Interesting how our understanding of risks change. I have that Soviet illustrated pop science book about space travel. Published in 1955 - two years before Sputnik - the main concern it had was the harm of microgravity. Huge unknown at the time, there were fears that humans would not able to function properly in weightlessness, so all the designs of orbital stations were with centrifugal gravity.
DNA at that point was barely discovered and genetics remained a pariah science under CPSU for years.
(The book also refers to space pilots as astronauts, not cosmonauts, and describes polar caps and channels on Mars. Wild.)
And 60+ years later their guess is semi-confirmed by this study; if humans want to be in space for a long time they'll need artificial gravity to avoid most of the harms mentioned in the article.
Amazing that 90% of his genes returned to normal expression. I wonder how long humans can withstand microgravity before that number drops severely, or if it's a gradual decline...
An old professor of mine was part of the medical research in these initial studies. I remember some of the big unanswered question about 0G were the digestive system and the vestibular system. Digestive because we had no idea if a stomach and the rest could deal with 0g and not just cause vomiting and whatnot. The vestibular (sense of balance) because the tiny crystals in your inner ear may detach in prolonged 0g away from the hair-like cells that transmit motion to your brain, causing permanent vertigo. Not a good thing for a pilot to have. There were many other effects that were unknown too, hence the space monkeys. Since they came back alright, it was seen as safe enough to send highly trained and very expensive test pilots up there too. Man, the Cold War, what a trip.
At some point we're going to have rotating, shielded space stations that are much safer than living in 0g aluminum tubes.
The real question is whether the effects of subnormal gravity are safe. If not, Mars isn't likely to work out and we'll instead have to build rotating habitats.
You can get rotating artificial gravity even with bolos, though wheel-shaped stations would be better.
If you store the station's water supply between the interior and exterior walls, you get a decent amount of shielding that way, and you need the water anyway so it's no extra mass. Alternatively, you could capture a near-earth asteroid and just tunnel your space station into it, using the material inside the asteroid for construction material.
I suspect any program to capture a near-earth asteroid and construct a station with artificial gravity would be approximately the same cost as a Mars mission.
If there were only any near term intention to capture asteroids. Everything is technologically possible and it's funny to say how it could be done. But if you look at budgets, timetables etc. it's not looking very likely.
If we are going to Mars in next 30 years it's going to be some other path.
With Space Force being the newest branch of the U.S. military, look...if the CIA wants to make up some shit about Martians having WMDs and therefore we need to invade the planet immediately...I'm willing to go along with it.
So I used to listen to Coast to Coast just as entertainment before it turned into a giant infomercial, I now listen to Mysterious Universe which is much better and much more entertaining and definitely worth a listen if you like crazy/paranormal things approached with lots of skepticism and humor, but a semi-regular guest on Coast to Coast claims that the CIA was on Mars ha!
The guest claimed that as part of a CIA project in his teens, he was on mars via teleportation and saw a young Barack Obama there. It's pure unsanity and obviously not fake but it's a hell of a rabbit hole to go down purely for amusement. The sad part is, at least from my impression, the guest really believed that he had been part of these alleged (fantastical) events. Here are some articles about it:
So who knows, maybe the CIA has really had a legitimate interest in Mars at some point, they've taken interest in far stranger things (maybe they took too much of their own drugs from MKUltra).
Scott Manley did a video about this - turns out this is pretty energy intensive (asteroids are heavy & you are spinning up the whole thing) & not doable at all for many asteroid types due to insufficient material strength of the asteroid. Therefore, internal centrifuges in an asteroid cavern or spinning stations made from metal and/or advanced materials (wheels up to ONeil Island 3 design) are a much better bet than spinning asteroids.
Any artificial extrasolar objects that use spin for gravity would be far to small for current telescopes to resolve, not to mention detect their spin, if they are circular.
That seems like a much better bet - the asteroids own gravity should be negligiable & you should be able to get reasonably sized cavern rather easily. Also a non/slowly spinnong asteroid is in general easier to dock with.
It's really not. It's not a far leap from "aluminium tube in space" to "slightly larger radius aluminium tube in space rotating along its axis surrounded by liquid hydrogen".
We don't need some magic force field to shield against radiation - water has already proven it can do this. Liquid hydrogen is an even better shield and it's something we currently have the technology to use.
The combination of much cheaper launch costs of SpaceX's Starship, zero to negative interest rates, and a bunch of space-interested billionaires, might just get some rotating space hotels up and running sooner than you might think.
I count three, the latter two of which are already doing more for less than most were expecting.
And this has all been clearly chosen as a development sequence that leads to them being a space trucking company, so those “decades” plural have already start.
But if it takes two more decades, so what? The points, pro and con, still stand. Technologically achievable, but no clear economic reason as yet.
