Sailor Moon? More like sail to the Moon: Japan vows to set foot on lunar soil by 2030 Japan's national space agency JAXA has announced plans to send a lone astronaut to the moon by 2030. It's a big step for Japan, since its astronauts have never set foot in space beyond the International Space Station. The proposal was presented this week during a panel with the country's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports …
Anime shows that some Japanese have a sexual preference that borders on paedophilia.
Alex Jones has just revealed that NASA has a colony of child sex slaves on Mars.
Of course the Japanese are trying to advance their space technology to the point where they can get to Mars.
It all makes perfect sense.
Oh, and Vulture Central needs to add an icon of a tinfoil helmet, with title text "I'll get my tinfoil helmet." So you'll have to imagine there's a tinfoil helmet in the coat I'm reaching for.
People seem to imagine that getting to Mars is like getting to the Moon, but with a bigger rocket. The problem is not physically getting there, it's avoiding dying from radiation exposure on the way. Three years exposure to high energy cosmic particles, plus the occasional intense blast of solar wind from solar storms is going to leave the astronaut with more than a nice tan, and there isn't much that can be effectively done about it.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/radiation-remains-problem-any-mission-mars-180959092/
Actually there are things that can be done.
First, don't spend 3 years traveling to Mars. Go faster, and get there in 3-4 months. This cuts the exposure by an order of magnitude.
Second, ~3 cm of water cuts radiation level in half. The crew is going to need water so put the storage around the outside of the habitable area. Have a panic room with thicker shielding for solar storms.
Third, don't use metal as the primary material in the bulkheads of habitable areas. Metals, when struck by high energy particles, emit secondary radiation. Inflatable sections, much like what Biglow is playing with, don't have the same problems with secondary radiation.
Radiation is not a big problem in most of the inner solar system. We don't want to hang out in the Van Allen belts or get too close to the Sun but we aren't planning on spending a lot of time in either place.
You forgot about the retinas detaching halfway there and your bone mass reaching breakpoint at that time as well. JPL has some great articles and research about how we'll have to be fully "Modified" before we ever hope to become a Space faring/Landing species. Humanity was meant for the gravity it was born on, until we can replicate it maybe....
Am I reading this right? Does JAXA intend to send just one astronaut to land on the Moon, do EVA/sampling/photography etc.? No crewmates to tend a mothershp in lunar orbit (will it be EOR/LOR or direct-ascent?), and serve as copilot for the lander? Or, does JAXA plan on a one-man lunar orbit/flyby mission as a kind of "technology demonstrator"? This article doesn't mention that.
Towards the end of the Mercury program, if I remember right, plans for a one-man lunar flyby based on a modified capsule were kicked around and quickly dropped. At least Gemini could carry two and, in the context of the heavily-studied Lunar Gemini proposals, one man could tend the Gemini in lunar orbit while his crewmate flew a bare-bones lander down to the surface. Also, the USSR's original plans for Soyuz lunar missions called for a crew of two working in a similar fashion as the proposed Lunar Gemini missions.
Just one guy, though? I don't think they've really thought this through enough.
We don't need to have a person to tend a craft in Lunar orbit any more. There are these things called computers which can automate all of the necessary tasks. Computers have gotten much smaller in the last five decades, so much so, they can fit on spacecraft.
Not that spending the resources on a lander of one is a good use of scare resources.
>Just one guy, though? I don't think they've really thought this through enough.<
I don't have any more insight to their plans than you do, but what you're failing to consider is that AI/autonomous flight is far, far more advanced now than it was during the Apollo days. The spacecraft could probably do a better job of docking with each other, etc, than a human pilot could.
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