System Benefit of a Hypobaric Hypoxic Spacecraft Environment

Humans are able to acclimatize and later adapt to extreme altitudes, and this will be shown to be beneficial to the human with respect to microgravity and spacecraft environment. Treating the astronaut as a subsystem, which can be enhanced and modified to ultimately benefit the whole spacecraft is an approach that is necessary to forge the next generation of human spaceflight. A spacecraft environment that is maintained at a pressure of 16 kPa (primarily oxygen) would be both well within the realm of possibility of an astronaut’s physiology and would provide significant benefits for the all the subsystems of a spacecraft from the large intra-stellar spaceship to the EVA suit.