Ralf Möller's favorite question: What are the limits of microbial survival?Īt the moment there are several investigations on the space station - huge, previously accepted proposals on the impact of antimicrobial surfaces. What would you advise space agencies hoping to keep spaceships as free from harmful bacteria as possible on future missions? There are certain capsules, like the Soyuz capsule. There are several devices available - not only for medical reasons - to bring you down to earth. There are medicines and pharmaceuticals, packages of certain antibiotics, certain medical things.Īnd if an astronaut's condition deteriorates? Is there an evacuation procedure? If an astronaut theoretically did get sick from the bacteria, what happens then? They said they'd found such and such types of organisms - some of them could be pathogenic - but even there, in the article, they said more investigations need to be done. Can you tell those families - are these bacteria dangerous? Are the astronauts going to be OK?įrom the data we have in this article, we cannot say there is a threat for the astronauts. And they have six sets of families and friends down here who don't know what to make of this 'bacteria' news. For example, you have a water purification system where you can use silver ions in a certain concentration to get rid of unwanted micro-organisms. You can add substances that you know are antimicrobial. So you're really depending on those filters. You cannot just open the window and get new air in.

What about the air filters on the ISS? Can't they remove the microbes? Which is a lot of cleaning for six astronauts. With the space station, we have over 1,000 cubic meters of living and working space. But you really have to make sure that every liquid that you use also works under microgravitational conditions - liquids also float around. So you have kind of a broad-based universal chemical, a disinfectant.

We would not use one component to fight bacteria or fungal contamination, because if you get resistance to one cleaning agent, suh as ethanol or an oxidizing agent, then you will never get rid of that. You could have some mixtures of different varieties of chemicals. But the situation's very different in microgravity. If I have a mold in my refrigerator, all I have to do is spray a little bit of bleach on a rag and wipe it off and kill it… They have been found in high abundance on technical surfaces.Īnd we know that there are some fungal isolates coming from the fungal molds, for example - that certain aspergillus strains can be found. Some environmental species are bacilli - Paenibacillus, Solibacillus and others. And they will be found not just on the astronauts' skin, but on your skin and my skin. Ralf Möller: Staphylococcus species have been found on the skin. DW: What kinds of bacteria are inside the International Space Station?

Clean space station