Beyond Ares 1-X: The problem with long-term space missions
By John Yemma | 10.27.09
In his 1901 novel “The First Men in the Moon,” H.G. Wells took care of the big problem of spaceflight. He invented antigravity, which he called “cavorite.” No explosive fuel tanks. No fiery ascents. No muss. No fuss.
Reality is different. Walk up to the Redstone rocket parked on the lawn of the Johnson Space Center in Houston and it is hard to believe that this oversized bottle rocket – a repurposed missile based on the German V-2 design – carried the first American astronaut into orbit 48 years ago. Diminutive and primitive, there is little mystery to how it worked: Astronaut at top; flame at bottom.
Alan Shepherd summed up the experience while idling aboard Freedom 7. “Solve your little problems and light this candle,” he urged Mission Control.
The space shuttle is far more complicated than the Redstone, but it operates on the same Fourth of July principle. So do the new Ares, the European Ariane, the Russian Soyuz, the Chinese Long March, the Japanese H2, and every other spacecraft on Earth: three, two, one, ignition.
In a Monitor special report (read it here), you can see the astounding cost and complexity of spaceflight. Can one nation afford open-ended exploration? Can the world join together on this? National interests, economics, and politics play a role in answering those questions. Physics plays the biggest role.
Gravity holds us back. And then, when we’ve finally beaten gravity by lighting the enormous, upside-down candle, gravity is suddenly missing where we most need it. Floating around in a spacecraft may look amusing, but it’s a bigger problem than blastoff. The human body was built for 1G, the gravity of our home planet. Without gravity, strange things happen.
Scientists have been studying the problem for years. Consider the small annoyances. We are used to looking down when we drop things. You have to check the ceiling in zero G. Velcro, sealed dinners, and zero-G toi- lets are necessities. No showering either. The bigger concern is that human anatomy functions best on Earth’s surface.
Humans can adapt in space, perhaps morph into blobby creatures of weightlessness, but then landing on another planet or returning home will be a challenge. Even short spaceflights force astronauts to rely on physical assistance when they touch down.
The only solution so far has been to substitute centrifugal force for gravity. You’ll be familiar with this from movies such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which travelers inhabit huge, rotating space stations. These giant Ferris wheels come with problems of their own.
In the interests of science, I’ve taken a ride in the rotating room at Brandeis University’s Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory. It is disorienting. Normal functions like touching your nose are difficult because of the Coriolis force, a side effect of rotation, although with a little practice you can retrain yourself.
“I’m convinced that most of the physical problems of long-term missions are solvable with workarounds,” says Paul DiZio, associate director of the Graybiel lab. Radiation exposure is the hardest problem to solve. “You’d need more lead than you can launch.” Nutrition, isolation, and other factors also need attention.
But centrifugal force, he says, can “mostly do away with the effects of gravity” – if you don’t mind life inside a barrel rolling through space.
Deep space missions will never be as easy as they look in the movies. You can appreciate why Wells and other science-fiction writers breeze past problems like gravity. They slow down the plot.
Until we patent cavorite, our future space-faring might be accomplished by building better robots – indifferent to gravity, radiation, and other extraplanetary punishments – while we work the remote controls at a very comfortable 1G on Spaceship Earth.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
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Talk to the Editor: Scheduling change
By John Yemma | 10.20.09
Because of technical improvements that CSMonitor.com is currently undergoing, we won’t be able to produce a “Talk to the Editor” webcast on Thursday, Oct. 22.
Webcasts will resume at 1 pm Thursday Oct. 29. Meanwhile, if you’ve missed them, you can view earlier webcasts by paging through previous posts on this blog.
Thank you for your patience and support.
John Yemma
Editor
The Christian Science Monitor
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Foreign correspondents keep an eye on the world
By John Yemma | 10.19.09
If a hero has a thousand faces, there’s usually one who becomes a favorite. It could be Ulysses or Huck Finn, Joan of Arc or Nancy Drew. Mine is William Boot.