I consider 30 years timeline as an optimistic scenario because we will have Super-Heavy rockets in operation in later half of 2020's, and from there onward the priorities for most major space agencies for manned spaceflight is return to the moon and in-situ resources. Which I believe should have been the focus for a while.
Most of innovation and commercial activity will be focused around lunar habitation and infrastructure, by the looks of it.
Just a nit-pick: i think it’s a political problem, not an economic problem. Humankind as a whole has the money/resources to do it, perhaps unprofitably. There is just no political will to prioritize it and make it happen.
Yeah and that might be because there are lots of problems down on earth right now, like climate change, requiring more effort and are maybe more important than space advance. And sadly I would agree, you don't?
> Liquid hydrogen is an even better shield and it's something we currently have the technology to use.
First get your liquid hydrogen (and any other similar solutions) into orbit.
I used to be (in the 70s) gung-ho for space colonies, but really the economics simply don't make sense with anything like current drive technologies, or indeed any in the foreseeable future. In my opinion, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that putting intelligent living organisms into space for their lifetimes is simply far, far too difficult.
If SpaceX can get anything near what they hope for the Starship launch costs ($2 million per launch/ 150,000 kg to orbit per launch = $13.3 per kg to orbit), the economics of space will be fundamentally changed. Building the cheapest launch capability possible has been a goal for Elon Musk's SpaceX since the beginning and you can see that principle at work in the decisions that SpaceX makes at each step in the development of its rockets. This could happen in 5-10 years, if there are not any large setbacks.
Who knows if SpaceX will price their launch capabilities at that price though.
The only reason they can even hope for such prices is because they get boatloads of money from the US government tho.
It would probably be more interesting to consider the real cost.
The problem is that the majority of earth's population is under-educated, if our economics system was conducive to education a lot of problems would be solved.
We need to figure out how to live together before we live together in space. Imagine how easy it would be to damage or destroy a relatively flimsy man-made habitat that everyone literally depends on to survive.
That isn't going to happen tho. People will be living in space way before they figure out how to get along because getting along is something that humans will never do: maybe what ever species we evolve in to might but that is surely thousands of years in the future.
The drive to compete is what causes progress, and not getting along is an inevitable side effect of that.
Any species that gets along perfectly either has telepathy (or some sort of unfakeable hormonal equivalent), is some kind of hive/single individual, or is stagnant.
For these purposes, all we need is to get rid of (or at the very least properly control) violent tendencies. We don’t need to make it so everyone’s singing religious rock songs around a fake camp fire to celebrate everyone getting a participation medal in cooperative soccer.
My bosses have never needed violence to enforce their opinions, and I have never needed to resort to violence against them when working relationships have turned sour.
And ridding the action is all that is necessary for us to not die from civil disorder in a space settlement.
This is only because the (threat of) violence has been outsourced to the state. Imagine that there is no state monopoly on violence [1] and your boss pays you directly in food, which you need to survive. Suddenly he refuses to pay you and you face starvation. Now you’re pretty likely to resort to violence.
I’ve mostly avoided needing to involve the state, too. My personality is more of “compete by being better” and I regard violence (and regulatory capture) as cheating.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an anarchist — I agree that state monopoly on violence would be spontaneously recreated if it was removed. I’m also a lot more dubious about the political future than about the technological future.
But, that’s beside the point: I’m saying that we could, plausibly, have social and political structures that suppress our violent tendencies and in so doing make it not ridiculously unsafe to live in a fragile space habitat.
This is not without precedent, as we are less violent now than we were a mere few hundred years ago, and have managed this with little in the way of actual evolution.
Without getting too spoilery, Ad Astra depicts some handheld weapons in space. The movie is slllowww but visually wonderful.
That isn't all that far fetched, both the USSR and the United States looked at various options for space weapons. Traditional firearms like the TP-82 carried by the soviets and various options were looked at for new weapons by both sides like the 'Soviet laser pistol' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_laser_pistol
There are some documents out there like "The Meanderings of a Weapon Oriented Mind When Applied in a Vacuum Such as the Moon" (just Google the title, click the link you trust) that show various other types that we know were looked at.
“ Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly.
In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.”
That is what SpaceX is doing. Their manned and unmanned spacecraft systems are similar now (Falcon 9 + Dragon/Crew Dragon) and will be the same with the next system (Super Heavy + Starship). Hopefully the Starship will begin unmanned launches in 2020 as planned and get a good number of launches under its belt so that manned launches can start soon. With Starship SpaceX won't be constrained by NASA safety requirements. They will have the NASA approved Crew Dragon to launch NASA astronauts while they can use the Starship to launch anyone who decides that the Starship is safe enough for them. There is even a low probability that Starship will be launching people before Crew Dragon starts launching people, which would be a real blow for NASA, but would really point out the problems of a safety first attitude for technological progress.
