this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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What a dumbass. If we send people in the quickest possible way (or any way at all, really) and they all die in the attempt, that will set the whole project back decades.
The answer to the radiation problem is better shielding, not a fundamentally unsafe mission.
btw it is not the nuclear propulsion that I'm calling unsafe. It is the idea that we could do without redundancy. That's just a monumentally stupid idea.
Since the astronauts need water to survive, why not line the spaceship with reservoirs of it to provide the shielding? Or does water not block space radiation well enough?
But then they’re drinking irradiated water, no?
Unless it’s really easy to remove the radiation safely, this doesn’t seem like the right solution.
They used the ice for everything, including cooling and heating the ship as needed. They got the bad effects from the cosmic radiation pinging in from all other directions, not from using the water. The volume of ice was larger than that of the ship, I think it also absorbed physical damage from micrometeorites. Let's hope someone in the Big Green Machine reads the novel.
I mean, they put nuclear waste at the bottom of miles deep water wells, because it absorbs alpha, gamma and beta particles and it's cheap.