Does that "fact" hold up when you control for body mass and fat/muscle ratio? Because I suspect in reality this only means that we should send smaller people with fewer muscles into space. Life expectancy for example does not correlate with gender anymore once you account for body size.
I believe David Sinclair talks about this in detail in his book "Lifespan: Why we age"
Personally, I see this is less as a real research discovery and more like a cautionary tale on the pitfalls of statistics and the need for multivariate regressions with control variables.
