** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

Minusorange said:
We'll need to build space docks before we can build spaceships with spinny wheels :D
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We’ll get there too. If we step back and have a bit of a cosmic perspective, one can see this is just the beginning :D

I hope we reach singularity before I die. Imagine being born in the 22nd Century, great time to be alive.
 
Nobody really knows as nobody has been in partial gravity for long periods of time. We can simulate microgravity on Earth using nose diving airliners which lasts a few minutes per dive but that's not enough. Given that 6 months in micro gravity around Earth's orbit is enough to severely affect vision then we can assume that even partial gravity will have a negative issue too just at a slower rate. Our bodies have evolved and adapted to Earth's gravity, so without that exact gravity value the body will slowly start to go wrong still.

Just my amateur assumptions of course based on interest and reading into these subjects as it's all fascinating to me and not topics you see discussed in normal media who only focus on the bits that "sell". The reality of it all is more morbid sadly lol. The public don't want to hear that space colonisation will never happen for several generations at the bare minimum, and companies need funding to further these efforts to finally get there. In these circumstances, sacrifices have to be made to progress for future generations.
 
mrk said:
Nobody really knows as nobody has been in partial gravity for long periods of time. We can simulate microgravity on Earth using nose diving airliners which lasts a few minutes per dive but that's not enough. Given that 6 months in micro gravity around Earth's orbit is enough to severely affect vision then we can assume that even partial gravity will have a negative issue too just at a slower rate. Our bodies have evolved and adapted to Earth's gravity, so without that exact gravity value the body will slowly start to go wrong still.

Just ,y amateur assumptions of course based on interest and reading into these subjects as it's all fascinating to me and not topics you see discussed in normal media who only focus on the bits that "sell". The reality of it all is more morbid sadly lol.
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This is where being able to generate an earth like gravity would come in exceptionally handy. But I don't think we can achieve that with the current technology we have.
 
ZeroG said:
This is where being able to generate an earth like gravity would come in exceptionally handy. But I don't think we can achieve that with the current technology we have.
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Gonna have to start spinning large round masses at immense speed for that to be possible!

There was a good video on artificial gravity for space travel by Cool Worlds a while back, think I posted about it but here it is for ref:

 
mrk said:
Nobody really knows as nobody has been in partial gravity for long periods of time. We can simulate microgravity on Earth using nose diving airliners which lasts a few minutes per dive but that's not enough. Given that 6 months in micro gravity around Earth's orbit is enough to severely affect vision then we can assume that even partial gravity will have a negative issue too just at a slower rate. Our bodies have evolved and adapted to Earth's gravity, so without that exact gravity value the body will slowly start to go wrong still.

Just my amateur assumptions of course based on interest and reading into these subjects as it's all fascinating to me and not topics you see discussed in normal media who only focus on the bits that "sell". The reality of it all is more morbid sadly lol. The public don't want to hear that space colonisation will never happen for several generations at the bare minimum, and companies need funding to further these efforts to finally get there. In these circumstances, sacrifices have to be made to progress for future generations.
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the human body is extremely adaptable, even in microgravity. Elevated pressure in the upper body/head area is detected through baroreceptors that basically tell your body that you have too much blood/fluid. A feedback loop kicks in whereby fluid levels are decreased in the body, up until the point at which the baroreceptors are no longer complaining. This is the reason astronauts get orthostatic intolerance (fainting when standing) upon immediate return to Earth, as their body doesn’t have sufficient blood volume to maintain decent pressure at head level so you pass out.

My point is, your body is amazing. And there have been countless experiments to understand how to keep humans healthy in microgravity and lower gravity levels. It’s too simple to say that anything apart from 1g is unhealthy. The body is very good at adapting to its current environment.

For the purposes of long term studies with regards to gravity loading on the body, we can do a bit bit better than seconds (it’s not minutes) per dive on a parabolic flight. Bed rest studies can simulate the gravitational unloading of the body both for in musculoskeletal system as well your cardiovascular system (ie the fluids and blood). By adjusting the angle past horizontal, you can even get the fluids to accumulate in the upper body simulating the effects of microgravity. It’s not perfect, but is a useful tool as it can be combined with ‘countermeasure’ treatments to study their effectiveness.

countermeasures are designed to keep the human body as ‘healthy’ as possible (which as I alluded to early really means able to function well upon return to gravity). These can include treadmills with bungee cords pulling the user onto the track, resistive weight lifting or even ‘artificial gravity’. Sadly we don’t have god like powers over natural forces (yet) but setting up human centrifuges is one possible answer. You could either have large structures rotating slowly or smaller ones rotating quickly. All of these countermeasures are designed to reintroduce loading forces to the body to reverse muscle loss and other issues.

