Dr Katherine Bennell-Pegg

So right from astronaut selection, we had to live in a hospital for a week, undergoing every test you can imagine without a scalpel.

And throughout your career, you provide a medical baseline of data, as well as

towards the end of your career and post-retirement, you keep having regular medicals that collect a lot of this data.

So particularly for women, there's been so few women in space, only just over 10% of professional astronauts to date have been women.

It means that that data is particularly important for medical science because men and women's bodies respond sometimes in different ways in space and certainly to conditions on Earth too.

But there's five main hazards of spaceflight, and each creates an opportunity for research and discovery, right?

So the acronym is RIDGE, R-I-D-G-E.

R is radiation, so looking at how our body responds to radiation.

I is isolation and confinement.

You're stuck in a tin can or an aluminium can far from Earth with a few other people, and that does weird things to your immune system.

and your psychology.

So there's a lot of psychological research done on us too.

D is distance from Earth.

So that can mean it's hard to get back in an emergency.

Even the International Space Station, we're only 400 kilometers up, right?

But it can take days to get back.

The moon is further afield again.

It can take weeks to get back.

It will have communications delays.

G is altered gravity.