July 29, 2015------------------C15-025

NASA has selected Wyle Laboratories Inc., of El Segundo, California, to provide biomedical, medical and health services in support of all human spaceflight programs at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The work supports ongoing research aboard the International Space Station and helps enable the journey to Mars.
The Human Health and Performance contract begins Oct. 1 and has a maximum potential value of $1.44 billion, including a five-year base period followed by one three-year option and one two-year option.
This contract directly supports NASA’s Human Health and Performance Directorate at Johnson, which is charged with ensuring crew health, safety and performance; providing occupational health services at Johnson and NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico; and conducting research and developing technologies to help mitigate risks to the health, safety and performance of future spaceflight crews.

Wyle will provide support services in the areas of fundamental and applied biomedical research; operational space medicine; occupational health and medicine; management of clinical, biomedical, space food and environmental laboratories; behavioral sciences; human factors engineering; spacecraft environment monitoring and management; biomedical engineering; biomedical flight hardware requirements, design, fabrication, testing and operation; and payload and hardware integration with the International Space Station and other spaceflight platforms.

Image:
(Left) NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren (left) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui, both Expedition 44/45 flight engineers currently aboard the International Space Station, participate in a food tasting session run by Vickie Kloeris in the Habitability and Environmental Factors Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Here, the Space Food Systems group, which falls under NASA's Health and Human Performance Directorate, develops recipes and sample meals for testing, as well as designing containers and packaging appropriate for long-term storage.
(Right) NASA astronaut Steve Swanson, equipped with a bungee harness, exercises on the T2 treadmill aboard the International Space Station. The Human Health and Performance Directorate provides a full spectrum of systems engineering functions to ensure crew health and safety, including fitness and health maintenance while aboard the International Space Station.