You wake up in a daze of confusion as your consciousness is plucked from the darkness. Sharp instrumentation and convoluted mechanics crowd you, with the only other person in the room standing at the helm of it all. In a panic, you rip yourself out of your constraints and tear through the room, through the building, and into the bitter-cold woods. Despite your own terror and confusion, any person you seek help from exemplifies that same terror and confusion, running away screaming. Through glimpses in water and broken shards of glass, you come to realize your own monstrosity, and you resign yourself to living in isolation. You read. You learn. You observe. The knowledge you gain enlightens you, but it also burns you. You realize that your sudden
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Safety concerns are no longer limited to shoddy rockets, however, as we have discovered more about how humans fare physically in space. There is a lot to be concerned about when it comes to putting people in space: eye-sight deterioration, muscle atrophy, and bone degeneration. It is continually difficult to manage these issues, as we still have astronauts that went up with 20/20 vision and in perfect health, then come back with 20/100 vision, low bone density, and intense exposure to radiation we have yet to understand the long term effects of. These are the conditions under which we want four brave souls to live in on Mars in 2025. When it comes to deep space exploration, where do we draw the line for the circumstances under which we can send people rather than machines on missions? I argue that that should be determined by the astronauts themselves. They are, after all, the ones that are actually going on these missions, so they should decide their own limits. Training, for astronauts, takes years. And it could be years beyond that where they actually get to go on a mission. They do not become astronauts because it is safe, and they do not stay astronauts because it is easy. Exploration, discovery, science … sometimes they demand risk – sacrifice, even – and astronauts are more than willing and more than capable of giving
Safety concerns are no longer limited to shoddy rockets, however, as we have discovered more about how humans fare physically in space. There is a lot to be concerned about when it comes to putting people in space: eye-sight deterioration, muscle atrophy, and bone degeneration. It is continually difficult to manage these issues, as we still have astronauts that went up with 20/20 vision and in perfect health, then come back with 20/100 vision, low bone density, and intense exposure to radiation we have yet to understand the long term effects of. These are the conditions under which we want four brave souls to live in on Mars in 2025. When it comes to deep space exploration, where do we draw the line for the circumstances under which we can send people rather than machines on missions? I argue that that should be determined by the astronauts themselves. They are, after all, the ones that are actually going on these missions, so they should decide their own limits. Training, for astronauts, takes years. And it could be years beyond that where they actually get to go on a mission. They do not become astronauts because it is safe, and they do not stay astronauts because it is easy. Exploration, discovery, science … sometimes they demand risk – sacrifice, even – and astronauts are more than willing and more than capable of giving