Female Chinese astronauts must have no scars, straight teeth More than a quarter of the astronauts on China’s next manned space mission will be women, but they were selected according to a strict set of criteria which rules out any with pronounced body odour or bad teeth. China Daily reported that China’s next wo-manned mission will see the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft blasted into the skies …
Seems reasonable assuming they apply the same rules to the blokes too. If as group of people are going to be spending time "out on the final frontier" locked in a tin can, if they can prove they look after their health it means they care about their own wellbeing, probably others and are most likely to be mentally stable.
Think of it this way, if you were locked into a room for several weeks with a group of people, how long would it be before you got so fed up with someone's teeth grinding, their smelly breath, wiffy pits, dirty laundry that you decided to lose it and start a huge barney? You can't just say, "Sod this you smelly bastards, I'm off out for the day!".
More practically, if someone has bad teeth, how do you get them to the dentist? Similarly with scars, under low pressure and with a restricted diet, it's possible they could reopen. I'm with you on the bad smells. I would hope the same rules apply to everyone and it's just getting extra reporting coverage because there are women.
They could do what everyone else (UK forces included) do; have your teeth checked out before you go, and preventative maintenance undertaken to ensure they're not a problem. 15 minutes with the dentist seems a better move than binning a (presumably highly-trained and expensive to make) Taikonaut; perhaps the dental budget is empty but the Taikonaut training courses have money to burn.
Or conceivably the only reason for manned spaceflight is PR and they don't want somebody who looks like a chinese version of stig of the dump plastered all over their posters.
Same reason that Gagarin was chosen - his family was suitably working class and US astronauts were picked from married crew-cut test pilots
Mercury, Gemini & Apollo 'nauts all used to breathe O2 at about 5PSI, that's how Apollo 1 went up in flames, poor build quality an a pure O2 atmosphere.
The saturated vapour pressure of water at body temperature is about 1PSI, so the body will survive at this pressure and not experience an embolism due to the boiling of water in the body tissues. However you need about 1.7 PSI to allow gas exchange to take place in the lungs
Space suits are pressurized to 4.3 psi with a pure oxygen mix because a full-pressure suit would have to be much stronger and the pressure would make the suit difficult and vert tiring to use.
The Skuttle Shuttle and the ISS are pressurised to normal sea level of 14.7 PSI and the ‘nauts breathe ‘normal’ air
On the Apollo missions the potable water was a by-product of the fuel cells and contained relatively large amounts of dissolved H2, when this water was used to rehydrate the dried food, the body processed the hydrogen to produce lots of hydrogen sulfide gas, so bad news then, everyone is going to be smelly,
Til you have a spark in a panel, and all that ripe fuel-high-oxygen content make that cabin go bust.
Gives GasPanic, Flatulence, and venting a new perspective.
I guess worries of BO could spawn ancillary industry work where the bulkhead liners are special (spacial?) absorptive padding.
The alternative is menthol nasal strips or nostril plugs. Otherwise, NostrilDominous would take over...
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They did have nearly the same criteria for men, except for the giving birth bit..
The only problem I see is where are they going to find a Chinese woman with the right education that gave birth naturally? I've never met a Chinese woman in China who gave birth naturally (and is within the right age group of course).. they all seem to have Cesareans...
And the BO thing, good call... a man was even granted a divorce in China because on his wedding night he found she had bad BO
And as for being married, I think that is to ensure the men in space behave!
Consider the now-retired Space Shuttle. There are suggestions that when it was being specced, NASA knew that American women would fly in space and so made the Shuttle female-friendly.
Did it have ... a rear view mirror? Clutch? Reverse gear?
Best of all, when the fuel tank was empty, the crew weren't required to refuel in any way, they just threw the tank away. So, no panicky calls to Houston, "help, I'm at the space station and I've filled up with diesel."
If I remember correctly, the pressure is kept intentionally somewhat lower than normal atmospheric sea level - as in they then need less air (= less weight) and the capsule doesn't need to be so strong in the opposite direction to when in the atmosphere (again, less weight).
Apparently the extended stay in low pressure can cause fillings to erupt due to pockets of much denser air in cavities in the teeth. No idea whether this ever really happened or not, but I'd also read somewhere that prospective US astronauts had any fillings they did have drilled out and refilled very carefully to reduce this risk.
> the extended stay in low pressure can cause fillings to erupt
No. It is a *change* in pressure which causes problems.
If the filling/tooth is not damaged from the forces applied to it (p=F/A), the pressure in any cavity will equalise, as there will not be a perfect, gas-tight seal. Then, of course, you have do to the same thing in the other direction on return to normobaric ambient pressure...
> No idea whether this ever really happened or not
Similar has happened to divers. I'm not aware of any explosive decompression incidents in teeth, but I know people who have had very bad toothache on ascent because of such an issue. A visit to the dentist prevents recurrence :-)
Vic.
Well, hey, that rule worked for the US Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, right?
@Nathan Hobbs: Yes, the first US astronauts did come out of the military test flight programs, so they had 20-20 eyesight minimum. As to teeth, I wonder. They grew up in the days before fluoridation of the water supply was common, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there were a number of fillings along for the ride.
The women are married with a child, that makes them milfs. It also ensures that any impropriety aboard the peoples republic of outer space transport device will not be reported for fear of shame. What happens in the peoples republic of space, stays in the peoples republic of space. Plus they will make excellent villain spies if James Bond ever joins the ISS crew.
I am no expert but unlike many westerners I do understand at a very basic level the difference between the different asian cultures and histories. That said the picture for this article looks a lot more like a Japanese woman than someone from China. That also said I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers.
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