Astronaut Scott Kelly on the devastating effects of a year in space

[FiveGoodMen]

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/north-america/astronaut-scott-kelly-on-the-devastating-effects-of-a-year-in-space-20170922-gyn9iw.html

Manned mission to Mars looks like a pretty bad idea.

[progressoid]

1. Hell, I'm his age and I bitch about the aches and pains I get from normal life on Earth.

I can't imagine what would happen if I subjected my body to 520 days in space too.

[Duppers]

2. This is what my NASA hubs has been saying ...

For years.


Traveling to Mars it's not such a good idea. Not as glamorous or popular with the public but sending bots makes much more sense, for the health of the astronauts and financially. A former astronaut, Leland Melvin, is a friend of ours, btw.

(NASA's budget does not include enough funding for all its current programs.)

[Cryptoad]

3. GOP Oligarchs

are going to need an escape plan from Earth by 2100

[Javaman]

4. sounds almost as if his body is rejecting earth. nt

[AtheistCrusader]

5. Manned mission to mars can work, but might be a one-way trip.

It's 1/3 earth gravity, so you could probably live there quite happily for a long time. Transitioning back would be difficult. The trip will likely need to be under spin to simulate gravity based on what we've learned so far.

[LudwigPastorius]

6. They've got to solve the problem of not getting the crew fried...

by cosmic rays and solar radiation.

A large solar flare during a manned Mars mission would be a very bad thing that might make the problem of physical atrophy a moot point.

[gordianot]

7. It can still be done but the space craft will be a lot more expensive.

Think Werner Von Braun and rotating space station. To bad you wreck someone’s health to prove a concept that you can not do it cheap.

[Javaman]

8. I was thinking the same thing...

centrifugal artificial gravity is the only way.

I had read about an idea of a pendulum type of counter weight idea years ago.

rather than having an "2001" type donut; you have a compartment on one end and a counter weight on the other. simpler and cheaper.

[elleng]

9. Written 48 hours after he'd returned.

[ffr]

13. I wonder if he wrote it. Did you catch the gramatical errors?

my vestibular system trying to read just to Earth's gravity.

I can't locate the other one at the moment, but thought while reading, did anyone review this before it was posted? Doesn't seem so. The point though, is that he may also not be thinking clearly 48 hours after returning to Earth.

[gordianot]

14. Serious problems have been noted for some time.

They seem to be permanent as is playing professional football.

[ffr]

10. His body was just evolving to his new environment; space

I agree. We're centuries from understanding and overcoming life away from our own planet, where we evolved to our environment.

Problem is, humans are consuming too much and continue to overpopulate, pollute and destroy the habitat that sustains all life. We don't have centuries for all of us to figure this out. Certainly not with Dotards running things.

[FiveGoodMen]

12. "humans are consuming too much and continue to overpopulate"

No amount of colonization will help that in any way.

So what if we send a few handfuls of our (currently) 7+billion to another planet ... will that stop the population problem here?

Or are you thinking that once we get the process perfected we'll send a couple billion off-planet -- think of the expense, not just in money but energy and resources.

Never going to happen. Not in (literally) a thousand years.

Exploration is just to understand the universe around us. It will never help with overcrowding. Not even a little.

The only point in that regard is that if something catastrophic happens to earth, there will still be human DNA propagating its way around the solar system.

Is that even important?

[ffr]

15. Not even close to what I was driving at.

Things will come to a dramatic and bad outcome here on this planet for us over the next two decades. We're already seeing stresses all over the planet. We've farmed everything out to the maximum, we've GMO'ed all of our crops to maximize crop yields, and still have no way to keep up with resource demands of our every growing population of 7.57 billion.

Fresh water resources are dwindling, we're heating up our global atmosphere, which is having negative impacts on crops and other life forms in the food chain. But we're not addressing the problem of overpopulation.

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Human kind, as we know it and as our mindset is going along now, does not have centuries to figure things out.

[FiveGoodMen]

16. Thanks. I guess I didn't understand what you meant.

I've responded to numerous "We'll be saved when we can colonize" threads and just figured this was another such case.

[yallerdawg]

11. We're not built for space travel.

But our creations are.