Informed Consent for Research Participation During Space Exploration: Ethical Issues

While informed consent is widely recognized as a cornerstone of ethical research with human participants, applying this principle to space exploration research creates some unique challenges and dilemmas. In this article, we examine ethical issues related to informed consent for participation in space exploration research and offer some suggestions for policy development and further investigation. We argue that: (1) informed consent for space exploration research should be required, but exceptions can be justified for research involving public records, de-identified medical records, secondary use of de-identified, biospecimens or data, emergency medical research, and research critical to mission success or crew safety; (2) organizations that conduct space exploration research should take steps to minimize the potential for undue influence by, for example, ensuring that informed consent discussions will be private and that information about research participation will be kept confidential; (3) prospective spaceflight participants should be provided with information about research activities or other types of data and specimen collection (such as quality assurance) that will take place; and (4) since existing laws and regulations do not apply to most of the research activities conducted by private companies, space companies should give serious thought to developing guidelines for the protection of human research participants.