| ▲ | adrian_b 4 days ago | |
The results from ISS are much more pessimistic than you say, suggesting some irreversible damage besides the reversible changes, but I am lazy now to search links to the research articles. The weakening of the skeletal muscles is not the worst, but the deterioration of the heart muscle. However, the research done on mice on ISS suggests that the undesirable effects can be mitigated by creating an artificial gravity (i.e. rotation) lower than on Earth, e.g. of 2/3 of Earth's gravity. The failure scenarios for rotating spacecraft need not be more severe than for non-rotating spacecraft. For instance if 2 or more spacecraft, which can be also used independently, are connected with cables to enable them to rotate around the common center of mass, if everything is designed carefully the failure of the coupling system should not have any other consequences than the loss of the artificial gravity and from then on the failure risks would be the same as for non-rotating spacecraft. | ||
| ▲ | somenameforme 3 days ago | parent [-] | |
As stated elsewhere, there's a very recent study [1] on astronaut heart health that's quite relevant. They studied the cardiovascular health of astronauts for 5 years after their return from long-duration stays on the ISS. They were all perfectly healthy. For one obvious problem with rotation systems, stations need to be regularly boosted. You'll also need to occasionally reboost the local rotation. This sort of basic stuff is already fairly complex with a static station, and becomes exponentially more so with a local rotation going on. Even moreso because you want to be relatively fault tolerant in case of a partial or failed boost. Then you need to compensate for impacts, docking and undocking, and much more. It's viable and almost certainly a solvable, but NASA is not the appropriate organization to do so. Their risk aversion makes it unlikely that they'll ever be doing much of anything revolutionary where failure could be catastrophic. They're having a tough enough time just trying to recreate what we already did 50+ years ago. [1] - https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio... | ||