posted 03-21-2012 05:15 PM               

"Clearly, in order to be able to explore beyond low-Earth orbit, we're going to have to stay in orbit a little longer than six months," said Suffredini. "So, one of the things we have been talking about for some time — in fact since the advent of a low Earth orbiting platform — is its benefit for human research."

"Part of that of course, is determining how long the human system can survive in a microgravity environment. And then can it survive in a microgravity environment for an extended period of time and then land on a foreign planet and expect the human to be able to do his or her tasks while they are there and then return home, again experiencing the same microgravity environment for an extended period of time."

So that's a long winded way of saying yes, we're considering that. We're talking to our partners about that. In fact, it was a bit of our discussion between the heads of agencies in Quebec about what steps do we need to take to put ourselves in a position to be able to extend the crew's time on orbit as part of the human research study on the human system's ability to withstand long duration spaceflight."

"That's not an activity that is going to occur tomorrow," he said. "We're taking steps and we will evolve to this point over a number of years so that we can get all the data we need before the end of the ISS lifetime."

"You can imagine if we had capcom calling up to the crew and there was a significant delay, it's more difficult to have a conversation," Dina Contella, Expedition 32 lead flight, said. "We're really just sort of laying the groundwork and getting some of these tools ready. We're working our way up to an eventual com delay experiment."