Robert "Bobby" L. Satcher Jr, MD, PhD, made history on Tuesday when he lifted off in the space shuttle Atlantis, headed to the International Space Station. Dr. Satcher, who completed his first space walk today, will be the first orthopaedic surgeon to orbit the earth and is one of only 23 US physicians who have become astronauts.
A musculoskeletal oncology surgeon who has been in astronaut training with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for 5 years, Dr. Satcher is serving as the flight crew medical officer and as a mission specialist on the 11-day assignment. On 2 space walks (known as "extravehicular activity" in space jargon), he will install an oxygen tank in the space station and perform maintenance work on the station's robotic arms, which he will get to maneuver.
"Operating the robotic arms is similar to performing arthroscopic surgery in many ways," Dr. Satcher said in a preflight interview with AAOS Now, a publication of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. "Many of the skills an astronaut needs are the same skills surgeons need."
AAOS President Joseph Zuckerman, MD, agrees. In an interview with Medscape Orthopaedics, Dr. Zuckerman said, "Much of what we do as orthopaedic surgeons is mechanical in nature, such as installing screws and plates. So this [space mission] is a good use of Dr. Satcher's skills."
Still, very few physicians have done the type of work that Dr. Satcher will be doing 5 million miles from the earth.
"The fact that he was chosen for this mission is special," said Dr. Zuckerman, professor and chairman of orthopaedic surgery at New York University School of Medicine.
"Logical Choice" for Astronaut
Dr. Satcher "is the logical choice for this work," his former boss, Michael Schafer, MD, told Medscape Orthopaedics. Dr. Schafer is a professor and chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, where Dr. Satcher was an assistant professor before going on leave.
When Dr. Schafer recruited him to Northwestern, the surgeon already had an impressive curriculum vita: an MD from Harvard University, a PhD in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and orthopaedic surgery residency training at the University of California–San Francisco, followed by fellowships in research and musculoskeletal oncology. At Northwestern, Dr. Satcher built a musculoskeletal oncology program "from ground zero," Dr. Schafer said.
In 2004, Dr. Satcher was in the clinic seeing a patient when he received the acceptance call from NASA that would transform him from a bone cancer specialist into an astronaut, reportedly his long-time dream. "The excitement was pretty intense," Dr. Schafer recalled.
That phone call came 4 years after Dr. Satcher first applied to the program — a delay caused by the interruption in training classes after the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, he told a NASA reporter.
Despite the risks, he won the support of his family, and they moved to Houston, Texas, to be near the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. At this time, he also holds a position as clinical assistant professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
At Northwestern, Dr. Satcher had an active research program, and in 2002 he won the Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation/Zimmer Career Development Award to study how bone responds to stresses. He will be able to satisfy his interest in this area as a proxy scientist aboard the Atlantis. Experiments he will perform include measuring vertebral disk height to see whether it changes in a microgravity environment, which could explain why astronauts become taller in outer space, he said in the AAOS Now interview.
Such research may help the orthopaedics field. Said Dr. Zuckerman, "The more we learn about how weightlessness affects the spine, the more we will learn how we can reduce the loss of bone mass that occurs with lack of weight-bearing exercise."
Source: Medscape Today