Long-Term Effects of Weightlessness

MartinBartinFargo writes "The Age has an article detailing the long-term effects of weightlessness on the human body. Stage 1 of the European Space Agency study involved 14 male volunteers spending 3 months carrying out all activities whilst lying on their backs, Stage 2 is currently underway. "

Comments

The money

[Violet Null]

$20,000 for three months? Wow. That sure beats those cheapskates at NASA; they only spent $100 / day, or ~$9,000 for the three months.

Re:What will stage 1 prove?

[Anonymous Coward]

They replicate weightlessness by having the subjects lie on slightly tilted beds, head down (6 degrees IIRC). This causes blood to flow away from the legs and to pool in the brain replicating the blood flow that happens to astronauts in real weightlessness (stronger muscles used to pumping against gravity's pull mean that more blood goes to the top half of the body)

For this reason hospital records are of limited use.

Re:So why aren't space stations being planned

[BlowCat]

It would be hard to dock to the rotating station. The solar batteries would have to rotate all the time to point to the Sun. It would be hard to point scientific instruments to the Earth. Some experiments require microgravity.

Rotating station may be a better place to live, but it would be a less interesting and useful place to work.

Re:So why aren't space stations being planned

[Thagg]

The only reason to be in space is microgravity; so there'd be no point in rotating the whole space station. As far as rotating just the habitat portion of the station, it's difficult to imagine how you could do that -- what kind of seal you could make between the two compartments that would hold air perfectly but have very little friction. Perhaps more importantly, it's hard to see how you could rotate a part of the station at a few RPM and not transmit vibration back to the the other part, this vibration destroying the very microgravity that is the only reason for being there.

For long duration space flights to somewhere, it makes perfect sense to rotate the ship; I can't imagine not doing that. But for a LEO space station I don't think it will happen, unless that space station is used for something other than microgravity research (tourism, maybe?)

thad