Space tourism poses challenges on health

The world may be on the brink of a vast new frontier of tourism - and that could raise a few odd, and at this point unanswerable, questions for doctors.
Such as, "What is the maximum time my patient with osteoporosis can spend on a vacation at a space hotel?"
That is exactly a question posed in a paper released Friday, proposing that the medical community needs to start thinking now about how to treat and advise the space tourists of the future.
"If someone's dream is to fly, we want them to fly," said Dr. Marlene Grenon, a UCSF vascular surgeon and co-author of the paper published in the British Medical Journal. "This field of space tourism is being created as we speak. It's going to be important to discuss the medical challenges now."
So maybe it'll be a few years - or decades, if we're talking about hotels - before space tourism takes off in the United States. As of now, only seven non-astronaut travelers have made it to space, all of them on board Russian rockets that carried them to the International Space Station for tens of millions of dollars each.
But the American space tourism industry is blooming, with half a dozen aerospace companies building aircraft to take regular folk into space - be it on two-hour suborbital adventures or multiday cruises around the planet.

500 ready to go

Virgin Galactic, the best known of the space tourism companies, has more than 500 reservations - at $200,000 a ticket - for its first suborbital jaunt, which could take place in the next year or two. Just last week, a California state senator introduced legislation to give tax breaks to companies that build spaceports for launching spaceships.
With space tourism on the cusp of becoming a real possibility for people who don't have the health and fitness of a NASA astronaut, now is the time to think about medical guidelines, said aerospace medicine experts.
There's a wealth of information about the effects of space travel on career astronauts - from the symptoms of space sickness to the long-term repercussions of lengthy stays at the International Space Station. But the effects on the average person with imperfect health are unknown.
"If you're going into space for minutes, or even for a day or two, I would think the impact would be relatively small for the average somewhat healthy person," said Dr. Peter Lee, a Stanford heart researcher who has conducted experiments on muscle atrophy in space.
"The question is if you get into patients with mild heart disease or pulmonary disease," Lee said. "No one with those diseases has ever been allowed to fly. So some of it will be a little bit of trial and error, and initially (the space tourism companies) will probably be conservative."

Why 'Galactic' tourism may really take off (by a man who's already been to the moon)

Astronaut Charles M Duke Jr, now 76, walked on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission of 1972. He served as Lunar Module pilot on the trip and was the ‘voice’ of Mission Control during the first Moon landing, by Apollo 11, three years earlier. Here, he gives his verdict on the race for space tourism...

Moon man: Astronaut Charles M Duke Jr in 1971

The future looks bright for space tourism. I’m not sure whether there will ever be a Hilton hotel on the Moon, as was suggested in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Probably not a 100-room hotel, but who knows? A trip to the Moon, for the average person, would, of course, be the thrill of a lifetime.
As Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, the Moon has ‘magnificent desolation’. I was overcome with the beauty of it. It’s the starkness of the terrain, the contrast between the bright Moon and the dark sky – it would be a wonderful place for any tourist to visit.
The actual trip to the Moon is fascinating, with experiences including feeling zero gravity and looking out to see the Earth receding and the Moon growing closer. I found it thrilling.
I’m really excited about Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the world’s first commercial spaceline. I met Sir Richard several years ago and admired his enthusiasm.
Since then, I’ve met a number of people who have paid their money to be passengers on one of his commercial space flights and they can’t wait to go.
I would love to take the Virgin Galactic trip into space – it would be tremendous.
The most wonderful part of what these pioneers are going to experience is the view up there of the blackness of space, fading into the light white of the upper atmosphere and into the deep blue as you look back to the Earth.
It’s the view that I would concentrate on. Believe me, it’s spectacular. Kennedy Space Center is a  fascinating place to visit.
NASA’s launch headquarters is the only place on Earth where you can tour launch areas, meet a veteran astronaut, see giant rockets, train in spaceflight simulators and even view a launch.
The next Kennedy rocket launch is scheduled for August 23 this year. NASA is offering visitors rare access to several key areas of Kennedy Space Center during its 50th anniversary year.
A special Kennedy Space Center Up-Close Tour has been extended until the end of 2012 to allow visitors a look inside the 525ft-tall Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where the Apollo rockets and Space Shuttles were assembled.

Alien Earth: What It Will Mean to Find Our Planet's Twin

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Finding Earth 2.0 is just a matter of time, and the discovery will likely transform the way we think about our place in the cosmos, astronomer Natalie Batalha said Tuesday (Jan. 8).
Batalha is a co-investigator for NASA's Kepler telescope, a planet-hunting mission that has uncovered 2,740 potential alien worlds in just the few years since its 2009 launch. Though Kepler has found some Earth-size planets, and others in the habitable zones around their stars that could allow them to harbor liquid water, none of them are true Earth twins. But that's likely soon to come.

Sizes of Planets

Zombie Planet

 

The unbalanced orbit of a so-called "zombie planet" in a dusty star system has astronomers struggling to explain the exoplanet's behavior.
New observations of the planet Fomalhaut b by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the oddball orbit, which has wild extremes between its closest and farthest points from the parent star and appears to cross through a vast minefield of dusty debris. 
"We are shocked. This is not what we expected," said study leader Paul Kalas, an astronomer with the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif..

