[Portions of this piece were originally written on April 24, 2016 but never published.]
“Using artificial gravity on board the space station or [a] rocket to Mars will most likely solve the fluid shift issue. The rotating donut like in the film by Stanley Kubrick ‘Space Odyssey 2001’ is a great example of what would be ideal. However, it is complicated to realize. Yet, it may be the way to go. Future research will tell,” Wuyts said. ~ “Cosmonaut brains are ‘rewired’ by space missions, scientists find“, By published February 18, 2022.
- Humans LIVING on the Moon by 2030: ESA to build LUNAR BASE to colonise for man: As NASA hopes to be the first to put a man on Mars, the European Space Agency (ESA) has altogether different ambitions, saying that it wants to colonise the Moon, By Sean Martin (www.express.co.uk), PUBLISHED: 16:10, Fri, Jan 8, 2016 | UPDATED: 17:53, Fri, Jan 8, 2016
- Could NASA Stop on the Moon on the Way to Mars? NASA’s chief of human exploration thinks we’ll need a pit stop en route to the fiery planet,By Samantha Larson (smithsonian.com) April 6, 2015 10:15AM
- NASA Is All About Sending Humans To Mars Before Anyone Else, by Eric Mack (Forbes)4/16/2015 @ 11:32AM 6,099 views
- “Cosmonaut brains are ‘rewired’ by space missions, scientists find“, By published February 18, 2022.
Some effects of micro-gravity (frequently and incorrectly called “zero-G”):
- Space sickness
- Bone mass loss
- Body fluid redistribution, mostly toward the upper body and head
- Reduced red blood cell count
- Eyeball deformation
- Chronic sinus congestion
- Losses of taste and smell
- Waste elimination complications (i.e., it’s hard to use a bathroom toilet)
- Digestion issues
- Etc.
As a layperson, these are only some of the physiological issues encountered by humans in space, and the longer they are there, the more pronounced these symptoms become. Some of these symptoms appear to persist long after a long-term space mission ends. Eyeballs may never resume their preflight shape. Bones never resume their original preflight strength.
Attempted solutions have been hard to come by, and tend to fall into three categories: Medication, exercise, and various devices.
Even back in the 1950s, the notion of artificial gravity has been contemplated for space missions. In the absence of true artificial gravity, the closest we can come is the use of centrifugal force –i.e., putting space travelers in some kind of spinning object, whether a disk, or oblong (perhaps dumbbell-shaped) object — so that the spinning force pushes them to the “floor”, simulating weight. Earth-bound experiments have been performed with centrifuges, but there’s at least one problem: Coriolis Force.
When a human experiences “gravity” from centrifugal force, there are still side-effects from spinning: Dizziness, motion sickness, spacial disorientation, a counter-intuitive sideways motion for objects dropped which one might expect to fall straight down, etc.