THESEUS : Towards Human Exploration of Space - a EUropean Strategy

Past space missions in Earth orbit have demonstrated that human beings can survive and work in space for long durations. However, there are pending technological, medical and psychological issues to be solved before adventuring in longer duration space missions (protection against ionizing radiation, psychological issues, behaviour and performances, prevention of bone loss, etc). Furthermore technological breakthroughs, e.g. in life support systems and recycling technologies are required to reduce the costs of these expeditions to acceptable levels. Solving these issues will need scientific and technological breakthroughs of interest for clinical and industrial applications and also allow identifying the relevance of these questions to health issues on Earth. Despite existing ESA or NASA studies or roadmaps Europe still has no roadmap approved by the European scientific and industrial communities. The objective of THESEUS was to develop an integrated life sciences research roadmap enabling European human space exploration in synergy with the ESA strategy, taking advantage of the expertise available in Europe and identifying the potential of non space applications and dual research and development. •Objective 1: Identify disciplinary research priorities; •Objective 2: Focus on fields with high terrestrial application potential; •Objective 3: Build a European network as the core of this strategy.