Future astronauts at risk of heart attacks, strokes if radiation allowed to ravage their cardiovascular health Space is not for the faint of heart. Astronauts will eventually suffer cardiovascular damage if they stay in the void long enough unless we get better at mitigating the effects of radiation. That's according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers of Cardiovascular Medicine. It describes how heart muscle is replaced by …
The only thing important is profit, and only profit! If making some money requires killing you, tough luck buster, you're a goner!
It's not like I won't enjoy it, but remember it's nothing personal, just business. After all, *I* am the most important person on earth, and thus deserve some (human) sacrifices. Because I'm worth it.
Until I read this.
I remember hearing that at sea level the Earth's atmosphere has the same protective effect as a wall of concrete 20 feet thick would in space, so that is probably not practical.
Alternatively, could a spaceship be protected by a magnetic field? Charged particles would be channeled by the field lines around the spacecraft, rather than allowed to penetrate it, as they are channeled by the Earth's magnetic field and make the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis. Of course that won't protect the crew from the uncharged particles like neutrons, but would it help?
Those guys were also about the fittest you could find when they were originally selected, so that should also be taken in to account for their longevity.
Also no one has done a long time outside of the Earth's protective magnetic fields yet, all of the long exposure has been on the ISS and similar in fairly low and relatively equatorial orbits.
Long term we need a solution to this, as eventually (maybe sooner than we might hope) we will have to move out and explore for new habitats.
Among other things, you're dealing with some pretty small sample sizes. That aside, the following differences apply:
Duration of trip: Apollo 11 spent eight and a half days outside the atmosphere. Apollo 17 took that up to twelve. People on the ISS spend a lot longer there, usually measured in months. People undertaking a voyage through space would certainly spend months or years on their journey. A longer stay outside the atmosphere means more exposure to radiation, and the ISS is lucky to be as close as it is.
Type of person: Astronauts have to be fit and relatively healthy or they don't get sent, but there are other aspects which are considered. The people sent to the ISS are often sent to work on specific scientific projects, which means that experience with the project can take precedence over physical health. Also, radiation can cause a problem whether you're fit or not. Even if we only sent fit people, they could still sustain serious damage. If they don't because they got lucky, didn't spend much time there, or had a good shield, their later fitness doesn't disprove the risk.
Forget it, Paul! We ain't goning nowhere. It took 44 years for Voyager probe to travel the distance light travels in less than a day so even the closest star is out of reach. Besides that, you wouldn't be able to lift up enough individuals and ressources to start everything from scratch elsewhere.
20ft of concrete to line your spacecraft? Easy! Project Orion has you covered.
All you need are some particularly intrepid astronauts. There’s no weight limit on big brass bollocks here... a massive steel base plate, some really heavy duty springs and a few hundred small nuclear bombs. Then, she goes up!
Of course now you need to protect those on the ground from high radiation. But that’s just a trifling little matter to solve...
There have been many remarkable scenes enacted in the great Examination Halls and in the narrow cells around, but it can at once be definitely stated that nothing either before or since has approached the unanimous burst of frenzy that shook the dynasty of Chung when in the third year of his reign the well-meaning but too-easily-led-aside Emperor K’ong inopportunely sought to replace the sublime Classic then in use with a work that has since been recognized to be not only shallow but inept. At Ho Chow nine hundred and ninety-eight voices blended into one soul-benumbing cry of rage, having all the force and precision of a carefully drilled chorus, when the papers were opened, and had not the candidates been securely barred within their solitary pens a popular rising must certainly have taken place. There they remained for three days and nights, until the clamour had subsided into a low but continuous hum, and they were too weak to carry out a combined effort.
Kai Lung's Golden Hours
.
There is so finer way of inducing a turbulent shit-storm on the American internet than to suggest we are not actually in fact capable of all flying into deep space in tin cans, and there living like gods forever.
This post has been deleted by its author
<trippyguitarandkeyboardnoises=on>
<voicetype="ELDRITCH">
"Black Corridor"
Space is infinite, it is dark.
Space is neutral, it is cold. Stars occupy minute areas of space.
They are clustered a few billion here, and a few billion there,
as if seeking consolation in numbers.
Space does not care, space does not threaten.
Space does not comfort.
It does not speak, it does not wake.
It does not dream.
It does not hope, it does not fear.
It does not love, it does not hate.
It does not encourage any of these qualities...
Space cannot be measured.
