Pete Hodkinson
RAF & UK's 1st Aerospace Medicine Consultant
Bio
Wing Commander Pete Hodkinson is a Locum Consultant in Aviation and Space Medicine at the Royal Air Force Centre of Aviation Medicine. He was the first UK trainee in this recently recognised specialty and trialled the draft training curriculum, including training at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre. He is a physician scientist with a focus on aircrew health, performance and life support systems. His PhD looked at the effect of hypoxia on helicopter aircrew and the test and development of portable oxygen delivery systems to mitigate the risk of hypoxia. An area of growing interest is the interface between aerospace medicine and engineering as this pertains to flight operations and life support systems.
Abstract
We are living through a second space age as international agencies and commercial enterprises compete and collaborate to establish the new field of suborbital spaceflight, broaden access to low Earth orbit, plans to return to the Moon, visit an asteroid and on to Mars. The UK is in a strong position to actively contribute to this second space age with a growing faculty of experience in space life and biomedical sciences and related extreme environment and exploration medicine and physiology. I will discuss medical aspects of the UK CAA Spaceport and Spaceplane report, which will highlight potential for collaboration between UK space medicine and UK industry. This theme will then be developed further to look at how the UK space medicine community has and could contribute to the second space age.
