-
Asked by anon-74270 to Rob, Louise, Leah, K-Jo, Helen, Heather, Abbie on 1 May 2020.
-
K-Jo O'Flynn answered on 1 May 2020:
There’s already astronauts up in space! Not in space exactly itself but in pods suitable for humans and research has gone into how humans could one day live on Mars and the moon.
-
-
Abbie Hutty answered on 3 Jun 2020:
It is definitely possible right now, if the spacecraft they lived on was in a low orbit around the Earth. for further away places, like the moon, or in deep space, or Mars, it is possible to design spacecraft and to get humans there, but the big problem with them “living” there, for any major amount of time is radiation.
The Earth has a magnetic field and it extends out into space a bit, not as far as our moon but far enough that some satellites are within it. Within this magnetic field, you are protected from the radiation in space, as a lot of the radiation bounces off it and doesn’t penetrate into that zone. So the International Space station is within that field, and so protected from the worst of space radiation. Even so, if there is a “solar flare” or other event like that that causes a big release of radiation from the sun, the astronauts there go to a special place on the space station which is more protected to wait for the radiation to die down again.
Outside of this protection the radiation would be much worse. The average background radiation is quite bad- enough to give astronauts a much higher risk of illnesses and cancers, but the solar particle events like I mentioned before could be very bad- they could kill the astronauts instantly or give them radiation sickness, depending on the severity of the flare. These events happen on average a few times a year, so any long duration mission would have a major risk here.
People are looking into ways of shielding spacecraft from the radiation to make it safer – one way is by making a really thick shield of lead or other dense material like that around the spacecraft. But that would be very expensive and difficult to launch enough shielding into space, if the spacecraft had to also be big enough inside for humans to live in it. Our current designs for rockets can only launch things that fit inside their nose cones- and none are big enough for that at the moment, so we would have to launch lots of separate bits and somehow assemble them all in space, a bit like how we made the International Space Station over many years. So this would take a long time and lots more funding than we have right now!
Another thing that is being researched is how to produce a little magnetic field like the Earth’s, to bounce the radiation off. Some researchers have managed to demonstrate it on a tiny scale, producing a magnetic field for a short amount of time around a small object in a lab, but it takes LOADS of energy. So to do it the whole time on a spacecraft big enough for people to live in, when you have to make all the energy that you will use on board that same spaceship, is a huge challenge! So until we have developed new energy sources that probably won’t work either.
Once you actually arrived at the moon or another planet the best way to avoid the radiation would be to dig deep bunkers to live in, or to find caves that already exist so that the soil will protect you from the radiation. You could just go out to the surface every now and then to do experiments, and stay down where it was safer for the rest of the time. That seems a bit of a shame though, if you’ve travelled all the way to Mars, to then have to live in a dark hole most of the time and not even enjoy being there!
These are the kinds of challenges you could come and work on if you became an engineer!
Comments
Rosina commented on :
There’s always a group of humans that live in space on the International Space Station. They are special scientists who find out more about what low-gravity environments like space do to plants and liquids and machines.
Living in space itself, where it’s very, very cold and no oxygen would be very hard for us – it’ll be like scuba diving but much harder! The astronauts on the Space Station can go outside in space by walking in special warm suits with oxygen tanks. But they can’t stay out there that long.
We could one day live on other planets, but not many plants that we know of are like Earth (and they’re all very far away from here, it would take too long to reach with our current space rockets). The planets closest to us, like Mars and Venus are very different from Earth; Venus is very hot (over 600 degrees Celsius! The hottest it ever gets on Earth is around 50 degrees!) and the air is toxic to breath.
Mars is a bit better – it’s not as warm (it’s minus 60 degree Celsius most of the time – compared to a very cold winter day in the UK which could be maybe minus 10 degrees Celsius) and the air isn’t very nice either – it’s full of dust and doesn’t have any oxygen. So we would have to build very special buildings so we could live on Mars, and somehow make or take enough oxygen to breath, and also grow food with.