NASA's policy is to establish standards for providing a healthy and safe environment for crewmembers, and to provide health and medical programs for crewmembers during all phases of space flight. Standards are established to optimize crew health and performance, thus contributing to overall mission success, and to prevent negative long-term health consequences due to space flight. In this document, the Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer establishes NASA’s space flight Crew Health standards for the pre-flight, in-flight, and post-flight phases of human space flight.

Human system standards are established to guide and focus the development of the crew health requirements as a means of protecting space-faring crews. The standards presented in this document, NASA Space Flight Human System Standards, Volume I: Crew Health, are intended to complement the overall set of human standards for space flight, which also includes NASA Space Flight Human Systems Standards, Volume II: Habitability and Environmental Health; NASA Medical Standard for Crewmembers; and current medical standards of clinical practice. Combined, these standards provide Agency technical requirements for an appropriate environment for human habitation, certification of human participants, the necessary level of medical care, and risk-mitigation strategies against the deleterious effects of space flight. The standards described in this document include levels of care, permissible exposure limits, fitness-for-duty criteria, and permissible outcome limits as a means of defining successful operating criteria for the human system. These standards help ensure mission completion, limit morbidity, and reduce the risk of mortality during space flight missions.

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