Can the Human Body Endure a Voyage to Mars?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/17/can-the-human-body-endure-a-voyage-to-mars?fbclid=IwY2xjawIbjARleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTWqxiHens6QwbxBHP8F3YczXGIRGABjwquKwEExjcQutSLZj6Q05IhjQQ_aem_cwUN3QJXlyBcPMU7LM2Yhw
26 Comments
It hasn’t been done but I don’t see why not. Astronauts have lived in space for years at a time. If your concern is radiation we have figured out that water is a pretty decent shield so we may have multi-layered exterior walls including a water layer in order to reduce radiation exposure.
Mark Watney voice: the trick isn’t getting the human body to Mars. The trick is getting the human body to Mars *alive*.
UuuuuUUUGGGGHHHH. Yes, but not yet. Enough already.
The long term issue is that humans evolved in gravity, we’re meant for gravity, things go wrong over time without it. That’s not including the other challenges. Food, water, oxygen, mental fitness, radiation. We ain’t going to mars any time soon, musk is a snake oil salesman.
Alive or not? Getting a dead human body anywhere in the solar system is quite easy.
Just send the brain and they’ll build a new buddy for them.
We should send musk to find out if it’s possible.
You’d have to be able to shield the crew compartment with heavy water or all would have their DNA torn to shreds by high-energy cosmic radiation.
We should stuff musk and his d-bag space-x team into a capsule and find out.
I believe the only reason we haven’t already sent someone to Mars is because there isn’t a solid fast food chain there yet, and that is somewhat fatal.
We will first send robots to build that, then we will go.
My guess is if we sent five ships right now…crew of five each, tech we have now…one or two would land and survive for a stretch. Probably a hundred years or so that we could send anyone or anything and get it back…which people seem to think is important.
The ISS has proven that we can live a lot longer in microgravity than needed to get to Mars (and we could always use spin-gravity if we wanted to reduce the health problems). So the only real question is “Can we handle the radiation outside Earth’s magnetosphere for the necessary times?”
And the answer to that is “Obviously yes, with enough radiation shielding, or a short enough travel time.”
The only real question is whether we’re willing to pay enough to make it a reality.
Getting back again would be more challenging, but there’s already several different proposed plans that should make it feasible even without creating new fuel on Mars.
Nope. People who have been in space 75% of the time that it takes to go to Mars need months of physical therapy to even walk again. The human body might last the journey, depending on how well the radiation is managed, but you ain’t going for a walk when you get there.
It’s a suicide mission, and there is nothing you can do there that can’t be done autonomously already.
Laser launch system, get between Earth and Mars in a month or so.
Also I’m guessing they asked these questions about crossing the pacific or the Atlantic.
Don’t know…let’s send Elon…see what happens
At the moment? Maybe.
You need to give them radiation shielding, and you need to get them there as fast as possible so they spend as little time in interplanetary space as possible, because of the radiation exposure.
Those two factors oppose each other, because shielding is heavy, and you need to be light to go faster (or have a ton of fuel). Using purely chemical propulsion to go to mars is likely possible, but it’s probably not worth it.
The mission constraints will be so tight that such a voyage wouldn’t be able to accomplish a whole lot beyond planting a flag, waving for the camera, and coming back home.
There are more advanced engine technologies on the horizon like plasma rockets that can in principle go a lot faster with considerably less fuel, but they’re not ready for prime time, and they’re pretty bulky themselves. You’d also have to build that ship in space, because those rockets will NOT get you out of the atmosphere – they’re actually weak but very, very efficient, which is better than strong and inefficient chemical rockets, but can’t lift a rocket against Earth’s gravity.
Well, you’d die of cancer a few years after the trip or even on mars
NASA discovered via the curiosity rover that a 180 day transit to mars, a 500 day stay, and a 180 day return trip would only be a slight increase (5%) in lifetime cancer risk.
https://www.space.com/23875-mars-radiation-life-manned-mission.html#
Honestly why would we want to? It seems like we could take advantage of robotics and other technical advantages to go to mars and learn about the red planet. I don’t see what advantage we would get from people going.
Not with our current spacecraft, but once we reverse engineer that UFOs inertial inertial dampeners we will be good to go
I wish Musk would fund KidneyX, space is hard on organs.
I’ve watched enough movies depicting the 80’s rock bands doing 20 pounds of cocain a day, while drinking the entire supply of alcohol and simultaneously having sex with 3000 people (sometimes at once) to know getting to mars would be a cakewalk
Will there be at least 2 medical doctors as members of the crew? Or at least 1 medical doctor and a very competent medical trained so that he can perform what ever he is instructed to save someones life? I read on the interweb that it’s a 9 month trip there and a 3 year trip back.
Rather than investing so heavily in biological or technological methods to engineer humans to survive for long periods in microgravity, perhaps we’d just be better served to develop more efficient engines to slash the travel time?
The trick is to use nuclear thermal propulsion once in orbit, that’ll speed the journey up quite a bit and save valuable dose time for the crew. Radiation protection is about time, distance, and shielding.
Space between Earth and Mars is a veritable soup of cosmic particles, so there goes distance. Shielding can be added, but unfortunately the best shields for the kinds of extreme radiation found in the cosmos also happens to be quite heavy. So our best shot at minimizing dose is to reduce how long the astronauts have to be without planetary protection.
Long term habitation is a different problem, but in terms of immediate effects, it’s not impossible to get astronauts there and back alive. The issue will be long term complications like cancer and other knock on effects from getting shot by all of those nuclear bullets as well as lack of our evolutionary gravity.
Not alive it’s not. We can barely handle the moon and back, and only when it’s in our magnetosheath.