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InnovationRx is your weekly digest of healthcare news. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here. C aptain Kirk himself, William Shatner, made history today at age 90 as the oldest person to ever fly to space, thanks to a ride on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket. “This experience, it’s something unbelievable,” Shatner said after the experience, adding later that,. “I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened, I just… it’s extraordinary, extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now, I don’t want to lose it. It’s so… it’s so much larger than me and life.” Space and healthcare are inexorably intertwined. The technology behind remote patient monitoring, which helps enable people with chronic conditions to stay home instead of going to the hospital, has its origins in NASA’s Mercury program. Several pharmaceutical companies have been conducting research utilizing facilities at the International Space Station to develop insights into biochemistry. Even Star Trek itself has connections to healthcare – just a few years ago, Qualcomm and the XPrize foundation awarded millions to two teams that developed a rudimentary version of the show’s tricorder.
