Today, Explained - NASA wants to live in space

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

NASA’s Artemis mission is the first step toward a long-term human settlement on the moon. Vox’s Unexplainable examines whether humans are even capable of living far from Earth for an extended period of time. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's been an eventful few weeks at Today Explained. Midterm elections, Twitter drama, big tech layoffs, cryptocurrency controversy, a global climate conference, the World Cup, and finally, Thanksgiving. We were so busy, we didn't get to wrap our heads around the hottest new space news. But thankfully, our friends at Unexplainable did. So today, we're bringing you their work. Enjoy it. Unexplainable, now available wherever you listen, except the radio.

I don't think they're quite there yet. You are watching the flight readiness briefing for NASA's Artemis 1 mission. The agency's Artemis mission is being heralded as the start of a new era of space exploration. It will be one small step towards one giant leap. NASA is closing in on a launch date for Artemis 1, the first in a series of missions that'll eventually take humans back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. With one big difference. This time we're going back to stay.

NASA's hoping to land humans on the moon by 2025. But after that, they've got bigger plans. They're hoping to build an orbiting lunar space station and a permanent base on the moon by 2025. But after that, they've got bigger plans. They're hoping to build an orbiting lunar space station and a permanent base on the moon itself. And our goal is to apply what we've learned living and operating on the moon and continue then out into the solar system. Our plan is for humans to walk on Mars by 2040. A permanent moon base and a mission to Mars could be the first steps toward becoming a multi-planetary species, where Earth isn't our only home,

where we're not confined to one vulnerable pale blue dot in case of catastrophe. Eventually, we can imagine a solar system full of human life. Human settlements in space, in which tens of thousands of people will live and work. But there's a pretty basic thing standing in the way. Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here. Space is terrible. It wants to kill us. Science writer Rebecca Boyle. You know, we've evolved to live on this planet and this planet only. I tell you, Zeke, it's cold up in there.

Whether it's the weightlessness, the radiation, or even the isolation, space is trouble for lots of different kinds of life. It's hard to raise fish or rats or mice or any other kind of species that we've taken up there. Sadly, 53 mice died in space, as did eight gerbils. It's hard to even grow plants in microgravity. Which makes NASA's grand vision of a permanent presence far from Earth a pretty risky proposition.

Space is really nasty, and it's very hard to be there for any period of time, even with a spacesuit and a space station surrounding you. Okay, everybody, look, we've got a number of long-range problems right now. And we barely understand the dangers of space, especially when it comes to living far from Earth for a long time. Like, over 600 people have been to space, but only 24 of them, less than 4%, have been more than a couple hundred miles from Earth. We'd like to confirm that the world is round.

And that tiny handful barely spent any time out there. I mean, the longest Apollo missions were just a few days. Odyssey, Houston. Welcome home, Homer. That's where the Artemis program comes in. It's often presented as just the next logical step in space, but it's also an experiment to see just how possible NASA's grand vision really is. The real goal of all these programs is to learn how to live and work really far from

Earth. How bad is it? How much can we handle? I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, what does space do to the human body? And if we're planning to have a permanent presence on the moon or even Mars, are we sure we can actually live there? Almost everything we know about the long-term effects of humans in space has come from low Earth orbit, this area of space just a couple hundred miles from Earth's surface.

That's where astronauts like Anne McLean have spent significant time on the International Space Station. You wait your whole life to launch to space, and then suddenly it happens. And launch to the ISS in 2018. I just remember feeling the thrust and just kind of this realization that you're leaving the planet. And it's really hard to describe, but it's like you're processing something that your

brain doesn't have the capacity to process because there just hasn't been anything like it before. As she left the pull of gravity, she turned and she gazed out this little round window. It was all pitch black. And then I saw what looked like a little piece of like flame off of a Bunsen burner, you know, like a blue flame. And I thought to myself, well, that's, I wonder what that flame on our spacecraft is. And I realized that as it got larger, it was actually the sun coming up over the curvature of the earth. And I realized that as it got larger, it was actually the sun coming up over the curvature of the Earth.

