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It sounds like the radiation hazard for long duration trips might be worse than thought.
It's not as bad as they make it out to be, and the actual effects are not as severe as people grossly imagine them to be.
I've been exposed to at least 30 rem, possibly as much as 60 rem, and I'm no better or worse off for the experience.
Carbon-Boron is widely used in nuclear reactors as shielding, so it should come as no surprise that they can actually make fabric using Boron-Carbide. Carbon nanotubes are 30 times stronger than Kevlar, and even more lightweight and flexible than Kevlar. Adding Boron to the mix makes the fabric even stronger.
You can make space-suits out of the Boron-Carbide, or overlay Boron-Carbide onto a different style space-suit. You can use Boron-Carbide as a covering in the command module, or use it as insulation.
The glass used is already infused with gold dust particles to shield radiation, so that's not an issue.
Our fleshy forms evolved to work within the tug of gravity. Take that pull away, and the clockwork operation of bodily functions just doesn't keep ticking at the same steady beat. From fluids floating the wrong way to DNA expressing differently, space travel is tough on even the healthiest human body.
I read the same article. For a trip to Mars, whether one-way or round-trip, there are going to be problems. A round trip would take a little less less than 2 years of total travel in space. That's quite a long time to be weightless. Weightlessness not only affects the brain, but the entire body. It affects the eyes, the bones, muscles, fluids, etc. In addition, although Mars does have gravity, it's still weaker than here on Earth, meaning that too would add some contribution to effects of the body.
If we could develop the means to get there in a month, such as with nuclear fusion, that might not be so bad. But that's not what's currently being considered, and we don't have a spacecraft capable of doing anything that for a manned mission. It would be a better idea to have some means to at least simulate gravity (such as depicted with the rotating section of the Discovery XD-1 spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey). The XD-1 is much too long and wouldn't be able to land on the surface, although it might be able to carry some compact shuttles or even rockets.
Last edited by NightBazaar; 10-26-2018 at 05:36 AM..
Here's a thought (and I'm not claiming any expertise in this field!!). Create a highly shielded "shuttle" designed for back and forth travel to Mars. The craft would be either in earth orbit, filled with people and en-route to Mars, in Mars orbit, or returning to earth.
I don't know what kind of shielding would be required, probably lots of really heavy "stuff." Which is why the craft would be only a "capsule" used to contain and protect people.
It's not as bad as they make it out to be, and the actual effects are not as severe as people grossly imagine them to be.
I've been exposed to at least 30 rem, possibly as much as 60 rem, and I'm no better or worse off for the experience.
Carbon-Boron is widely used in nuclear reactors as shielding, so it should come as no surprise that they can actually make fabric using Boron-Carbide. Carbon nanotubes are 30 times stronger than Kevlar, and even more lightweight and flexible than Kevlar. Adding Boron to the mix makes the fabric even stronger.
You can make space-suits out of the Boron-Carbide, or overlay Boron-Carbide onto a different style space-suit. You can use Boron-Carbide as a covering in the command module, or use it as insulation.
The glass used is already infused with gold dust particles to shield radiation, so that's not an issue.
There might be more to the story than just absorbed dose. For example, an x-ray photon could be absorbed and cause a break in a single strand of DNA. However, solar particle radiation and cosmic radiation are not just composed of photons (like x-rays). They also have naked atomic nuclei, ions, traveling at enormous speeds with huge energy levels. An absorbed ionized radiation particle might not cause just a single break, it might cause a double break and maybe at even multiple locations per particle absorbed.
So, having said that, I’m not a radiation physicist by any stretch so it would be interesting to hear from someone who has that kind of expertise.
Radiation passes through water, ice, and most materials. What point are trying to make?
Maybe a huge amount of water, many feet in depth/thickness, could lessen the radiation, but there'd be no way to encircle a craft with such an amount.
No sane person or scientist would entertain such an approach.
Not a science-fiction fan, I guess? This is exactly the solution that Arthur C. Clarke proposed in The Songs of Distant Earth. He might not have been entirely sane, to be fair.
Mass blocks radiation. We have a lot of air protecting us. We'd need a similar amount of water. Atmospheric pressure is about 10 meters of water, so we'd need roughly that much water. Gold is about 20 times denser than water, so we'd only need 0.5 meter of gold.
I read the same article. For a trip to Mars, whether one-way or round-trip, there are going to be problems. A round trip would take a little less less than 2 years of total travel in space. That's quite a long time to be weightless.
Yes as easy as many thought this would be it's clearly not stacking up to be such. I am well versed what drives evolution and we did not evolve in a low gravity/no gravity environment so it makes perfect sense why these astronauts experienced adverse physiological effects from being in space.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NightBazaar
Weightlessness not only affects the brain, but the entire body. It affects the eyes, the bones, muscles, fluids, etc.
Yes this is what the article I posted mentions as well.
I'm linking the actual study on how it affected their Brain Tissue.
The most interesting finding was how space travel affected gene expression...i.e. how genes are turned on or turned off.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NightBazaar
In addition, although Mars does have gravity, it's still weaker than here on Earth, meaning that too would add some contribution to effects of the body.
If we could develop the means to get there in a month, such as with nuclear fusion, that might not be so bad. But that's not what's currently being considered, and we don't have a spacecraft capable of doing anything that for a manned mission. It would be a better idea to have some means to at least simulate gravity (such as depicted with the rotating section of the Discovery XD-1 spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey). The XD-1 is much too long and wouldn't be able to land on the surface, although it might be able to carry some compact shuttles or even rockets.
Space exploration drives innovation and discovery so I'm all for any possible ways we can make it to Mars.
For everything we think we know about the impact of space travel on living organisms, there are probably dozens or hundreds of other things we don’t know. When I was in the lab, I got to work on some small fishes that were taken aboard Skylab 3. The adult fish, when exposed to zero G could not orient properly with each other and would make loops when trying to swim. However, newly hatched fish of the same breed, oriented with each other perfectly and swam without looping. NASA got really excited about this, thinking that there was environmental influence on the early development of the vestibular system. One of the guys said that we always hear that the astronauts are doing fine when they return but they don’t tell you about how they will turn off the room lights and fall over because they’ve learned to ignore input from their vestibular system in favor of what their eyes tell them. Fascinating stuff.
There was a later experiment with the same little fish, control group on the ground, a 1 G centrifuge control group that went up with another group that would again be at 0 G. I had left that lab by that time so don’t know how it turned out but I thought that was something pretty cool to be involved with at the time.
Yeah right. There are lots of fruit trees there too.
Lots of stage lighting also if you look closely at the photographs.
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