired by DMU, where he spent 2½ years as dean before he was pulled back into space, so to speak.  
 
For Polk, returning to NASA in the top medical spot was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work in a position where some of the routine duties include planning for manned missions to Mars, helping to select research experiments for the International Space Station and monitoring the health of astronauts and retired astronauts and all NASA personnel — all in the “we can solve this — let’s work the problem” culture of NASA. 
 
“It’s an infectious place to work,” said Polk, who was in Des Moines recently for DMU’s graduation ceremonies. It was his first time back since leaving in the fall of 2016, and he and his wife found that their former West Des Moines neighborhood had grown so much they had trouble finding their old house. They now reside in suburban Virginia, and he commutes two hours each way to the space agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. 
 
If there was one theme that I carried away from our wide-ranging discussion, it’s that the research and scientific advancements that are solving space-travel issues are creating some tremendous benefits for the majority of us, even over-50 Earthlings like me who aren’t likely to go into orbit in our lifetimes, let alone travel to Mars. But the next generations most certainly will. 
 
“This is the busiest time we’ve ever had at NASA,” said Polk, who first went to work for the agency in 2004 as chief of medical operations. Although the days of the Apollo moon landings in the ’60s and ’70s were heady times, there were just three space vehicles involved in each mission, he pointed out. 
 
Polk contrasted that era with today, as SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp. each have private-sector space vehicles taking cargo to the International Space Station, while projects like the Deep Space Gateway, the Orion Spacecraft and the Space Launch System — the most powerful rocket ever built — are underway. 
 
“There’s a real value to having the entrepreneurial commercial ventures involved, balanced by the old salty dogs of NASA who have the decades of experience with space flight,” he said. “We’re learning lessons from them; they’re learning lessons from us. It’s been a good thing.”

One of the areas that Polk oversees is the human element of space flight — all the considerations for keeping astronauts safe and healthy from takeoff through their return to Earth.

“It could be things as simple as how many G’s can an astronaut withstand [during launch] and in what position in a capsule,” Polk said. “Or what font to use on the dials, so when they have a change in vision due to swelling of the optic nerve when they’re out in space after six months, they can still read the panel.” 
 
Then there’s the astronaut health portion. “We do a huge preventive medicine program,” he said. “After you’ve spent $3 million training an astronaut, you’re not going to kick them out for something small. Even something big, we’ll try to rectify that. There are all sorts of things we’ve worked and fixed and gotten an astronaut back to flight. 
 
Much like the spirit seen in movies like “Apollo 13” and “Hidden Figures,” there’s a can-do culture throughout the agency, backed by tremendous brainpower. 
 
“You don’t hear the word ‘no’ very often at NASA,” Polk said. “They’ll say, ‘Well, it doesn’t exist right now, but we’re fairly confident we can invent it or solve that problem by the time we get there.’ I think that’s one of the reasons I really like that organization — people don’t view an obstacle as something that will stop the mission. They view it as a challenge to be overcome.” 
 
Some of the biomedical experiments being conducted at the space station have resulted in additional research and are adding extraordinary value to medicine. And because NASA maintains an open website (nasa.gov/hrp) for its human research program, university researchers and entrepreneurs are free to leverage that research into new directions.
 
As an example of the latter, Polk recounted how NASA developed a computer algorithm to look at 250 shades of gray for analysis of planetary photography, so that pictures from a Mars lander, for instance, can be separated to build a high-quality three-dimensional picture. 
 
Researchers at the University of Southern California, and also a private company, used that algorithm to more precisely look at ultrasound images taken of carotid arteries to determine the extent of thickness and plaque buildup. 
 
“Who thinks of picking up a planetary algorithm and saying, ‘Hey, I think that will work in an ultrasound’?” Polk said. “So it’s just an example of the things that get picked up that are amazing.” 

NASA recently unveiled its new “Exploration Campaign,” which outlines specific steps the agency will take to get astronauts back to the moon as preparation for human missions to Mars and deeper into the solar system. 
 
So how far away are we from manned Mars missions? 
 
“The technology exists to get there; the space launch system we’re building now is designed to take us there,” Polk said. “And we have figured out by landing multiple rovers how to land safely on Mars, so the technology exists.” While some human health hazards — such as solar radiation — can be shielded, cosmic radiation can’t be shielded, he said.  
 
Consequently, shortening the trip to Mars from six months to four months would significantly reduce astronauts’ exposure to radiation. “I’m the biggest cheerleader for the guys working on the engines,” Polk said. 
 
Improving technology means that the risk to humans in space continues to decrease. But there’s a balance to weigh. 
 
“We don’t want to be a large bureaucracy that’s risk-averse — if we wait until it’s absolutely safe, we’ll never go. But we want to try to do everything we can to make that risk manageable.”