It cannot be angered, it cannot be placated.
It cannot be summed up, space is there.
Space is not large and it is not small.
It does not live and it does not die.
It does not offer truth and neither does it lie.
Space is a remorseless, senseless, impersonal fact.
Space is the absence of time and of matter...
M. Moorcock
Astronauts, cosmonauts etc in the International Space Station are protected because it says in low earth orbit enclosed by the Van Allen belt which deflects a lot of charge particles. Not all the sun’s output is charged though. The article is about living on or regularly travelling to the Moon or Mars. The moon has no atmosphere or much of a magnetic field and Mars’ magnetic field is weak indeed. So weak the solar wind stripped it of much of its original atmosphere.
You can apparently get decent shielding with water. Make a spacecraft’s skin hollow and store the water for the crew’s needs there. Use Moon water to avoid having to loft it from the Earth’s gravity well. At least until we build the space elevators. Musk’s Spaceship 1 doesn’t look much like a Mars vehicle to me. Even if you can get past the tendency to explode on landing. He seems a bit blasé about such things to me.
I suspect this article is a shot across his bows by people who know their stuff. Best that the people going to Mars go in the peak of health, to die in the landing fireball. Don’t sign me up.
You can apparently get decent shielding with water. Make a spacecraft’s skin hollow and store the water for the crew’s needs there.
I seem to recall that's what Robert Heinlein proposed in one of this books. Podkayne of Mars I think.
"You can apparently get decent shielding with water."
You can get decent shielding with anything. Essentially all the matters for radiation shielding is putting atomic nuclei in the way of incoming particles. If you have a nice dense material with lots of atoms packed closely together, you get good shielding with a relatively thin barrier. Have a less dense material, and you need to make the shield thicker to get the same effect. So a few centimetres of lead might be equivalent to a metre or so of concrete, or a kilometre or two of air. There's nothing special about water in that regard.
The main reason water is often suggested for that use is because of the idea that we need to take some with us anyway, so why not make it useful instead of just leaving it sitting around doing nothing. The problem is with the quantities involved. The amount of water needed for a journey of a few months is likely far less than the amount needed for radiation shielding. If we need to ship it to Mars bases or whatever then maybe we'd need more, but there are big efforts ongoing to make sure we don't need to do that because it would be incredibly expensive to constantly ship that much mass to other planets. In much sci-fi, water is used because the hydrogen is used as fuel for fusion power, but even if current efforts on that front pan out we're still quite a way from being able to plan spacecraft around it.
At that point you might say that if we need a similar mass of material for shielding, surely water is just as good as anything else at that point, since we'll need to launch the same amount of something no matter what. But dealing with liquids sloshing around is a big faff. And if you have to carry mass with you, you might as well make it useful and use it for strucural support and other things - this is precisely why a lot of radiation shielding here on Earth is concrete - lead might not take up much space, but if you need a wall anyway you might as well just make it a bit thicker and call it a day rather than building a normal wall and then applying shielding separately.
So water might be handy as shielding once we have fusion-powered interstellar spaceships, but in the near future with chemical rockets and hopefully local water on the Moon and Mars, there are likely to be much simpler and more efficient ways to do shielding that don't involve liquids, hollow structures, pressure tanks, and so on.
sorry, Not correct. Hydrogen is, for its mass, one of the best elements at dissipating most radiation.
It is true that Polyethylene is effective - but too heavy for its structural properties. I understand that some work is being done on impregnating Aluminium (which usually makes it brittle but is used in current ships) with H2 to improve its absorption effects. Similarly the use of methane impregnated carbon fiber related materials in various epoxies/ceramics is being worked on.
Water wont slosh around in space. It is a solid if you want it to be. Indeed, it doesnt even have to be on the inside as it can also provide ablative properties.
further, the whole ship would not be shielded - just the bits with people in it - or a shield which can be turned to face potential bursts of cosmic radiation. Alternatively, some form of sleeping cocoon (or 'bag' with a few cms of water as a lining would go a long way.
Are you kidding me ? What is it only roughly 5 years since their first successful booster landing after nearly 60 years of spaceflight,landing which is now so mundane and routine it isnt even reported on, and you are giving them grief that an experimental prototype which has only launched & flown twice using brand new types of rocket engines,cant quite instantly nail a successful landing yet,even though its comparable in size to the Space Shuttles external tank and attempting stuff never done before.
Starship will get people safely to Mars
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
