Forget Space Travel, It's Just a Dream

An anonymous reader writes "The clash of two titans — physics and chemistry — are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible ... at least with current technologies."

Comments

You're forgetting about radiation

[Dr. Spork]

The article talked about the laws of physics and chemistry, but failed to mention biology. And the truth is that the amount of radiation an astronaut absorbs each day in interplanetary space probably far exceeds the amount of radiation that anyone has received from the "catastrophic" Fukushima reactor leak. When your DNA is getting fried like that, you don't want to hear about year-long detours. Outside of the Earth magnetic field, the radiation dose is in the tens of Sieverts per hour. With shielding you can get that dose down to a fraction of a Sievert, but that's still not good. (source)

Think about it this way: Fukushima emergency workers are required to stay away from reactors for the rest of the year if they absorb a quarter of a Sievert. In outer space, you get that every hour. In the US, the annual limit for radiation workers in non-emergency situations is a tenth of a Sievert.