Space exploration: Despite the uproar around Elon Musk’s predictions of a human colony on Mars by 2026, experts claimed that the human body’s limitations still serve as a barrier to humanity’s desires to colonise other planets.
The job of maintaining humans during lengthy space missions poses a significant obstacle to any endeavour to reach other planets and celestial bodies, a panel of experts noted during a recent presentation hosted by the French Embassy and Institut Francais.
Solar radiation, the need for safe habitations, coming up with methods of farming or food storage on the harsh new world or spacecraft, dealing with the terrifying array of physiological and psychological issues related to long-term space travel made worse by a sense of isolation from Earth, and even the disposal of food and human waste that “earthlings” take for granted are among the challenges.
Due to these difficulties, Mathieu J. Weiss, Space Counsellor and National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) representative in Bengaluru, is persuaded that what is really preventing a flood of human-crewed space missions from taking off is not so much the complexity of space technology or even the propulsion systems, but rather the uncertainty of how humans will survive missions that could take months or years to complete.
“The space sector has gone through tremendous changes these last years. Look at reusable technologies, look at sustainable technologies, solutions with artificial intelligence,” Weiss said. “In fact, the novels we were reading in the 20th century about science fiction are just becoming reality and we, as experts in the field, we are feeling it, living it every day.”
In the meanwhile, Weiss issued a warning that residing on the moon or on Mars offers technical difficulties that neither current missions at the International Space Station (ISS) nor prior generations of space travel have actually been able to solve.
“We are at the cusp of a major leap in human space flight to other celestial bodies but whatever we learned from the fantastic Apollo program and all the work the Russians have done cannot be used for us to live on Mars. We need to now understand the physical limits of sending humans out there, which raises questions such as: How will they rehab from the prolonged flight duration and how will they fare from a physiological point of view and from a psychological point of view?” he said.