What we are still figuring out is what types of countermeasures are needed for long term space flight, what the considerations are for if someone is landing on Mars and not Earth etc etc. It’s a very big topic across multiple specialities. I haven’t even touched upon radiation protections.
 
Malevolence said:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584739main_Wings-ch5d-pgs370-407.pdf
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A decent summary, although dated from the Space Shuttle era. For example, now ARED (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Resistive_Exercise_Device) is now doing a pretty decent job at keep astronauts in shape, and it was developed based on the learning from previous machines. It cannot help with cardiovascular loading though.

Another topic that is only beginning to be explored is the effect of space flight on females and the menstrual cycle.
 
Just finished the new series Away on Netflix about the first manned voyage to Mars by NASA with global joint effort. Was a great thrill and they touched on the reality of long distance travel like space blindness and some of the physics and engineering issues involved.

Can recommend!
 
mrk said:
Elon Musk has said that the first Mars colonists should be prepared to die there for a number of reasons, but the reality is also that they will almost certainly be blind by the time they reach Mars.

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-fin...-in-space-and-it-s-bad-news-for-mars-missions

Going from 20/20 vision to 20/100 in just 6 months is pretty severe. If either theory as to the cause of space blindness is found to be correct, then there's no way to fix this without constant artificial gravity.

This goes back to the thought that human space colonisation may not be entirely human after all in the all biological sense.

Quite freaky thinking about it!
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Fascinating. Makes even more a mockery of that mission to Mars a few years back with randoms waffling on about how "they'd be the first person to give birth on Mars" and various other crap.

Space exploration is about money and budget more than anything, the cost to make totally safe environments for humans to travel long distances in space is likely to be way more than more advanced drones and probes with massively less payload and life support considerations for future exploration.

Though a guy got funding for research into curing blindness at a genetic level recently, who knows what medical advancements could make recovery, rather than prevention an option.

https://www.dw.com/en/hungarys-rese...rocedure-that-could-cure-blindness/a-54846376

I wouldn't even rule out genetic engineering to create humans that can deal with long term space travel conditions before they find a viable budgeted way to make it totally safe for real humans.
 
Minusorange said:
We'll need to build space docks before we can build spaceships with spinny wheels :D
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And refineries,
chef-borjan said:
Send robots first, establish infrastructure to make human colonisation safer (and therefore cheaper).

But this will happen in the next 20 years. An exciting time.
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No, concentrate on uploading human consciousness into a robot and send us :)

While Mars is great idea and a noble goal, we surely would be better off tapping into the moons resources first and establishing a low g manufacturing site to start the colonisation of the solar system.
 
A known remaining major space travel and habitation concern (even if the gravity problem is solved) is that of psychosis and cognitive impairment being caused by craft intrusion and brain penetration of high energy particles disrupting cellular and neural messaging architecture and functioning.

Shielding (physical prevention) would certainly be better than applying constant neurological maintenance and recovery (ie. using a rehabilitatory driver mix of compensatory chemicals and cognitive algorithms).

Whether the latter approach will even be effective depends on relative damage rate and repair times.

Current achievable fastest neurobiological (and some cognitive component functioning - operating parts of the thinking mechanism such as directional control of memory, attention, mood, etc ) recovery times from moderate-severity multisensory first-onset recent psychosis of 3 days duration can take a day or more. Less if detected earlier than 3 days, depending on radiation environment conditions.

As a known (ie. published in the space medicine research literature) exospace medical concern, research work will need to focus on determining if the available body-mind repair rate can exceed the predicted estimated average damage rate under several likely critical operations scenarios - eg when craft or equipment are under exclusive human control, shielding has been breached by debris impact, etc.
 
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Nb. By multisensory psychosis above, I refer to simultaneous auditory, visual and tactile / haptic hallucinations without grandiose delusion. Or seeing, hearing and feeling things which are objectively not there, occurring as a result of physical damage to the physical brain.
 
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