Re: Engineering Newsletter

[T.L.G.vanderLinden@student.utwente.nl (Timothy van der Linden)]

ReplyTo   : Ric

>In system travel should give us a good idea of how well people adapt to
>space travel.  A few missions of longer and longer duration to near and then
>farther planets would help to see the adaptiveness of humans to prolonged
>space flight. By the time we sent some folks to Titan and back we could
>refine the problem and work on means to sidestep these.

Yes, that will give us a preview. But I think you don't have to wait for
that: Imagine living and working in your own house, never allowed to open
the door and go outside. When looking outside nothing happens, the stars
almost don't change. How would you feel?
How many people are there that can survive happely and healty in such an
environment?
Probably an important feature of the spacevessel would be that it feeled
much like Earth's environment. This doesn't mean it should look the same,
but several things like a leisure room, a bar, a garden of some sort (and
maybe a swimming pool) also crew quarters should not be too small. In fact
all kinds of things that would make the spaceship bigger and heavier would
make living better.
So the dilemmas are size and weight versus crew happyness and healthyness.
The point is to make a spacevessel that feels like YOUR environment (home,
work, shops).

>>As indeed many suggested once you start living on Mars or Moon, you can't go
>>back to Earth easely. Maybe we should look for a low gravity object (a
>>moon), work on the ground and sleep in orbiting space stations with
>>artificial Earth-gravity. Or we should build massive spinning buildings that
>>create 1g.
>
>We are going to have to establish a solarsystem based society before we
>would be able to convince anyone of the need to go anywhere else.

So if we want to continue the SD project we should make it 2140 instead of 2040.

Timothy

P.S. Who knows the latest guess for the completion of THE spacestation
(Freedom or whatever is leftover).