Safety first attitude? The space shuttle exploded with all crew lost, twice. Crew dragon exploded on one of its tests. Boeing test went tits up.
Rarely does a year go by without a rocket crashing or blowing up. If you want to blow up metal fine, but when it comes to people I find your attitude unhelpful.
>Safety first attitude? The space shuttle exploded with all crew lost, twice
2 lost out of 135 missions. That's what, a 1.48% failure rate? In a spacecraft that was kinda wonky given things like the fact each shuttle had nearly 3,000 FRCI tiles (each one present a possible failure point).
Launching into space with rockets will always be dangerous, you're strapping your cargo (human or otherwise) to one or more bombs and saying "please blow up in the way we want and not all at once".
Even if someone develops magical anti-gravity, there would always be the chance that it would fail and you'd drop out of the sky with no means of propulsion or that something would go wonky and part of the craft would suddenly implode. Even a space elevator would have risks.
Everyone knew the vehicle was wonky and that makes it even more egregious, it's not an excuse. It should have never stayed in service for as long as it did.
You seem to think 1.5% is an acceptable failure rate? Then what is too high in your mind, 50%?
Imagine we did have large scale space infrastructure/ spacestations / lunar colony, astronauts would have to fly that vehicle several hundred times in their career. No-one would survive till pension. We've had rockets for like 70 years now, it should not be a gamble whether you will survive.
18 people have died in space exploration since the 1950's. Over a million people die in car wrecks each year on earth[1]. Yes, we want to make space travel safer, but letting people who want to take bigger risks to do great things is something to encourage. It is not like the people going on these rockets are forced to do so. They work hard all their lives just to have a small chance to go. Some risk is needed to make technological progress in space travel at some reasonable rate.
So by US automotive safety standards, space travel has a long ways to go in terms of fatality reduction, whereas by global safety standards space travel is approximately on par.
⁴: Assuming - again - a constant 1 million deaths per year over 50 years
⁵: https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-world-population-k..., which assumes that there is at least one person capable of driving per registered vehicle in the world; this is almost certainly a drastic underestimation, since it doesn't factor in passengers at all.
This is an interesting comparison, but I think it unfairly favours rockets because you seem to be calculating chance of fatality of each passenger/driver.
Typically astronauts will have less than 10 flights, whereas a driver could have 10,000 trips in a car.
Typically you won't be driving (or riding in) a car for up to a year non-stop (without so much as a fuel stop), either; I feel like that offsets the quantity of trips to at least some extent.
A more interesting question is how can humans be modified to be fit for space and other planets?
You and I will never leave earth, let alone the solar system. But a colony ship with a 1000 year nuclear battery, a huge computer, a massive sample of biological samples and some raw materials could go to another star system. Once there it could build something that would thrive locally (their gravity, their o2 levels, their radiation and temperatures). Something with a similar enough brain to humans...
> 40 percent of the astronauts who lived on the International Space Station suffered some sort of damage to their eyes, including optic disc edema, globe flattening, and folds in the choroid, the blood-filled layer between the retina and the white sclera.
In order to modify humans not to experience these effects in space, you would need to take those 60 percent of astronauts who did not suffer these effects, have them reproduce, check that their children inherited the right genes (i.e. the genes that insulate them from these effects), wait for those children to grow, train them as astronauts, send them into space, check for any other health effects, bring them back to Earth, make those people who do not experience adverse optical effects have children of their own who are immune to other health effects of exposure to microgravity, check that these children have all the right genes, etc. Rinse and repeat over generations. Forced evolution, basically.
Gene therapy would dramatically expedite the process, but you need to first identify which genes protect astronauts from xyz health effects of long-term exposure to microgravity, and then modify the genes of your astronaut candidates to fit the right genetic profile. You must also avoid nasty side effects. If the procedure you used to tweak the genes of your astronaut to prevent bone density loss, for example, results in the astronaut having a higher likelihood of developing a cancer, you must find another way to protect the astronaut from bone density loss without increasing his likelihood of developing a cancer.
A more "brute force" approach would be to send a large cohort of randomly selected humans into space, say 10,000, have them spend a few months in orbit, monitor them for any adverse health effects, and select those few (if any) who did not experience any side effects to be the parents of a future, genetically enhanced, astronaut corps. While everyone else is crippled to various degrees by their stay in space.
The real "brute force" approach is to send millions to space and make colonies all over the moon, asteroid belt, mars, outer planet's moons, everywhere - and see who will survive and if they leave any descendants.
