Human missions to Mars in doubt after astronaut kidney shrinkage revealed
Human missions to Mars in doubt after astronaut kidney shrinkage revealed
‘An astronaut could make it to Mars but they might need dialysis on the way back,’ scientist warns
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So what you really mean is “human exploration of space generally speaking in doubt”
If the issue is gravity, we could go to Venus and spin space craft to get centrifugal force.
You'd need an unreasonably huge station to do that, probably with materials that don't exist.
The tinsel strength required for a centrifuge ring is equal to the tensile strength required to build a suspension bridge of the same length. Obviously we do build suspension bridges all of the time so the materials already exist.
The problem is the size needed to not have a debilitating G-Force difference between the head and the feet.
Actually neither one of those statements is true.
The issue with spin-gravity is angular momentum. The smaller you want something to be, the faster it has to spin. The faster it spins, the harder it is for the people inside to adjust.
So to get 1g of gravity, they found that a good in between would be about 4g of angular momentum. Astronauts could get used to that relatively easily in a few days. And that could be achieved in a spinning structure with the diameter equal to roughly the length of a football field. If they find that human health could be unaffected by living in lower gravity, say .5g, than you can decrease that size by 50%.
It's large. But not unreasonably so by any stretch. It's about the size of the ISS. Especially when you consider that it doesn't have to be a complete circle. If you can imagine a truss extending out from a central point like an aircraft propeller with a habitat on one end and a counterweight on the other. As someone else already mentioned, it's no different than building a suspension bridge.
What about Renderite(tm)?