Comments by "Randy Schissler" (@randyschissler5791) on "neo"
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@TrevorCrook-c1s You're clueless about what Don Pettit was trying to say. He said nothing about radiation. In 1972, when Congress cut funding to NASA, the Apollo program was scrapped. That meant everything that went with it, contracts with contractors, infrastructure, equipment for building spacecraft, engineers, support personnel, all of it went bye bye. That's what Pettit meant with his poor choice of the word "technology." And building that back up again, is very difficult and basically starting from scratch. With Apollo done, this gave NASA the opportunity to do less cost draining projects, and they did a lot over the decades. If they had kept going to the moon, they couldn't have done those things.
"Orian reported that radiation was effecting guidance systems. "
You're confused about that as well, can't even spell Orion correct. You are referring to NASA engineer Kelly Smith, in the 2014 video "Orion: Trial by Fire." Kelly is talking about the new Orion spacecraft, passing through the Van Allen belts. He explains about the susceptibility of modern electronics to the effects of radiation. Modern microcircuits are very tiny and fragile, in comparison to the physically big electronics of Apollo. That's why the Apollo spacecraft didn't have a problem getting through the Van Allen belts. Notice how Kelly is talking about the radiation effects to the electronics, and not the humans on board. The danger is that if the electronics fail, then the spacecraft fails, and when the spacecraft fails, the astronauts will likely die. But also notice when Kelly says that Orion has protection, shielding that will be put to the test, as the spacecraft cuts through the radiation, to make it home safely.
But that is old news. Last September, Polaris Dawn, with its crew of four, went through the most dangerous parts of the belts and came back just fine.
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@TrevorCrook-c1s "Exposure to high levels of radiation will give you cancer and genetic mutations ."
That is true, but it all depends on the length of exposure, and the type of radiation. Not all radiation is the same.
Dr. James Van Allen:
"The radiation belts of the Earth do, indeed, pose important constraints on the safety of human space flight.
The very energetic (tens to hundreds of MeV) protons in the inner radiation belt are the most dangerous and most difficult to shield against. Specifically, prolonged flights (i.e., ones of many months’ duration) of humans or other animals in orbits about the Earth must be conducted at altitudes less than about 250 miles in order to avoid significant radiation exposure.
A person in the cabin of a space shuttle in a circular equatorial orbit in the most intense region of the inner radiation belt, at an altitude of about 1000 miles, would be subjected to a fatal dosage of radiation in about one week.
However, the outbound and inbound trajectories of the Apollo spacecraft cut through the outer portions of the inner belt and because of their high speed spent only about 15 minutes in traversing the region and less than 2 hours in traversing the much less penetrating radiation in the outer radiation belt. The resulting radiation exposure for the round trip was less than 1% of a fatal dosage – a very minor risk among the far greater other risks of such flights. I made such estimates in the early 1960s and so informed NASA engineers who were planning the Apollo flights. These estimates are still reliable.
The recent Fox TV show, which I saw, is an ingenious and entertaining assemblage of nonsense. The claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense."
James A. Van Allen
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