science-junkie:The Strange, Deadly Effects Mars Would Have on Your BodyBy Kevin Fong We’ve imagined
science-junkie: The Strange, Deadly Effects Mars Would Have on Your BodyBy Kevin Fong We’ve imagined sending people to Mars since well before Gagarin’s first spaceflight. Wernher von Braun, principal architect of the Saturn V launcher that delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon, envisaged 1965 as the date on which the first humans might arrive at Mars. Since then, more than a thousand different technical studies have been conducted, most of them making the assumption that Mars lay little more than 20 years in the future. But that is where Mars has remained: always in our future. Space is not a single destination. Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars involve very different voyages and challenges. Since the dangers were more immediate and dramatic for earlier missions — catastrophic explosions that no one could hope to survive — the ability of the human body to adapt to the extremes of terrestrial environments was largely irrelevant. Mars, however, presents a challenge of a different scale and character: It’s more a marathon than a sprint. Here the absence of gravitational load takes on a new dimension, transforming from a novelty into a creeping threat, because life on Earth has evolved over the past three and a half billion years in an unchanging gravitational field. In that context, it shouldn’t be a surprise that so much of our physiology appears to be defined by — or dependent upon — gravity. Take gravity away, and our bodies become virtual strangers to us. Read More -- source link