Finding Alien

Finding Alien Earths, A Near-Miss by Asteroid Apophis and Could Space Make You Taller?

Last week scientists said finding an alien Earth is likely, we found out asteroid Apophis will just miss our planet when it zooms by and the largest structure in space was discovered. See the top stories of the last week here. FIRST STOP: Strange But True: Astronauts Get Taller in Space

Still in the works

Several companies are hard at work designing, building and testing vehicles that aim to fill the American gap in human spaceflight following the retirement of NASA's space shuttle program. These commercial providers hope to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, but could also one day transport other paying customers to the space station and future destinations in low-Earth orbit.
Boeing, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada are developing and testing vehicles and launch systems as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.

Have Astronomers Found Chemical Precursor to Life In Gas Clouds?

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Astronomers have found tentative traces of a precursor chemical to the building blocks of life near a star-forming region about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
The signal from the molecule, hydroxylamine, which is made up of atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, still needs to be verified. But, if confirmed, it would mean scientists had found a chemical that could potentially seed life on other worlds, and may have played a role in life's origin on our home planet 3.7 billion years ago.

Space Planes

Space Travel:Danger at Every Phase

50 YEARS OF HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT

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Types of Space Hotel

The hotels themselves will vary greatly - from being quite spartan in the early days, to huge luxury structures at a later date. It's actually surprising that as late as 1997 very few designs for space hotels have ever been published. (cf Shimizu, Ehricke, WATG) This is mainly because those who might be expected to design them haven't expected launch costs to come down far enough to make them possible.

 Luckily it's easy to design basic accommodation in orbit - because it was already done in 1973(!) with the "Skylab" space station. Minimal living facilities require a cylindrical module with air-conditioning, some windows, and a kitchen and bathroom. But zero gravity allows you to build almost any shape and size, in almost any direction.

  So exploiting the full range of possibilities of zero gravity architecture will keep designers happy for decades! There'll also be rotating (and tethered) structures giving artificial gravity.

Virgin Galactic space tourism blasts off in 2013

(CBS/AP) - The dream of space tourism is only a year away, according to Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic venture. The company expects to launch the inaugural flight of their SpaceshipTwo in 2013, and reports are it will be a family affair: The billionaire adventurer says he will be joined by his adult children.

The British tycoon behind the Virgin business empire that spans cable television, airlines and space tourism revealed that the three will make a 60-mile (100-kilometer) journey on the SpaceshipTwo (SS2) next year - along with 120 other tourists who have signed on to take the $200,000 two-hour trip where only a select few have gone before.

SpaceShipTwo / Virgin Gallactic

"Next year Holly and Sam will be joining me for a first voyage into space," the thrill-seeker told a packed conference Wednesday on the third day of the Farnborough Airshow south of London. "Going into space is a hard business. It keeps my mind buzzing."

Virgin says 529 have paid for the right to go to space - one more than the total number of space travelers since Russia's Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in 1961.

The future space tourists got their first glimpse of the SS2, with a replica set up outside the auditorium as the real one gets fixed up in the Mojave Desert, New Mexico, along with a spaceport designed by British architect Lord Foster. The tourists will have to undergo a week of training at the spaceport before taking their flight.

"I wanted to be the first Irishman in space and I'm really looking forward to it," said 70-year-old businessman and author Bill Cullen, who was the first to sign up for the ride in 2004.

Grant Roberts, 36, said his dream of space flight came from his grandfather, who was a pilot for Britain's Royal Air Force and flew on missions over Germany in World War II.

Branson also said a new launch vehicle - LauncherOne - would take small satellites into space at much lower cost than is now possible The Virgin Galactic team said a number of companies were hoping to use LauncherOne, which is expected to begin operations in 2016 and can carry up to 500 pounds (227 kilograms) of weight.

"It will be a critical new tool for the global research community, enabling us all to learn about our home planet more quickly and affordably," he said.

Private Space Travel to Make Giant Leaps in 2013

Private companies building new spaceships to soar through orbital and suborbital space are looking forward to an action-packed year in 2013, with new flight tests, launches, wind tunnel tests and rocket technology trials all planned during the new year.  

Of the many spacecraft being developed only one has already flown in space, the Dragon capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in Hawthorne, Calif.The unmanned cargo ship has flown in space three times so far, and carried supplies to the International Space Station twice in 2012 — first in May during a test and then again October

Excalibur Almaz is a suitably fantastical name for a company that recently announced it plans to offer passenger flights to the moon. The Isle of Man-based company has purchased four disused Russian space capsules and two space stations which, it hopes, will be used to propel paying passengers into lunar orbit as early as 2015.
Ambitious? Absolutely. They’re in good company, however, with Russia’s Soyuz and Virgin Galactic flights potentially taking tourists to the heavens in 2014 and 2013 respectively.
I asked space expert Graham Southorn, editor of the BBC’s Focus magazine, about the likelihood of future success for these space tourism providers – and this is what he had to say

 

Virgin Galactic
Richard Branson’s Virgin megaempire is planning to launch its space branch – its suborbital craft SpaceShip Two, launched from a mothership aircraft, will fly up to 99 miles, just at the boundary of space. Passengers can expect to pay around £125,000 for the trip. There is no definitive date set yet, but it is currently slated for next year.