SPODS: SOLID-Pod Architecture for Secure Astronaut Health Data Management in Long-Duration Missions and Its Role in the Space Health Data Ecosystem

Future long-duration missions require continuous collection, controlled sharing, and resilient preservation of astronaut health and operational data despite intermittent connectivity, strict privacy requirements, and the need for greater crew autonomy. Existing space-health data pipelines are often application-centric or mission-centric, which complicates data portability, fine-grained access control, and cross-application reuse, increasing the risk that valuable datasets remain siloed within isolated mission environments. This paper proposes SPODS, a conference-ready architectural concept that applies the SOLID paradigm to the space domain by assigning each astronaut a personal Solid Pod used as the primary logical store for longitudinal health records, wearable-sensor streams, and mission annotations. SPODS combines Solid Protocol resources, Solid-OIDC identity, and resource-level authorization with a spacecraft edge gateway that performs ingestion, synchronization, policy enforcement, and delay-tolerant replication. Collection of data in SPODS contribute to the development of a Space Health Data Ecosystem, to allow reuse of datasets by research institutions, mission partners, healthcare teams. By structuring astronaut health data according to interoperable quality and metadata standards, SPODS enables authorized research users to access high-quality datasets in a secondary-use perspective, thereby preventing ex ante fragmentation. In this way, SPODS performs a dual function: first, it ensures astronaut-centered data protection, continuity, and least-privilege access for missioncritical uses; second, it prevents the long-term isolation of spacehealth datasets by supporting interoperable secondary use for scientific research, innovation, and precision medicine. The architecture is designed to support least-privilege data sharing among crew, medical officers, flight surgeons, and authorized analytics services while preserving data ownership semantics and interoperability. We further show how Web of Things descriptions and machine-readable privacy metadata can be integrated to describe heterogeneous sensors and permitted data uses. Rather than reporting fabricated results, the paper contributes a rigorous system design, a threat model, and a practical evaluation plan suitable for a prototype implementation. The proposal positions Solid Pods as a promising foundation for privacy-preserving space medicine, autonomous onboard decision support, and as the enabling infrastructure for a reusable, trustworthy, innovationdriving Space Health Data Ecosystem.