Why Cape Town is part of NASA’s launch plans

Splashdown: Cape Town, and False Bay, at the top right, in this image from the International Space Station, from just over 400km.

What most South Africans don’t know is that NASA’s plan for keeping astronauts alive on the way to the Moon includes the trauma unit at Tygerberg Hospital. Should an Artemis launch fail late in its window, the crew capsule would splash down into the Atlantic Ocean, just off Cape Town. And Dr JD Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, is the person responsible for making sure that the hospitals here are ready for it. Recently in South Africa for Stellenbosch University’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences’ 70th Annual Academic Day, Polk says he looks after NASA’s astronauts from selection onwards. One of his first jobs was giving Neil Armstrong a physical, which he admits, left him trembling. His group also runs human systems integration, which

means advising the teams designing spacecraft how to build around the astronauts. “Engineers are really good at building rocket engines, but they’re not that great at that soft, squishy thing that rides on the top,” he says.