And I was watching my first sunrise. Anne went on to spend 204 days on the ISS, surrounded by the cold, dark vacuum of space. The walls of the space station are very thin, which is pretty surprising. You know, when you first get up there, you're like, oh gosh, I don't want to accidentally punch a hole through the wall. It's not really going to happen, but

these are the thoughts that cross your mind when you first get there. And it didn't take long to notice the types of dangers those walls couldn't keep out. For one thing, there's the ionizing radiation, these tiny, fast-moving particles ejected from the sun or from distant supernova explosions. Just think about, like like if little atoms became bullets. Many of these subatomic particles shoot right through the walls of the space station. When we shut our eyes at night up on space station, you can see what actually looks like a shooting star go by your eyes if you get hit by a piece of radiation.

It's not totally clear how this happens, but one theory is that these particles could be hitting astronauts' retinas and making their rods and cones fire, which would lead them to see a flash of light that isn't really there. And the first time you see it, you're like, wow. Because we hear about radiation on the ground, and then we go, oh man, this like really fast atom moving through my head probably is not great for my body. On top of the radiation, there's the issue of gravity. Gravity is an incredibly strong force. Well, when it leaves your body, your fluids shift up. Your body is designed to constantly pump blood up from your feet,

which makes sense as long as gravity is pushing down. It's like when you pick up the empty can of Coke that you think is full, and you kind of go, whoa, and you pick it up real fast. And microgravity changes the pressure around astronauts' eyeballs. Some people experience a change in eyesight because you think about maybe there's a little more pressure on the back of your eyeballs. So instead of being shaped like almonds, they get to be a little more round. Bone density is a problem, too.

That's why now when you see astronauts on the space station, you see us lifting weights. And because her spine wasn't constantly being compressed by gravity, the space between Anne's vertebrae actually expanded. I grew just under two inches in space. Which was okay, except for her pants. I got up there and I put on the pair of pants and I thought, why did I choose these ones? They only go down to my ankles. Until she came back to Earth.

I shrunk right back down in a couple of painful days. And finally, there's just the fact of being in space, confined to this tiny box for a long time. We do talk a little bit about space fog that just kind of makes you less likely to think quickly through things. NASA itself acknowledges that the psychological impact from isolation is one of the most dangerous unknowns of long-term space missions. I mean, there was definitely days where I just, I felt like I never woke up.

Like, I felt like I was half asleep all day long. And for lots of astronauts, these changes, like cognitive troubles, bone problems, vision issues, they can last even after they get back to Earth. But this is all just what space does to people in low Earth orbit. Things get significantly more difficult as astronauts get further from Earth. Take radiation, for example. Because the ISS is so close to Earth, it's actually shielded from most cosmic radiation by Earth's magnetic field. So even though there's enough radiation on the ISS to see these flashes, it gets way worse further out.

I've got a series of random lines that are moving like a flashing horizon with thunderstorms on the horizon. Apollo astronauts have reported tons of these flashes. Oh man, there's a good one, the left eye, right in the middle. It starts out as a semicircle and then folds into a point like on a pencil, and then it disappears. Only 24 people have spent even a brief time exposed to this kind of radiation. And just from this limited sample, there's reason to worry.

According to a 2016 study, these astronauts were four to five times more likely to die from heart disease than astronauts who stayed close to Earth, just from being outside Earth's magnetic field for less than two weeks. Which is why Artemis has an experiment to test long-term impacts. It's going to be the first biological mission into deep space in many years and the first small satellite carrying biology to deep space ever. Sergio Santamaria is the lead scientist for BioSentinel, an experiment on Artemis I

that's testing the long-term effects of radiation far from Earth. It's not going to have people, but it will have something surprisingly close. So yeast happens to be very similar to humans and how they respond to radiation. Radiation can damage cell parts, even DNA. So to see what this looks like in deep space, biosentinel is going to be launched from Artemis's rocket into an orbit around the sun.

We get information on how fast they grow, and we'll be doing these experiments over six months, so we can get more information of what the effects are coming from galactic cosmic radiation, for example. Sergio has exposed yeast to radiation on Earth using particle accelerators, and he's found that it has a slower rate of growth. But that's just for something as simple as yeast. There's so much we don't know about what cosmic radiation can do to humans over a long time.

It can do a lot of things, you know, potentially increasing cancer effects. And in other organisms like bacteria, it can produce mutations that make them even better or worse. You know, they can become more pathogenic even. It's a random process. It doesn't hit something in particular. It can produce random process. It doesn't hit something in particular. You can produce mutations everywhere. So the area outside Earth's magnetic field clearly poses some serious problems. But with Artemis, NASA's not planning to stop there. They're planning to go way further out, eventually building a permanent moon base.

