"Space Radiation Remains Major Hazard for Humans ..." Topic

…Going to Mars.

"During a conference this week in Washington D.C., enthusiasts are attempting to rouse support for a manned mission to Mars sometime in the next two decades. NASA is there, as are many key players in the spaceflight community.

But there continue to be major obstacles to manned Mars missions.A new study highlights one of the big problems with extended space travel: galactic cosmic ray radiation. According to the report, astronauts on the International Space Station would receive doses that exceed their lifetime limits after just 18 months for women and two years for men.

A Mars mission crew would be spending at least this long in the harsh radiation of deep space.Cosmic rays are a unique type of radiation in that they are difficult to shield against. And the new research points out that the cancer an astronaut could develop after too much cosmic ray radiation is bound to be very dangerous…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

This article does not correspond with my (probably out of date) understanding of cosmic rays. I was given to understand that they were high energy particles that quickly collided with any mass and the dangers came from the secondary radiation from the collision . I' ll have to see about updating my self.

x42

1. No one is going to Mars without a better engine. 18 month trips are a joke based on old tech solutions and budget adventurers. If we want to go to Mars (or anywhere else), get the engineers working with some capital on a serious engine to get there in 2 week travel times. That means 1g constant thrust.

2. Radiation is solved by power. Want to go to Mars and no glow in the dark? NASA was working on a magnetic shield energized through the plating of the ship. Problem? Not enough funding, not enough power. If you have a better power plant (nuclear at the minimum), you have the power necessary to provide enough shielding to turn back the cosmic rays just like our own atmosphere.

These articles are good but beat around the bush. All considerations are solved with speed or power or both. Speed is life. Slow is death. Going to Mars means fission (fusion if you can have it) speeds and nuclear protections.

While we are at it, make cancer beating a priority and set up a task force whose only purpose is to break cancer's hold on society. It kills more people than anything and that simply needs to end. Expensive certainly, but in the long run far cheaper, the spiraling cost-benefit analysis of all these people suffering and costing the medical system is just stupid. Solve the damn thing any way we can and eradicate the disease.

Anyway, I relinquish the soapbox.

Interesting thread Augustus.!

Amicalement
Armand

I agree, Augustus.

For Mars (and elsewhere), we ought to be looking at concepts like Orion (nuclear pulse) or any of the nuclear systems already proposed and even partially developed. Chemical propulsion is a dead end, except for reaching orbit, and maybe not even the best solution for that.

As for cancer, the newly developed "targeted" chemotherapy tech, that uses encapsulated drugs that are released by lasers (or potentially other tech) only at the tumor site, may turn out to be the biggest immediate breakthrough on that front. I'm also hoping that the concept has application to other medical issues as well, as drugs that can be targeted to only interact with the "trouble site" and not the body as a whole could potentially end life-threatening or debilitating side effects that result from delivery methods which today are unfortunately systemic. Imagine, for example, psychotropic drugs that are released only at specific areas of the brain, or being able to so precisely control doses to unhealthy organs so that processing organs (as the liver) only have to handle minimal amounts, or even no "overflow" at all. But that's another discussion!

However, one factor in all scientific discovery is that it's often impossible to predict what area of research will produce feasible results, or if something apparently unrelated might prove to be a key breakthrough for a problem not even being researched! The telephone, for example, was meant to be a device for helping deaf people hear. Vulcanized rubber was an accident. So was nylon, IIRC. So it's impossible to say whether any given effort will or won't produce results.

galactic cosmic ray radiation

So just how are we suppose to get Super Heroes if they can't be exposed to cosmic rays?

If a cancer cure can come out of a Mars mission, by all means lets go to Mars. I can't think of a better "spin-off".

We can't even go back to the moon and they want a useless flags-and-footprint Mars mission.

Build a functioning moonbase and then think about going to Mars.

Launching from Earth is stupid anyway, the Moon is tailor made for launching interplanetary missions.