Our journalist friends from France briefly explain why solar and cosmic radiation make manned space travel to Mars or beyond not feasible — unless you want to die quickly.
“A theorised solution would be to generate a huge magnetic or electrostatic shield around the ship to repel the particles, although the energy expenditure would be huge and the solution itself may pose hazards to health.
“Cost alone is likely to make these ideas unfeasible, leaving mission deciders with the nightmarish task of determining what is an acceptable level of risk for the men and women who will go to Mars.”
Let’s hope sobering stories like this put to death the childish, escapist notion that we can willfully destroy the only known living planet in the Universe because we can always go somewhere else.
It is axiomatic that if we could somehow make Mars livable, we should be able to keep the Earth livable. The vice versa is axiomatic as well.
“A theorised solution would be to generate a huge magnetic or electrostatic shield around the ship to repel the particles, …”
Or, perhaps, as the military does for foreign volunteers, we could just promise US citizenship to those who would go, if they live. But that is likely not the motivational tool that it used to be. < / snark >
That’s depressing. So everyone on Star Trek should be blind with cataracts by now.
Booman,
I would not call it depressing in the least and hope you don’t think of it that way. I am a huge fan and supporter of space exploration, especially the Hubble Space Telescope.
I wrote this post simply because I know that lots of people think that travelling to Mars is just a matter of Congress putting up the money, and then whooosh, we’re there.
I also wrote this post because the more we learn about space, the more we see what an incredible vessel of life the Earth is. Without our magnetic field, Earth would be pummeled with hard cosmic radiation, perhaps making surface life completely impossible. It’s important for us to know our physical parameters.
Cheers.
Disagree.
Quite a few astronauts went to the moon, which is outside of the Earth’s magnetosphere, without radiation sickness.
Nobody knows how bad the problem would be from Earth to Mars.
Experts generally think that propulsion is a bigger problem than shielding.
They’ll solve this.
Read the linked story. The Apollo astronauts were only exposed to cosmic radiation for a few days. That’s why they were not greatly harmed. Any space voyage more than a few days — without massive shielding — will result in lethal doses of hard cosmic radiation. It’s sobering news, but true.
Cheers.
I did read the article. There will always be explorers willing to take risks much greater than this. And I do think that adequate shielding will be developed. Water shielding, for example, is probably an economically feasible option under current technology if water is discovered on the moon.
Also, you say here that “any space voyage more than a few days, without massive shielding, WILL result in lethal doses.” I don’t think that’s true. In any event, the linked article doesn’t reach that ultimate conclusion.
Prior to this article, I don’t think I’d heard that so many astronauts are thought to have eye problems from cosmic radiation. But I’m pretty sure that none of them have generally developed radiation sickness, as I said in my first post.
I don’t mean to quibble. Of course this is a problem. But it’s a fixable problem.
Interstellar flight, on the other hand…there’s a problem probably not fixable in our lifetimes.
Agreed. Over time we’ll discover better, cheaper modes of both propulsion and shielding. It’s only been a little over a century since airplanes were thought to be impossible. You can’t predict those “unknown unknowns.”
None of which is to say we shouldn’t conduct ourselves as if we couldn’t leave the Earth.
To me, the big question is will we develop the new energy sources needed for things like this before energy becomes so economically or environmentally prohibitive that we have a major retreat on many fronts of civilized life as a result. (Cheap energy = money to spare for space travel research)