
Astronaut Scott Kelly on the devastating effects of a year in space - ALee
http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/astronaut-scott-kelly-on-the-devastating-effects-of-a-year-in-space-20170922-gyn9iw.html
======
SOLAR_FIELDS
I think a real takeaway from this article is that long distance space travel
will not be truly realistic until we have a way to simulate earth’s gravity on
a ship. There are numerous approaches to this as any hard sci-fi novel will
tell you, but how far away exactly are we from creating something like this in
real life?

~~~
valuearb
The real takeaway is that he was up there far longer than needed to get to
Mars, and he’s fine. The first travelers to Mars will just tough it out.
Eventually we will likely have spinning Aldrin Cyclers providing artificial
gravity and strong radiation shielding, but don’t need them for our first
trips.

Magellan didn’t have a cure for scurvy, safe ships, or maps, but he still
agrred to lead an expedition that cost him and 80% of his crewmen their lives
but opened the world for exploration. If those explorations had waited until
ship and medical technologies advanced to provided modern day levels of
safety, westerners only now would be reaching the Philippines.

~~~
geezerjay
I agree. Yet, the first stage of problem solving is identifying the problem.
Thanks to Scott Kelly, some problems were identified, and now it's possible to
test possible solutions. If Magellan knew about the problems posed by scurvy a
couple of years before he set sail I'm sure he would've preferred to figure
out some ways to avoid that problem instead of risking losing 80% of his crew.

------
rootbear
I think an important open question is how much gravity is enough. Will Mars's
0.38g be enough for colonists? How about the Moon's 0.165g? These are critical
questions we need to answer to know how practical it will be to have colonies
on those worlds. The only choice my be to breed humans for those conditions.
Homo ares and Homo luna.

Venus is such a tragedy. Surface gravity of 0.9g, probably quite livable, but
the surface is Hell.

~~~
fnwx17
yes, this is like the biggest oversight for me - it's well known that 0.38g
will affect people differently than 1g.

Imagine people that have been born and spent most of their life on Mars and at
some point will meet people who were born on Earth - what a strange encounter
that will be.

------
hirundo
A guinea pig speaks! "It's not all fun and games being a guinea pig." Great
story, I'm looking forward to reading the book this is excerpted from.

Granted that this is a first person account, still, this is what heroism looks
like. Thank you for your service, Captain Kelly.

