Who would have thought that a trip to Mars could get tis complicated. In a 6 year trip to Mars contingencies and standards have to be set for sex,death radiation etc. II do wonder how no worldly gravity would affect astronauts. after that long.
This gets a lot of talk, but really, there’s no reason for astronauts to go without gravity on a trip to Mars. All you have to do is spin the ship. Sure, it won’t be exactly like Earth gravity, due to things like the Coriolis effect. But we’re not trying to play baseball, here, just to keep the astronauts’ bodies from atrophying.
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No question here. I’ll just pop this over to MPSIMS.
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It’s even more complicated than that. Aside from fundamental problems with radiation, lack of gravity, limited provisions and resources, et cetera, the basic difficulty of being isolated in a spacecraft somewhere between the size of a Volkwagon Type 2 (for a CEV-type capsule) to something the size of Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey for the better part of 29 months is one of those things “Mars Direct!” advocates conveniently overlook. This exacerbates any latent psychological problems, as would some kind of crisis where one or more astronauts are injured, killed, or fall ill during transit. It’s all well and fine or NASA or other manned space exploration advocates to talk about what heros astronauts are or how being on such a groundbreaking task would allow them to restrain their baser impulses, but in fact once you’re past the initial exuberance factor, people are still apes with bad breath, constipation, and cranky morning attitudes.
The case of Lisa Nowak has no doubt brought the issue to the public (and NASA’s) consciousness, but there has always been a high incidence of psychological problems in the astronaut corps which is kept tightly under wraps. NASA has never had a clear plan to deal with this; it’s virtually unthinkable (from a political standpoint) to send an all-male crew on a groundbreaking mission, but the problems, biological, emotional, social, and otherwise, of sending a mixed gender crew on an extended mission also pose grave difficulty. And in the case of serious medical or emotional problems there’s no turning around and dropping someone back to Earth the way we can with the ISS.
I continue to maintain that a true manned Mars exploration mission will require some form of propulsion an order of magnitude more effective than current chemical rockets in order to minimize the hazards of a long intermediate journey and provide sufficient crew size and provisions to assure redundancy and capability in the case of an emergency, as well as allowing for enough manpower to perform actual scientific exploration in addition to just planting a flag. People seem to want to think of a mission to Mars as being just a somewhat bigger version of a Lunar transit, but in fact it’s in a completely different ballpark of complexity and risk.
I agree, but I’ll also note that current practical experience in simulating gravity via centerfuge in space is almost nil. (Some experiments with tethered rotation were performed on one of the Geminip missions, but that’s the extent.) In the scheme of things this doesn’t seem like a terribly complicated thing to do, particularly if you avoid complicated rotating housings and the like and simply have a couple of craft that either tether to each other or to a central propulsion system (presumably with some means to transfer from one to the other), but it still remains to actually prove out such a concept and figure out how to make it workable during acceleration. You’d probably want to despin the assembly before performing maneuvers, but that will require energy, either in fuel or in a counterrotating flywheel. Not a big deal, perhaps, with some kind of high specific impulse nuclear or ion propulsion system where propellant doesn’t make up the bulk of the payload, but for a chemical propulsion system you’d be hard pressed to perform multiple spin-despin operations, or carry around a massy flywheel.
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