The Speculist

Well, Adam is really tough. He doesn't let a little thing like the vacuum of space bother him. :-)

I'm glad that NASA is giving some thought these days to going to MARS.

But I don't think going will be practical until we have the space elevator.

We are going to need a very big ship. A big monster rotating ship that can sustain a sizeable crew for maybe three years. This will become much more feasible with a space elevator.

A real Mars program would have at least three of these Mars ships in a constant rotation between the planets. If it takes about a year to get to Mars, as the first ship arrived at Mars, the second could then leave Earth. By the time that the second ship arrived, the first would be ready to leave to go home. This way a constant presence could be maintained.

One of the first orders of business would be a Martian elevator.

If a ship was kept flying a figure 8 between the planets, it could pick up and drop off people and supplies in low mass modules while it maintained momentum in it's Earth-Mars trajectory.

Okay, here's a concept I've been thinking about for space suits. The purpose of most of the volume of a space suit is to maintain a constant pressure on the body so the liquids and gasses within don't boil explosively (cf. explosive decompression). While some parts of the body really need a pressurized environment (the head and face, obviously, and likely the lower abdomen and groin for similar reasons) why not replace the rest of the suit with an omnidirectional elastic jump suit which exerts 32PSI of squeeze on the body? Obviously this assumes a working pressure of one atmosphere for the pressurized components, so vary to taste. The advantage to this suit would be the loss of the rigidity of conventional suits, wherein the user is essentially moving around in a stiff, human shaped balloon. Even if one just made gloves my way, the results would still be a much more facile and useful hand.

And a skin tight elastic body suit would come a lot closer to Phil's ideal, as well, though one might find one's heroes wearing layers on top of the pressure layer - armor leaps to mind.

-Jim

Great idea, Jim. Do you think it would take nanotech to achieve that level and consistency of pressure from a fabric?

The ultimate answer is to not use a human body for space work - it's limitations are just too great.