Boot is found in Evelyn Waugh’s minor comic novel “Scoop.” He is a gardening writer who wants nothing more than to pen homey columns from the ramshackle manse that he and his eccentric family inhabit far from London. He specializes in overwrought prose such as: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.” Through a case of mistaken identity, Boot’s editors dispatch him to a country called Ishmaelia, where – after many adventures and hilarious encounters – he blunders into a scoop.
The novel is too dated (1938) and nichey to be of enduring popularity, but generations of foreign correspondents have chortled at the truths they see in its outrageous characters and plot twists.
Foreign correspondents witness amazing and awful things – revolutions, massacres, natural disasters. Some long to see the world. Like William, some stumble into the job. Almost all end up with a believe-it-or-not story to tell at dinner parties. Michael Kelly, who died in Iraq in 2003, had a group of Iraqi soldiers surrender to him 12 years earlier in Kuwait. Vincent Schodolski, who was with United Press International in the early 1980s, once interviewed a party propagandist in Lebanon who argued strenuously that his group was not a “Muppet” of the Israelis.
The best story I know of this kind belonged to Joseph C. Harsch, who reported for the Monitor from 1929 to 1988 and always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.
In early December 1941, he and his wife, Anne, stopped in Hawaii for a working vacation. As the only nonlocal correspondent on the island, he easily scored an interview with the Navy commander in chief, Adm. Husband Kimmel, who assured him that war with Japan was not imminent and that Joe and Anne could relax and enjoy the island.
On Sunday morning, the Harsches awoke to what sounded like banging. They snoozed, got up, took a leisurely swim, then went to breakfast, where they suddenly learned that down the beach at Pearl Harbor had dawned a day that would live in infamy.
Joe had been in London two years earlier when war was declared, in Berlin during the Battle of Britain, in Java as the Japanese closed in. His right-placedness continued to the very last days of the war when he and an Army captain discovered and arrested Nazi architect Albert Speer in a small town in Germany.
Foreign correspondents work hard to develop sources and gain access to remote places where they are often unwelcome guests. Several dozen a year are killed or kidnapped.
As John Maxwell Hamilton notes in his excellent new history of foreign correspondents (“Journalism’s Roving Eye”): “All the problems of journalism are magnified in foreign news-gathering. For owners of media, this is the most expensive reporting. For editors, it is the most difficult to second-guess…. For journalists, it is the most demanding.”
Professor Hamilton, who reported for the Monitor in the 1980s and is dean of the school of mass communications at Louisiana State University, worries that the public has lost sight of the value of foreign reporting and that, as he recently told me, “foreign correspondents aren’t seen as the heroes they once were.”
If they were ever heroes, they were not the superpower-possessing kind. Armed with a notebook and curiosity, they do their work, as Joe Harsch put it in the title of his book, “at the hinge of history.” Sometimes they find history in the making. Sometimes, on a quiet Sunday morning, history falls into their lap.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
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Talk to the Editor with John Yemma for October 15: Iraq
By John Yemma | 10.15.09
This webcast, recorded live on October 15, features Monitor Editor John Yemma, multimedia editor Pat Murphy, Middle East blogger Dan Murphy, and Baghdad-based writer Jane Arraf in a conversation about the current state of affairs in Iraq. Video after the break. (more…)
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Talk to the Editor with John Yemma for October 8: Congress
By John Yemma | 10.08.09
In this webcast, recorded live on October 8, Monitor Editor John Yemma, The Monitor’s Pat Murphy, and Washington correspondent Gail Russell Chaddock talk about the myriad issues facing Congress, including the healthcare debate, new financial regulations, and the war in Afghanistan. Join us Thursday, Oct. 15 for our next broadcast, a conversation with correspondent Jane Arraf and Iraq blogger Dan Murphy about Iraq. Video after the break. (more…)
