Human Physiological Reactions To Heat Stress In Space Flight

Since the beginning of manned spaceflight thermal emergencies have; occurred in some spacecrafts especially during their early missions. During the first orbital flight of US spaceship "Mercury-Atlas-7" ("MA-7"), the air temperature rose up to 40℃ which made the body temperature of the astronaut with intense sweat rising to 38.8℃ due to the thermo-control system failure. What is more, the astronaut would not return to the Earth if more mistakes in performance caused by heat stress had been made in "MA-7" emergency landing. Such accidents also took place in the missions of "Skylab-1", space shuttle "Challenger" (STS-6) and "Soyuz-1", etc. From these we may see that heat stress in spaceflight has had strenuous impact on crewmembers with heavy sweating and body fluid loss, decreased physical fitness and work capacity leading to more mistakes in information management and operations which might even interrupt flight...