I was a stereotypical male. Now, not so much. The "hard science" technical problems are fairly intractable. Here is a report from old me.
In space you can't consider a person as just their body. There is also all their air, water, food, clothing, and other necessaries, and their waste products, and all the equipment required to produce an…
I was a stereotypical male. Now, not so much. The "hard science" technical problems are fairly intractable. Here is a report from old me.
In space you can't consider a person as just their body. There is also all their air, water, food, clothing, and other necessaries, and their waste products, and all the equipment required to produce and deal with all of those things, and more besides. Safety systems for dealing with air loss and similar. Medical equipment. Equipment to maintain the equipment. Power supplies and everything necessary to maintain them, and stuff to protect everything against radiation and extremes of cold and heat.
Very simplistically, to get humans outside low Earth orbit where conditions are benign, you're looking at a minimum payload of a hundred thousand tonnes (for a thick enough hull to protect against cosmic rays) and several hundred hundred tonnes of equipment and furnishings per person aboard. (Most of the Apollo astronauts, who spent an infinitesimal fraction of their lives outside LEO, developed cancers.)
With a payload that size, you need truly immense quantities of mass to eject from the rocket ("fuel"): the rocket equation is a pitiless ruler. Think trillions of tonnes, if you want to move a mere million people into space. (A million is probably below the number needed for a viable colony, because of the technologies needed.)
And then there are the extreme timescales involved. Space is big. Try to go anywhere too fast, and you melt your vessel from waste heat production, as well as needing ever-greater quantities of ejection mass. And you can't anyway. The speed of light, an absolute speed limit, is very slow compared to the distances in space. All your instruments will fail, and every machine with moving parts, and most structures with welds as well. You need a continuously operating industrial civilization inside your spacecraft. Continuously operating for tens of thousands of years. We've managed barely a hundred.
I was a stereotypical male. Now, not so much. The "hard science" technical problems are fairly intractable. Here is a report from old me.
In space you can't consider a person as just their body. There is also all their air, water, food, clothing, and other necessaries, and their waste products, and all the equipment required to produce and deal with all of those things, and more besides. Safety systems for dealing with air loss and similar. Medical equipment. Equipment to maintain the equipment. Power supplies and everything necessary to maintain them, and stuff to protect everything against radiation and extremes of cold and heat.
Very simplistically, to get humans outside low Earth orbit where conditions are benign, you're looking at a minimum payload of a hundred thousand tonnes (for a thick enough hull to protect against cosmic rays) and several hundred hundred tonnes of equipment and furnishings per person aboard. (Most of the Apollo astronauts, who spent an infinitesimal fraction of their lives outside LEO, developed cancers.)
With a payload that size, you need truly immense quantities of mass to eject from the rocket ("fuel"): the rocket equation is a pitiless ruler. Think trillions of tonnes, if you want to move a mere million people into space. (A million is probably below the number needed for a viable colony, because of the technologies needed.)
And then there are the extreme timescales involved. Space is big. Try to go anywhere too fast, and you melt your vessel from waste heat production, as well as needing ever-greater quantities of ejection mass. And you can't anyway. The speed of light, an absolute speed limit, is very slow compared to the distances in space. All your instruments will fail, and every machine with moving parts, and most structures with welds as well. You need a continuously operating industrial civilization inside your spacecraft. Continuously operating for tens of thousands of years. We've managed barely a hundred.