Comments on Astronaut for Hire: Earth and Space 2010

Thanks Brian, a thoroughly absorbing and terrific ...

2010-03-28T10:56:47.870-10:00

Thanks Brian, a thoroughly absorbing and terrific post, I really should be getting to some of these conferences soon, when I complete this plasma training schedule. It would be helpful if hospitals had more brain and spine scanning equipment, the waiting list is crazy!!! Obviously the correctly so emphasis on IRSU will become a main player thesis in universitie's, it will probably serve as a p.h.d project now, but, I really hope it get's it's way onto the degree syllabus, but, I think that most of us at the front of this science discipline comprehend the gravity of the situation regarding performance.

I think it's an excellent choice that the president has decided to let us do the ground work now, I've been learning and training for this my entire life as have many others, but, really, it's cutting the teeth that this is about now and personally I think it's really really exciting to be keeping tally with all the possible vessel scenario's available for science and exploration.

Norman Copeland.

www.spacetravel21stcentury.blogspot.com/

Looks like a very interesting conference. I think...

2010-03-27T10:49:18.448-10:00

Looks like a very interesting conference.

I think that the drill is an example of how easy it is to trivialize space exploration and criticize cost - it takes a lot of innovation to have something work reliably as space hardware, since repair cost is so prohibitive (what happens next time Hubble has a problem?).

As for the Mars analogs, There has to be redundancy in everything for such a long mission where a restart is a very difficult and costly thing to do, and that includes people. In a mission with a length of a year and a half and so far, human conditions that never happened in space may and will happen, including (at some point) the first death in space which is not a result of hardware catastrophy. Having one person go or even two is out of the question. Even three or four is questionable unless they get trained like a RAID-5 hard drive array - N-1 drives (or people) hold all the necessary information (and skills), so a failure of one drive (or death of one person) doesn't jeopardize any data (or the mission). Sounds harsh, but unlike LEO or even the moon, where one is at most a few days from rescue, a year and a half is enough time to die from an early undetected Cancer without treatment, for example.

Very interesting, especially those statistics of w...

2010-03-27T03:36:54.732-10:00

Very interesting, especially those statistics of when humans might destroy ourselves. Even if you are skeptical and assume those stats are off by 100%, doubling the timeframe isn't THAT far off!