alt Hacker NewsNobody can even come up with a coherent reason for any of these proposals to exist. Even the ISS is more of a political instrument than a real science thing. NASA likes to say its about studying how to help humans live in space, but those results were in decades ago: more than a few months in zero-g wrecks people. So why are we still trying to build old modular Salyut/Mir derivatives instead of trying to figure out the minimum spin humans need to stay healthy? Because the whole point is to do familiar safe things while providing full time jobs for ground control.
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At risk of crassness - human lives are pretty cheap and there are plenty of people willing to take the hit for a chance to be in space for an extended timeframe. Meanwhile building something with enough spin and shielding is a huge ask
I agree that a "long term fractional g spin test" is one of the most valuable things a LEO station can do. But there are others too.
For example, medical interventions against zero-g decay can be tested in any microgravity, spin or no spin. Development of in-space manufacturing and assembly can happen on any sufficiently capable space station.
All of that, however, requires a good amount of ambition. And I'm not sure if NASA under the current political system can deliver ambition.
Nobody cares about ground control. They care about aerospace industry in their states. Public space programs aren't about science and engineering, no they are primarily about jobs. We burn enormous capital in strange ways in order to divert a small amount of capital into useful places. Its the only way to get it done, so I can live with it.
Right! And because China has a good chance of pulling of a moon and then mars landing first, they are lurching into, hmmmm,ok,they are lurching flat out trying to bluster up a program without disturbing the space grift industry, ie: SLS , Shuttle Leftover Systems and the whole thing disolves into cringe
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Extended space spays doesn't really wreck people, it's just that your body adjusts to the new environment so your strength decrease, your bone density decreases, your orientation mechanisms shift to 6 degrees of freedom, and so on. Of course when you get back to Earth you're body again has to go through a readjustment phase because those previous adjustments are now unfit for the new environment, but it's nothing beyond that. It'd be interesting to see what an extremely long stay of like a decade+ would do, but that's a major ask of anybody not only in time commitment but also because it's basically asking whether or not the transition would be fatal, and the answer is unclear.
As for a spinning station, that's something NASA will probably never do. They're extremely risk averse and you're opening up an unknowable, but very large, number of new possible failure scenarios there - many of them likely catastrophic. If anything that's something of an argument for genuine private stations who may have different levels of risk tolerance. Or we can just wait for China, because they'll 100% do it and probably relatively soon.