4 ms·

They can just wear a helmet. Lead lined balaclava? They also mention that is not a showstopper and that it can potentially be countered with entertainment and

• MikkoFinell 9y ago
  I believe the thickness of lead required for any significant protection would make the weight of the helmet unreasonable. Unless the exercise you mentioned consist only of weighted neck curls. A more realistic approach to mitigating the issue is in my opinion to have rotating crews. They would spend most of their time in underground shelters, and only some minor fraction of their time doing surface work. Advances in medicine, specifically in regard to cancer, along with minimizing exposure time, is what I believe will make the risk low enough to be within acceptable bounds.
  • logfromblammo 9y ago
    At 38% Earth's surface gravity, you might need to wear lead clothing all the time anyway, just to keep your bone strength and muscle tone.
  • QAPereo 9y ago
    This is a much more reasonable idea once you're on Mars, and current research offers some hope that it would actually work. More worrying though is the trip to Mars, which would have a much higher exposure and require some really novel shielding. The best way for that to happen, short of a breakthrough in materials science, is to build the shield outside of our well, with materials we didn't have to lift. This is in large part why I think that Mars is continent upon offworld mining and construction industry, rather than the other way around.