DailyDirt: Life's Little Problems In Space

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Space travel isn't easy. It's risky and involves quite a bit of preparation if the trip is going to last more than a few minutes or hours. But if humanity is really going to commit to space exploration, there are a few problems to solve. Life support systems are obviously going to need to protect our fragile bodies from radiation and the vacuum of space. On top of that, we also need to counteract the negative effects of microgravity on our health. Some people are thinking about these problems, but it's likely that we won't have solutions until at least 2030.

• NASA officially forbids pregnancy in space due to the unknown hazards it presents to the unborn. If humans are going to colonize other worlds, we're going to need to figure out how to procreate in different environments -- and bring along 10,000-40,000 astronauts to keep the genetic diversity high (unless space explorers opt to do far more genetic engineering experiments than we do on earth). [url]
• Plenty of people have volunteered for the Mars One mission -- a one-way trip to the red planet. A short documentary of a few of the people willing to die on Mars (or on the way) shows that these folks are a bit weird, but that they're not so crazy, either. [url]
• Astronauts haven't been to the moon in a while, so we've almost forgotten all of the things they've done and left behind on the moon. Astronauts have slept for 8 hours on the moon. They've left behind all kinds of waste -- but not bags of vomit, apparently. [url]

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Filed Under: apollo, astronauts, life support, mars, mars one, space, space exploration
Companies: nasa