Visions for centuries, not decades
Should we travel through outer space? The convenient answer is no. However, given all that threatens us as humanity and civilization, it would be unwise to abandon space exploration, manned flights and, ultimately, look for other places to live than Earth.
A few months ago, NASA announced a detailed National Space Exploration Planto achieve the lofty goals set out in President Trump's December 2017 space policy directive. These ambitious plans include: planning for a moon landing, long-term deployment of people on and around the moon, strengthening U.S. leadership in space, and strengthening private space companies and developing a way to safely land American astronauts on the surface of Mars.
Any announcements regarding the implementation of Martian walks by 2030 - as published in the new NASA report - are, however, quite flexible and subject to change if something happens that scientists have not noticed at the moment. Therefore, before refining the budget for a manned mission, it is planned, for example, to take into account the results Mission Mars 2020, in which another rover will collect and analyze samples from the surface of the Red Planet,
Lunar space port
NASA's schedule will have to survive the funding challenges that are typical of any new US presidential administration. At the moment, NASA engineers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are assembling a spacecraft that will take humans back to the moon and then to Mars in the next few years. It's called Orion and looks a bit like the capsule that Apollo astronauts flew to the moon in almost four decades ago.
As NASA celebrates its 60th anniversary, it is hoped that in 2020 around the Moon, and in 2023 with astronauts on board, it will once again send it into our satellite's orbit.
The moon is popular again. While the Trump administration long ago determined NASA's direction to Mars, the plan is to first build space station orbiting the moon, the so-called gate or port, a structure similar to the International Space Station, but serving flights to the surface of the moon and, ultimately, to Mars. this is also in the plans permanent base on our natural satellite. NASA and the presidential administration have set a goal to support the construction of an unmanned robotic commercial moon lander no later than 2020.
The Orion spacecraft is approaching the station in orbit of the moon - visualization
This was announced in August at the Johnson Space Center in Houston by Vice President Mike Pence. Pence is chairman of the newly revamped National Space Council. More than half of NASA's proposed budget of $19,9 billion for the coming fiscal year has been allocated to lunar exploration, and Congress looks set to approve these measures.
The agency has requested ideas and designs for a gateway station in orbit around the moon. The assumptions refer to a bridgehead for space probes, communication relays, and a base for automated operation of devices on the lunar surface. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Airbus, Bigelow Aerospace, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Orbital ATK, Northrop Grumman and Nanoracks have already submitted their designs to NASA and ESA.
NASA and ESA predict they will be on board Lunar space port astronauts will be able to stay there for up to about sixty days. The facility must be equipped with universal airlocks that will allow both the crew to enter outer space and dock private spacecraft participating in mining missions, including, as it should be understood, commercial ones.
If not radiation, then deadly weightlessness
Even if we build this infrastructure, the same problems associated with long-distance travel of people in space will not disappear yet. Our species continues to struggle with weightlessness. Spatial orientation mechanisms can lead to big health problems and so-called. space sickness.
The farther from the safe cocoon of the atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field, the more radiation problem - cancer risk it grows there with each additional day. In addition to cancer, it can also cause cataracts and possibly Alzheimer's disease. Moreover, when radioactive particles hit the aluminum atoms in the hulls of ships, the particles are knocked out into secondary radiation.
The solution would be plastics. They are light and strong, full of hydrogen atoms whose tiny nuclei don't produce much secondary radiation. NASA is testing plastics that can reduce radiation in spacecraft or spacesuits. Another idea anti-radiation screens, for example, magnetic, creating a substitute for the field that protects us on Earth. Scientists at the European Space Radiation Superconducting Shield are working on a magnesium diboride superconductor that, by creating a magnetic field, will reflect charged particles away from a ship. The shield operates at -263°C, which doesn't seem like much, given that it's already very cold in space.
A new study shows that solar radiation levels are rising 10% faster than previously thought, and that the radiation environment in space will worsen over time. A recent analysis of data from the CRaTER instrument on the LRO lunar orbiter showed that the radiation situation between the Earth and the Sun has deteriorated over time and that an unprotected astronaut can receive 20% more radiation doses than previously thought. Scientists suggest that much of this additional risk comes from low-energy cosmic ray particles. However, they suspect that this additional 10% could impose serious restrictions on space exploration in the future.
