41–43 of 43 posts
I read a while back that one of the biggest issues with a human mission to Mars is the landing, I can't remember the article but a brief search turns up this one that covers the relevant points: http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-...
The sex issue is just frivolous. E.g. I haven't had anything but rejection from a woman in three years, I'm perfectly healthy and functional, and I'm not being carefully chosen for one of the most groundbreaking missions for the human race.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strangely, the article fails to follow this up with the next logical sentence, which is: "Also, a rotating spacecraft is trivially easy to implement, meaning that the entire zero-gravity argument is nothing more than a ridiculous canard by those who'd rather suck down a few more tens of billions of pointless microgravity biomedical research before allowing us to leave Low Earth Orbit and do anything interesting."
Nothing involving rocketry is trivially easy implement. To my knowledge building a centrifuge to produce artificial gravity has never been attempted, it would take years of work and tens or hundreds of million dollars to design, prototype, test, and man rate any such a system.
Unfortunately, the approach for the last several decades has been to say "gosh, microgravity is scary, maybe we can RE-ENGINEER THE HUMAN BODY to can cope with it". That's a canard. Spam in a can at the end of a string is trivial in comparison.