BORDEAUX, France - French doctors on Wednesday were carrying out the world’s first ever operation on a human in zero-gravity, using a specially-adapted aircraft to simulate conditions in space.

The team of surgeons and anaesthetists took off from Bordeaux airport in southwest France for a three-hour journey to remove a benign tumour from the fore-arm of a volunteer.

The experiment is part of a programme — on course for completion next year with backing from the European Space Agency (ESA) -- to develop techniques for performing robotic surgery aboard the International Space Station or a future Moon base.

“The operation would pose no risk to the patient. Its aim is to prove the effectiveness of new surgical and anaesthetic techniques carried out in conditions of weightlessness,” according to a statement from Bordeaux University Hospital, which provided the medical team.

“This phase is essential before we can move ahead with developing the next stage when we would operate with a robot remotely controlled from the ground by satellite,” it said.

The specially-adapted Airbus 300 aircraft — dubbed Zero-G — was performing a series of parabolic swoops, creating between 20 and 22 seconds of weightlessness at the top of each curve. The process was to be repeated around 30 times.

Strapped inside a custom-made operating block, three surgeons and two anaesthetists were working during these brief bursts — with their instruments held in place with magnets around the patient’s stretcher.

“Since February we have been rehearsing this operation on the ground and in the plane. It is all crystal clear in our heads,”  team-leader Dominique Martin said earlier.

A similar experiment was carried out in October 2003 -- but the operation then was to mend a0.5-millimetre-wide (.01-inch) artery in a rat’s tail.

Anaesthetist Laurent de Coninck said that zero-gravity surgery offers huge promise for space exploration, though it would at first be limited to treating simple injuries.

“Today more than 400 people have already travelled into space. The chances of injuries occurring during missions would become ever greater — and to bring a wounded person back to Earth for treatment is both risky for them and expensive,” he explained.

World space agencies hope that by 2020 a permanently inhabited base can be established on the Moon, to conduct research, exploit lunar resources, learn to live off the lunar land and test technologies for voyages to Mars.

In the shorter term, pre-built robotic surgical blocks could also have valuable uses here on Earth, for instance inside caves or difficult-to-access locations, such as after an earthquake.

“Long-distance flights to Mars would not be happening in the immediate future,” said Guy Laslandes, head of the Ariane V programme at France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES).

“But the experiment would allow the development of working methods and miniaturised tools that can be used in extreme conditions on Earth, such as during missions to the North Pole.”

- end -