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NASA Prepares For Space Surgery and Zero Gravity Blood
Hugh Pickens writes "Draining an infected abscess is a straightforward procedure on Earth but on a spaceship travelling to the moon or Mars, it could kill everyone on board. Now Rebecca Rosen writes that if humans are to one day go to Mars, one logistical hurdle that will need to be overcome is what to do if one of the crew members has a medical emergency and needs surgery. 'Based on statistical probability, there is a high likelihood of trauma or a medical emergency on a deep space mission,' says Carnegie Mellon professor James Antaki. It's not just a matter of whether you'll have the expertise on board to carry out such a task: Surgery in zero gravity presents its own set of potentially deadly complications because in zero gravity, blood and bodily fluids will not just stay put, in the body where they belong but could contaminate the entire cabin, threatening everybody on board. This week, NASA is testing a device known as the Aqueous Immersion Surgical System (AISS) that could possibly make space surgery possible. Designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Louisville, AISS is a domed box that can fit over a wound. When filled with a sterile saline solution, a water-tight seal is created that prevents fluids from escaping. It can also be used to collect blood for possible reuse."
but damn does it look cool and tasty in slow motion.
Robots and rovers are becoming so good that I think we should take all that manned mission to Mars money and re-purpose it to exploring Mars, and Titan, and Jupiter's moons with machines.
The only viable manned missions that I can see right now would be "one way tickets", and the politicians are too squeamish for those.
So, rovers and flying drones, or boats for Titan are the best way to go at the moment.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The ability of humans to perform well on the surface of any planet after months of zero-g seems doubtful. Build the spacecraft big enough, and rotate it. Better yet, send two spacecraft, tether them together, and rotate both of them about their center of mass. It will solve a lot more problems than the relatively minor one of dealing with in-space surgery.
They should launch more crew members than they need, with the assumption that the ones that require surgery en route will be chucked out the airlock.
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It's just stupid. They are wasting time and money doing research on crap like this when they should just spend it on building space stations with artificial gravity. You could do it with tethers and counterweights if you can't afford a huge space module.
So much research on the "problems of doing things wrong". You cannot have a sustainable human population in space without artificial gravity, so such "zero gravity" research is niche and near dead end for long term space travel.
Once you have artificial gravity and decent radiation shielding you can go to the asteroid belt which is a better choice than Mars since asteroids aren't huge gravity wells. It's not like Mars is a hospitable environment, so any talk of Mars is stupid at this point of time - it's like talking of jumping before you can even stand.
"My job is rocket surgery!"
Considering surgery in space is good omen. At the very least, Someone is planning to be there one day.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Does anyone know of plans for the Mars mission (what kind of vehicle will be used)?
You need to look at the Design Reference Mission - see also this presentation on the Design Reference Architecture 5.0. These aren't exactly plans, but they are a fairly fleshed out mission design, to get people something specific to refer to and a benchmark to research against. If you look at DRM 7.1.2, it talks about artificial gravity, but basically puts this as "to be determined."
Why do you need negligible Coriolis effects? (I'm assuming that's what you mean, tidal effects require ridiculous amounts of mass) Sure, they'd make gymnastics a bit exciting, but if all you want is to have stuff stay where you put it then Coriolis effects are a non-issue. So what if things fall on a curved path? If people can get used to living on a ship at sea where "down" is continuously changing, sometimes quite violently, I'm sure they can get used to having to lean anti-spinward when standing up.
As for wobble - again, so what? Assuming the craft outmasses the occupants substantially any wobble will be a manageable nuisance. It's not like you'll be attaching the Hubble to this thing so that wobble renders it useless. In the case of transportation craft it could interefere with navigation a bit, but thrust would likely be either the current impulse style to maximize efficiency, in which case you just have everyone stand still during a burn, or with continuous low-thrust ion drives, in which case you simply track the current wobble against the stars and modulate thrust to avoid cumulative navigation errors.
For space stations it's even easier - a couple small asteroids tethered together and spun up and you've
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Interesting comments, but two things to consider:
1) You don't need to rotate the entire vehicle, just a small module inside it to provide a little artificial gravity when needed.
2) The problems have been worked out long ago. Hubble and spy satellites use gyros to aim the vehicle at whatever is being imaged. It's a very cool system, just transfer momentum between the gyros and the vehicle whenever you need to point it, takes almost no energy to move even a huge telescope.
Why do you need negligible Coriolis effects?
The general rule of thumb is that human factors restrict you to an rpm of 2 or so (although I cannot find a good primary source for this). This paper suggests that people can get used to 23 rpm (!), which would mean you could do a Mars gravity in a single, decent sized, spacecraft. I must admit that I have some doubts about this. A 2 rpm Mars gravity would require a 85 meter tether. A 8 meter tether (or spacecraft) would suffice at 6 rpms, and I suspect that that would be more along the lines of what would be chosen. Astronauts would just have to get used to it in their training (or not go).
Studies actually have been done to find out what radius is required for comfortable spin "gravity". NASA did those too, in between useless fiddling around with zero g surgery. It does take a fairly large radius to eliminate enough of the tidal affect to avoid feeling sick because your head and your feet are moving at noticeably different speeds, but it's a manageable radius (unless you're too goddamn incompetent to build and use a heavy lift launch vehicle, in which case you're fucking around with zero g surgery instead).
As for your complaints about passenger-induced wobble, see the aforementioned heavy lift comment. Couple that with the fact that nobody seriously proposes moving a human-occupied spacecraft with full time thrust to get anywhere interesting in the solar system. Ion thrusters are irrelevant to that much mass, and chemical thrusters have strict fuel limits, so you don't boost all the time. You boost up to X speed, then go inertial. Deploy your tether, spin up, settle down for a long damn wait (to pretty much anywhere). Whatever wobble is induced while inertial is either undetectable (because you built an actual spacecraft, and not a tincan on a string you're calling a spacecraft) or can be reasonably compensated for with small attitude adjustment rockets. (But stop pretending a tincan with attitude adjustment rockets is a spacecraft You're gonna get people killed doing that)
When you get right down to it, NASA is great for research, but all of their construction efforts are laughable and they should stop pretending to build stuff and just stick with the research.
On the other hand, Elon Musk is serious about it, and his next launch of a resupply to the ISS happens tonight. Be sure to watch. If it blows up this time (it didn't last time), then I'll shut up. But chances are it won't, and SpaceX will keep steaming along.
Maybe, just maybe, a government won't be involved this time. (80% of SpaceX's current launch manifest is commercial. Only 20% of the money they're currently expecting to collect will come from governments.)