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Are Humans Fit for Space? A ‘Herculean’ Study
- melling 7y agoThis reminds me of the discussion from 5 years ago after the Virgin Galactic crash. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540405 What I said then still stands: “ 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.”
- njarboe 7y agoThat 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.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoSafety 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.
- ryanmercer 7y ago>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.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoEveryone 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.
- njarboe 7y ago18 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. [1]https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
- yellowapple 7y ago> 18 people have died in space exploration since the 1950's. Over a million people die in car wrecks each year on earth I was curious about the statistical risk here, so I crunched some numbers. There are approximately 230 million licensed drivers in the United States alone¹, versus approximately 560 astronauts². So let's do the math here: 18 space deaths / 560 astronauts¹ = 3.214% 1,850,000 US automotive deaths² / 230,000,000 US licensed drivers³ = 0.804% 50,000,000 worldwide automotive deaths⁴ / 1,200,000,000 worldwide drivers⁵ = 4.167% 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. ---- ¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_name ²: https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ (your link), assuming the 37,000 per year is constant ³: https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/number-of-licensed-drivers-usa/ https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/number-of-licensed-dr... ⁴: Assuming - again - a constant 1 million deaths per year over 50 years ⁵: https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-world-population-knows-how-to-drive-a-car 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.
- varjag 7y agoInteresting 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.)
- jrumbut 7y agoWhich one? Is it online anywhere?
- varjag 7y agoNot sure. I got mine off eBay as memento, having read it back in school days many years ago. Very much identical to this lot: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1955-Traveling-in-Space-M-Vasilev-Russian-Soviet-Illustrated-Vintage-Book-Rare/223782937120 https://www.ebay.com/itm/1955-Traveling-in-Space-M-Vasilev-R... There's also an expanded post-Sputnik edition of it I think.
- anonymfus 7y ago>Is it online anywhere? http://www.flibustahezeous3.onion/b/167460 http://www.flibustahezeous3.onion/b/167460
- perl4ever 7y agoI have a Soviet illustrated pop-up book about space travel, with the same title, but a different author and I think published about 1980. It appears to be "Into Space" by V. Sevastyanov, however I could only find pictures of the cover by searching for "В космос" В. Севастьянова. Front: https://images.app.goo.gl/M51TCVL35gabKREH7 https://images.app.goo.gl/M51TCVL35gabKREH7 Back: https://images.app.goo.gl/bdLAZTJ9iVbm1q596 https://images.app.goo.gl/bdLAZTJ9iVbm1q596 I've been wondering for years if it was a valuable collector's item, but now due to the magic of Google Lens, I guess it's not.
- binichgross 7y agotldr no
- philwelch 7y agoAt 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.
- daenz 7y agoWe 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.
- ddorian43 7y agoSpace kamikaze
- int_19h 7y agoPerhaps that kind of forcing function is exactly what is needed?
- edgyquant 7y agoThat 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.
- ars 7y agoThe 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.
- ben_w 7y agoFor 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.
- nabla9 7y agoLongest 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.
- sandworm101 7y agoWhich is why we should be doing tests in earth orbit at mars gravity (using rotational/tethered structures).
- nabla9 7y agoNot in the budget I'm afraid. If you start building rotational structures and getting experience, the price is similar to a spaceship with rotational gravity.
- sandworm101 7y agoTwo capsules and a rope.
- nabla9 7y agoPlus 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.
- sandworm101 7y agoGemini did tether experiments.
- LatteLazy 7y agoA 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...
- HenryKissinger 7y agoNot realistically, no. For example > 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.
- themagician 7y agoI 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.
- hoorayimhelping 7y agoAntigravity 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.
- themagician 7y agoForget costs. Where are you even going to get the materials for that at scale? Sounds good for a space ship or small space station. How do you make that work for thousands of people?
- jacobush 7y agoAsteroids
- nine_k 7y agoMoon 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.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago> Antigravity is provided by rotating a cylinder That's not antigravity, it's just Coriolis Force.
- neurobashing 7y agoBeltalowda sabe what inyalowda sa-sa, que si? 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.
- mirimir 7y agoIt'd be far more efficient if we could abstract human consciousness from the meat machinery.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoThese guys are heroes for putting their bodies throug this much testing for mankind.
- jeisc 7y agoHomo 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.