How bad for your health is space travel? Answering this question will be crucial not just for astronauts aiming to go to Mars, but for a booming space tourism industry planning to blast anyone who can afford it into orbit.

In what has been billed as the most comprehensive look yet at the health effects of space, dozens of papers were published on Tuesday using new data from four SpaceX tourists onboard the first all-civilian orbital flight in 2021.

Researchers from more than 100 institutions across the world sifted through the data to demonstrate that human bodies change in a variety of ways once they reach space—but most go back to normal within months of returning to Earth.

There are plenty of crazy ideas for missions in the space exploration community. Some are just better funded than others. One of the early pathways to funding the crazy ideas is NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. In 2017 and again in 2021, it funded a mission study of what most space enthusiasts would consider only a modestly ambitious goal but what those outside the community might consider outlandish—landing on Pluto.

Two major questions stand out in the mission design: How would a probe arriving at Pluto slow down, and what kind of lander would be useful on Pluto itself? The answer to the first is one that is becoming increasingly common on planetary exploration missions: aerobraking.

Pluto has an atmosphere, albeit sparse, as confirmed by the New Horizons mission that whizzed past in 2015. One advantage of the minor planet's relatively weak gravity is that its low-density atmosphere is almost eight times larger than Earth's, providing a much bigger target for a fast incoming aerobraking craft to aim for.