I assume the astronauts are healthy, thoroughly vetted by doctors, trained in basic medical principles, and have basic medical supplies on board.
But what happens if they get appendicitis or kidney stones or some other acute onset problem?
In: 2048
Basically, their scrutiny level is so intense that it’s practically impossible. They’re quarantined to prevent anything they might catch, and the level of test and scrutiny they undergo at every step through the process is about 200 times what anyone else would endure. By the time someone is “okayed” to go to space for a basic mission, their entire medical system has been scrutinized. Someone who’s “okayed” for a long mission? Their physical has been scrutinized to the ultimate level possible. Basically, they’ve been checked, tested, scrutinized to the point that their bodies (and psychology) are essentially known thoroughly. The doc’s know how many inches of intestine they have, and there isn’t a question about their current condition that hasn’t been asked and answered fully.
Chris Hadfield’s book (which I highly recommend) And Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon both pretty well illustrate this; by the time you’re selected for flight, you’ve been gone through with the finest of fine-toothed combs, and if there’s even a teeny little unlikely thing that might maybe possibly present a potential-albeit-incredibly-unlikely problem on-flight…unpack your stuff; you aint goin’ nowhere.
Back in the Apollo days, many flyers were astounded by how intense the scrutiny was, and very few were cool with it. There was always a sense of “look what those bastards want to do to us now” in terms of medical scrutiny.
Of all the stuff that can go wrong, the gooey bags of mostly water in the control suite is least likely to be the problem. They’ve had the best medical scrutiny money can buy *hundreds of times* repeatedly asking “what could go wrong”. The only answer that’s acceptable to sign off on a pilot? “All clear- Go.”
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