One of the significant challenges to human space exploration is the somewhat long travel time to Mars. NASA just took a big step toward rectifying this with an investment of $725,000 in the development of a new rocket system expected to cut the current duration of a round trip to the Red Planet down to only two months.
Round-trip missions to Mars are long, currently nearly two years with the help of existing technology and throughput, posing considerable health risks to astronauts. More important is space radiation. Astronauts spending six months on this particular mission absorb radiation equivalent to 1,000 chest X-rays. This heightens the risk of developing cancers, damage to the nervous system, bone loss, and even heart disease in them.
“The best way to reduce radiation exposure and other harmful health effects is to shorten the length of the trip,” said Troy Howe, president of Howe Industries. That’s why his company partnered with NASA to develop the Pulsed Plasma Rocket, a propulsion system that promises to revolutionize space travel.
The PPR, currently in its second phase of development as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, achieves high thrust efficiency by firing pulses of super-heated plasma. The effort focuses on finalizing the engine design, working out the proof-of-concept experiments, and holds the design for a shielded spaceship with PPR-powered propulsion leading to human missions to Mars.
The PPR’s significant advantage in velocity is only the reason it would be capable of propelling a spacecraft at incredible velocities. It produces 10,000 newtons of thrust at a specific impulse of 5,000 seconds. With that, a spacecraft carrying four to six passengers could achieve a speed of around 100,000 miles per hour. However, such speed would have to be drastically reduced to enter Mars’ orbit and finally land, which Howe Industries has already considered here in this design.
But it will be another two decades, at least, before PPR is spaceworthy. By then, the technology could also help take man beyond Mars and even achieve missions as distant as Pluto. “You can pretty much achieve anything you want in the solar system once we get this technology running in 20 years,” Howe said.
However, some other challenges face the Mars journey. A new study announced by researchers from University College London has revealed that long-duration space travel changes the structure of the kidneys of astronauts. More than 40 samples obtained from several space missions on both humans and mice suggest that kidneys remodel in space and parts of the organ start shrinking in less than a month.
The findings could screw a NASA and SpaceX plan to send crewed missions to Mars in the next several decades. SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, has claimed that spacecraft should be able to do that within the next “10 to 20 years,” but the team told UCL that astronauts need measures to protect their kidneys during long space travel. Some of these potential countermeasures include onboard recovery techniques in the form of dialysis machines.
“We know what has happened to astronauts on relatively short space missions, such as an increase in health issues like kidney stones,” said Dr. Keith Siew from the UCL Department of Renal Medicine. “What we don’t know is why these issues occur, nor what will happen on longer flights like the proposed mission to Mars.”
Professor Stephen Walsh, the senior author of the study, says that kidney health is one of the major consideration points while charting out a space mission. “You can’t protect them from galactic radiation using shielding, but as we learn more about renal biology, it may be possible to develop technological or pharmaceutical measures to facilitate extended space travel,” he says.
If NASA and companies operating out of the country are to continue pushing the frontier of space exploration, mitigating such serious health risks will be instrumental. Then, the development of the Personal Protective Rocket and other mitigating measures may make faster, safer pathways to Mars and beyond open up.