Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 123, Humans in Space.

I'm Gary Jordan. I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight.

Human spaceflight. We talk about it a lot, but that human element in front is a very important piece of the puzzle.

It can make traveling through space a lot more complicated what with redundant systems

that pesky little thing called life support and that heightened element of risk.

But in the end a human can lean on curiosity and discovery in space exploration to do so much

more and best of all can share the experience that many of us can only dream of. A lot of work at NASA

goes into understanding the human element in human spaceflight. In fact, there's a

program right here at the Johnson Space Center that focuses on just that.

It's called the Human Research Program.

Longtime listeners may recognize this program from many of the episodes we've done in the past,

namely the series on the Five Hazards of Human Space Flight,

episodes 56 through 61 for those interested.

But there's a lot more to the program,

and it can be organized into different elements

or areas of focus.

So for these next six episodes, we're going to dive deep into the work

being done to understand what exactly happens to the human body in space because

there's so much more work that goes behind that than you might think. Physiology, how humans interact with machines,

human behavior. It involves analogs on the ground or like pretend spaceflight in a sense,

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