Space physiology and space medicine are fairly recent sciences, born of the desire to launch man into space and bring him safely back again. Weightlessness and cosmic radiation - conditions which can neither be adequately simulated nor reproduced on earth - are on the other hand used as research tools for medical experiments, in particular in the fields of neurophysiology, internal medicine as well as genetics and radiation dosimetry. The newly established Austrian Society for Aerospace Medicine provides a basis for multidisciplinary approaches to spaceflight biomedical research. Diagnostic,...