NASA use human cadavers in testing Orion Spacecraft

I found this article on a website called SpaceRef.com.

I recently learned that NASA has made some limited use of human cadavers in testing during the development of the Orion spacecraft.
Now, on first blush, this might sound somewhat macabre. In fact, it is more common than you might expect. There is also a practical reason for using this approach.
Let me start by providing the statement that the NASA Public Affairs Office provided me with today in response to an inquiry I made regarding the use of human cadavers in the Orion program:

"Human cadavers have been used as part of NASA's testing protocol. NASA is sensitive to the issues involved in using postmortem human subjects (cadavers) to test its systems. Human cadavers are rarely used in testing and only when it is determined that crash test dummies and mathematical models can not provide the information necessary to ensure the safety of the crew.

To evaluate the effects of accelerations incurred during normal and extreme landing scenarios of the Orion crew exploration vehicle, NASA has engaged both military and academic experts to conduct a series of impact tolerance tests to study the effect on humans. To do that, NASA uses instrumented dummies and cadavers. "

Apparantly, NASA have used human cadavers also in the past. Back in the 1990s, a human cadaver skull packed with radiation sensors was flown on several DoD-sponsored Space Shuttle missions to document radiation exposure during long term spaceflight.




Link to full article:
www.spaceref.com...

dude. sign me up. I'd love to have my corpse used for something that cool.

Good article, I would probably donate my corpse to NASA for space flight.

Kind of weird, but maybe my family could at least say that Mom died as an astronaut.

Hey, what if some of the "alien" bodies people have reported around crashed spaceships really were human bodies? What if some of those small bodies with large heads were bodies of dead children with space helmits that made their heads look very large... If NASA has used human cadavers for years, they may have used them as far back as Roswell... Back in those days, I'm sure it wasn't difficult to get the bodies of dead kids from some orphanage... Hm.