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t m c » p u l s e | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 5 24 Minute Maid Park, home stadium of the Houston Astros, is about 30 miles northwest of Johnson Space Center. There are days when McCulloch makes the trek there after a Wednesday clinic at NASA to go to his other, other full- time job: Astros team physician. (He is also the team physician for the Houston Ballet and Rice University athletics, but that is for another story.) After working closely with both groups—astronauts and Astros— McCulloch began noticing some similarities. Aside from the obvious moniker comparisons, both engage in comparably rigorous training programs and push their bodies to the limit for maximum performance under pressure—all in the face of sleep deprivation and demanding travel schedules. "I essentially view the astronaut corps as another professional team," McCulloch said. "They're a select group of highly specialized, highly valuable individuals required to work in a high-stress environment, and they'll have periods of downtime followed by periods of high-demand physical per- formance with no room for error." Even more, both groups exhibit uncanny parallels in their incidences of injury—specifically in regards to the shoulder. As it turns out, McCulloch discovered, the analog for astronauts in a spacesuit is a major league baseball pitcher. Leveraging the cutting-edge sports medicine practices available to the Astros, McCulloch organized a con- sortium to bring the two medical teams together to identify injury prevention tools and rehabilitation solutions for the common problems he observed. "Already we've adapted a rotator cuff injury prevention program we use in baseball to the astronaut corps," McCulloch said. "And it's a two-way street. In working with astronauts, espe- cially once they're in space, all of the variables change. It makes you question every aspect of why we do what we do and if there is a better way to do it. So it's really led to a lot more critical think- ing about the way we address every problem and whether we are doing it in the most efficient way possible, and that has spilled over into the care of all of my patients." The overlap of NASA's innova- tive methods and the everyday life of the average American is nothing new. Modern-day energy bars were originally adapted from food created for consumption in space, technol- ogy developed for the Hubble Space Telescope was responsible for recent breakthroughs in improved digital imaging and biopsy for breast cancer patients, and a non-invasive blood analyzer planned for use during future lunar or Mars missions could eventu- ally transform the lives of millions of diabetics who need to monitor their blood sugar daily. "We have a real source of national pride here in Houston at the Johnson Space Center, and we have another one here in the Texas Medical Center, and the ability for us to contribute mutu- ally in this regard is imperative for us as a leading health care institution and important for us as Americans," McCulloch said. The opportunities for collaboration are truly infinite, especially as missions to space become longer in duration and potentially farther away than ever before. According to NASA, setting foot on Mars could become a reality in the 2030s, and the technology developed for that kind of feat would undoubtedly have revolutionary applications in the Texas Medical Center and beyond. "I can only imagine the problems we're going to solve on our way to Mars," Scheuring said. "It's a great investment. If the president came by tomorrow and said, 'You know what? Let's get this accomplished by 2020 or 2025,' we'd figure out a way to do it, just like we did with the moon. It's a matter of having the mission and that will drive everything else. And it's no different in medicine. I got to know Neil Armstrong well in the last couple years of his life, and that was one thing he really tried to get out there: get a difficult mission and everything else will follow—we'll figure it out, we always have." I essentially view the astronaut corps as another professional team. They're a select group of highly specialized, highly valuable individuals required to work in a high-stress environment, and they'll have periods of downtime followed by periods of high-demand physical performance with no room for error. — PATRICK McCULLOCH, M.D. (Credit: Alex Bierens de Haan for the Houston Astros)