Weightlessness destroys the body. Among other things, this leads to the fact that some immune cells cannot do their job, and red blood cells die. It also causes kidney stones and weakens the heart. Astronauts on the ISS struggle with muscle weakness, cardiovascular decline, and bone loss that last two to three hours a day. However, they still lose bone mass while on board.
Astronaut Sunita Williams during an exercise on the ISS
The solution would be artificial gravity. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, former astronaut Lawrence Young is testing a centrifuge that is somewhat reminiscent of a vision from a movie. People lie on their side, on a platform, pushing an inertial structure that rotates. Another promising solution is the Canadian Lower Body Negative Pressure (LBNP) project. The device itself creates ballast around the person's waist, creating a feeling of heaviness in the lower body.
A common health risk on the ISS is small objects floating in the cabins. They affect the eyes of astronauts and cause abrasions. However, this is not the worst problem for the eyes in outer space. Weightlessness changes the shape of the eyeball and affects it decreased vision. This is a serious problem that has not yet been resolved.
Health in general becomes a difficult issue on a spaceship. If we catch a cold on Earth, we will stay at home and that's it. In a tightly packed, closed environment filled with recirculated air and lots of touches of shared surfaces where it's hard to wash properly, things look very different. At this time, the human immune system does not work well, so the mission members are isolated for several weeks before departure to protect themselves from disease. We don't know exactly why, but bacteria are becoming more dangerous. In addition, if you sneeze in space, all the droplets fly out and continue to fly further. When someone has the flu, everyone on board will have it. And the way to the clinic or hospital is long.
The crew of 48 expeditions aboard the ISS - the realities of life on board the spacecraft
Space Travel's Next Big Problem Solved no comfort life. Essentially, extraterrestrial expeditions consist of traversing an infinite vacuum in a pressurized container that is kept alive by a crew of machines that process air and water. There is little space and you live in constant fear of radiation and micrometeorites. If we are far away from any planet, there are no views outside, only the deep blackness of space.
Scientists are looking for ideas on how to revive this terrible monotony. One of them is Virtual realitywhere astronauts could hang out. A thing otherwise known, albeit under a different name, from a novel by Stanisław Lem.
Is the lift cheaper?
Space travel is an endless series of extreme situations to which people and equipment are exposed. On the one hand, the fight against gravity, overload, radiation, gases, toxins and aggressive substances. On the other hand, electrostatic discharges, dust, rapidly changing temperatures on both sides of the scale. In addition, all this pleasure is terribly expensive.
Today we need about 20 thousand. dollars to send a kilogram of mass into low Earth orbit. Most of these costs are related to design and operation. boot system. Frequent and long missions require a significant amount of consumables, fuel, spare parts, consumables. In space, system repair and maintenance is expensive and difficult.
Space elevator - visualization
The idea of financial relief is, at least in part, the concept space elevatorconnection of a certain point on our globe with a destination station located somewhere in space around the world. The ongoing experiment by scientists at Shizuoka University in Japan is the first of its kind at the microscale. In the project's boundaries Space tethered autonomous robotic satellite (STARS) two small STARS-ME satellites will be connected by a 10-meter cable, which will move a small robotic device. This is a preliminary mini-model of the space crane. If successful, he may move on to the next phase of the space elevator project. Its creation would significantly reduce the cost of transporting people and objects to and from space.
You also have to remember that there is no GPS in space, and space is huge and navigation is not easy. Deep Space Network - a collection of antenna arrays in California, Australia and Spain - so far this is the only extraterrestrial navigation tool we have. Virtually everything, from student satellites to the New Horizons spacecraft currently piercing the Kuiper belt, relies on this system. This one is overloaded, and NASA is considering limiting its availability to less critical missions.
Of course, there are ideas for an alternative GPS for space. Joseph Guinn, a navigation expert, set out to develop an autonomous system that would collect images of targets and nearby objects, using their relative positions to triangulate the spacecraft's coordinates - without the need for ground control. He calls it the Deep Space Positioning System (DPS) for short.
Despite the optimism of leaders and visionaries - from Donald Trump to Elon Musk - many experts still believe that the real prospect of Mars colonization is not decades, but centuries. There are official dates and plans, but many realists admit that it will be good for a person to set foot on the Red Planet until 2050. And further manned expeditions are pure fantasy. After all, in addition to the above problems, it is necessary to solve another fundamental problem - no drive for really fast space travel.
