NASA Offers $5000 a Month For You to Lie in Bed

tracer818 writes "In order to study a person as if they were in space without gravity, NASA scientists are paying subjects $17,000 to stay in bed for 90 straight days. The study will follow the Bed Rest Project standard model and be conducted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Participants will live in a special research unit for the entire study and be fed a carefully controlled diet."

Comments

Re:What's that movie?

[MichaelSmith]

make the vehicle big enough so that you can spin it and not get dizzy. [..] so damn obvious that Von Braun was talking about it in the '40s. But it has never been done. Actually something like that was done on skylab. You don't need to spin the spacecraft. You just need a cylindrical track which you can run around. It works very well.

Re:What's that movie?

[MichaelSmith]

TYou already mentioned the first problem: Size. "Just make it big enough" isn't a very good answer when you realize that the ISS has a "living volume" of about 425 m^3 - that's a large appartment, no a spaceship like you see in the movies. This was proposed for the Apollo LM and CM. Run a tether between them and use the RCS to spin them up. The LM (being lighter) gets 1G and the CM gets 1/4 G.

You don't need to build a huge space station.

day 89, and you have to bail?

[Chapter80]

$5000/month? or $15,000 for 90 days?

It'd really suck if you got to day 89, and then had a family emergency.

Re:I'm in.

[electrictroy]

I have a feeling those 90 days would be really, really boring. They probably don't let you watch TV or surf the net or anything else interesting.

Also, it would be a cut in pay for me.

Re:Paying People To Lie in Bed

[PopeRatzo]

The government's been doing that for years. It's called welfare.

I hope you never need any help. People who think welfare is for lazy people don't generally do well when they are in a position of need.

Not even nearly worth it

[mserms]

I broke my back a few years ago and needed to lie flat on my back for three weeks (nurses rolled me onto my side once a day to wash my back). In that time my legs had become about 1/3 thinner. Not that I cared too much - I wasn't paralysed.

If I had chosen not to have surgery, I would have needed to lie on my back for twelve weeks. I was told that it would take about two years to get back to normal strength if I'd gone down that route...

You couldn't pay me enough to be in bed for 90 days.

Deeper understanding

[AlpineR]

How much artificial gravity do you need? 1.0 G? 0.2 G?

Will some experimental drugs help counteract the effects of weightlessness?

Can the problems be alleviated with specific exercises during weightlessness?

How long will it take to recover after returning to gravity? If an astronaut is weightless on a trip to Mars, can he be back up in a week or a month?

If you want to treat something as a problem to overcome, you might need to know more than "It's bad", ok?

Under $8/hour to ruin your health?

[guidryp]

Considering you are working 24/7, that is pretty low pay rate of under $8/hr. Maybe starving students might take them up on this. I think only 20 year olds would fully recover from this as well.

I might consider doing it for Ten Times that amount $150k to $200K. Not worth risking my health otherwise.

Not to mention this would probably feel like torture after a week. My back gets sore if I lay in bed too long on Sunday mornings.

Not worth the health risks

[mlwmohawk]

It sounds like a lot of money, but 90 days in bed will cause a lot of your body atrophy, heart, lungs, legs, etc. Not to mention a lack of vascular assistance in blood circulation could cause clots.