You can devise a spacecraft that provides some gravity for occupants, either via rotation or acceleration. Rotational gravity is probably way easier to solve for than adaptation to micro gravity.
> In order to modify humans not to experience these effects in space, you would need to take those 60 percent of astronauts who did not suffer these effects, have them reproduce
That assumes that the 60/40 split had anything at all to do with genetics.
Definitely. It would be surprising if genetics affected almost any of these problems tbh. Much more likely is that the damage arises in a poisson ransom process or whatever and we have little recourse
Also, IMHO it’s a bit arrogant to believe we know the best traits. Humans are complicated systems. Maybe halfblind, motion sick and paranoid people are better at surviving out there than happy contempt people never bothered when the centrifuge breaks down. Or whatever. I agree that the best brute force test is to just put a lot of people up there and see what happens. The best survivors might not be the obvious candidates.
This is equivalent to what Plato advocated. His solution to the problem of people not willingly going along with it was for the state to keep it a secret. He was a bit more of a fascist than most people recall.
Thats far too long term & primitive. Direct mechanical augmentation (artificial eyes!) or possibly even genetic one would likely achoeve the same much more quickly.
Wouldn't it be better to keep them there? Those that survive/thrive get to breed and rinse and repeat. Keep them in space their entire lives, generation after generation and evolution would produce a space-faring capable group of humans.
With sci-fi tech, sure, we could probably eventually do things like that... but why should we? If we can't get there and they can't come back, what the hell is the point? Blasting our collective spunk on far off junk just seems like narcissism.
In all seriousness, the bit about “a new species of spacefaring hominins” is more-or-less what The Expanse posits. Belters are not Inners, beyond culture.
Longest continuous period in space is just 1.2 years. Almost all human testing is yet to be done before we know if the Mars mission is possible without rotational gravity and heavy and expensive radiation shielding. Nobody knows how much gravity on Mars surface (0.38 g) or on the Moon surface (0.17g) helps with the problems and recovery.
Simulated Mission where astronauts spends 9 months on ISS, few months in moon (or short visit on earth) then another 9 months on ISS would tell something. Radiation is not as bad as in the Mars trip, so it would be safer than the eventual Mars mission.
Or we just find some volunteers, tell them about the risks and send them to Mars. I'd go, for example.
In the early days of flight people were taking huge risks, many died. But we went from no flight at all, to landing on the Moon in one lifetime. I think it's okay to take risks, as long as everybody involved knows about them and does it voluntarily.
The Japanese recently brought up a centrifuge to do experiments on long term exposure of small mammals to this sort of gravity. We should be hearing back with the first results this coming year.
Not what the op was talking about. Those have been operating for some time. They will also use HUT bed rest to simulate Martian gravity on earth and Martian gravity in ice in ISS. Intermittent rotation tests will start in maybe year or two with rats.
Validation testing with humans must be achieved somehow.
Plus completely new procedures for operating in artificial gravity, safety measures, prototypes, startup, tests, exercises, docking procedures, ... Soon we are talking about big money. If you want to move inside capsules you need to balance and deal with vibrations etc.
There is a difference between a quick test and a year long health impact study. Those passengers need to be fed, supplied erc. Youd have to put the whole of ISS on a tether.
Homo sapiens are not suitable for the purpose of life in space, homo sapiens may someday create an intelligent life form which will be adapted for a long life in a zero gravity vacuum and radiation filled environment.
I doubt humans will ever live beyond earth. I can’t see how it’s possible. Lack of gravity, lack of pressure, excessive radiation. We’d literally need antigravity and magical force fields to sustain what we consider “human”.
A few generations off Earth and humans won’t even be humans anymore. We will become aliens ourselves IF we manage to survive.
Antigravity is provided by rotating a cylinder along it's longitudinal axis. It's very simple stuff.
Not sure why we need force fields. If you meant radiation shielding, liquid hydrogren or even water is a fine radiation shield. Life evolved on earth in shallow seas before there was an ozone layer.
All of the things you mentioned are possible, but very expensive today. The reason we wouldn't live beyond earth is because people just accept that it's too hard and too magical.
Moon is close by, has plenty of sunlight, aluminum and apparently iron ores, some water. It all is at a reasonable gravity that allows to safety operate on the surface, but cheaply launch a lot into earth orbit, even using electromagnetic catapults that don't require a propellant.
I think you are right. I actually meant "центробежная сила", but blame Google Translate [1] which translated is as Coriolis Force (english is not my first language).
I thought it is a bit weird, but then I though thata US still uses imperial units, which 100x weirder, so I didn't check further. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
DNA at that point was barely discovered and genetics remained a pariah science under CPSU for years.
(The book also refers to space pilots as astronauts, not cosmonauts, and describes polar caps and channels on Mars. Wild.)