Science writer Rebecca Boyle says that astronauts will hopefully spend several months at a time there, which will let them do two main things. One, they'll learn how to survive in an extreme environment, prepping NASA for a mission to Mars. And eventually people would just live there permanently rotating in and out like the way we do on Antarctica or on the space station. And two, they'll be near valuable resources on the moon, including water ice in its south pole. In theory, you could get that water and it could be used for rocket fuel. If NASA can extract oxygen from this water ice, the moon can basically be a gas station for future missions to Mars. But despite all this potential, the moon isn't exactly a welcoming place. For starters, even though the pull of gravity is stronger on the moon than it is on the ISS, it's still six times weaker than it is on Earth.

And turns out that's just at the threshold where it really starts to mess up your perception. People get kind of dizzy. There's actually a lot of videos of astronauts falling down on the moon. I fell down. Just like falling on their face. I just got my first initiation to getting very dirty. You sure did. They're just totally disoriented. Like your vestibular system just can't kind of figure out where you are in space.

Yeah, I look like an elephant stumbling around here. On top of the weaker pull of gravity, astronauts who live on the moon will also have to deal with lunar night. That's another thing that makes the moon really unpleasant. Any spot on the moon has two weeks per month where it faces away from the sun, which leads to some ridiculously cold temperatures. There's no atmosphere, there's no pressure, there's no, you know, warm sun or clouds overhead. It's really difficult for basic

technology to survive that, let alone humans. And then there's a danger that may be even scarier than radiation, weak gravity, or the freezing cold, moon dust. So because there's no atmosphere to speak of, any dust that's moving around because of a spacecraft arriving or leaving is going to fly around like a scouring pad. Apollo astronauts dealt with moon dust constantly. There's kind of a constant stream of micrometeoroids hitting the moon, and that kicks up a bunch of dust. Some of it goes fast enough that it goes into orbit, essentially. And there's no air to absorb any of those particles or slow them down.

Boy, you're going to have to give me the dust of the year one after this. I listened back to the tapes from Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon, and honestly, barely a few minutes went by without the two astronauts worrying about the dust. Ah! Man, that is dusty. But the moon doesn't have wind or waves like Earth does to make that dust softer. Every piece

of moon dust is jagged and sharp, so it's just flying like bullets all over the place. The dust would stick to astronauts' suits. Once you get it on there, you might as well forget it. And then when they went inside the landing capsule, it just went everywhere. So there's no avoiding breathing it in. And they all complained bitterly about it, and it hurt their throats, and it gave them

like a feeling like a head cold, like you were congested because there's so much crap you're congested because there's so much crap you're breathing in. I have never seen so much dirt in my whole life. Ever. One of the astronauts actually got sick from all of it. It's come on pretty fast, just since I came back. I didn't know I had the luter or dust hay fever. In a post-flight debriefing, astronaut Gene Cernan said, quote, I think dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon.

I think we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems except dust. Man, I hate this dust. That was his biggest worry after spending just a few days on the moon dealing with moon dust. All of these issues can pose acute problems. But long-term exposure is a whole different ballgame. Take moon dust, for example. We know it made astronauts sick on the moon, but studies have shown that longer exposure

could lead to a higher risk of serious diseases like cancer down the line. So when you add that to the higher chance of dying from heart disease, from cosmic radiation, it might just be that spending a long time in deep space can't be perfectly safe. There's a real chance it can shorten your life. But even if living in space is always going to be dangerous, NASA isn't going to wait till the long-term risks are zero, which they're fully open about with astronauts like Anne.

I understand cognitively the dangers, but I can't say no. It's this passion that I just, I want to explore. Rebecca says certain technologies could make long-term survival less risky. Like NASA is researching drugs that could mitigate the effects of weak gravity. Their idea is to make spacesuits out of a type of plastic that would absorb more cosmic radiation. And when it comes to moon dust, NASA's experimenting with a kind of slick coating on spacesuits to keep it off. But there's one interesting solution that could potentially solve a bunch of these problems at once. There are actually some caves on the moon that are caused by lava flows that collapsed.

And so in theory, like you could go under these domed kind of cave areas and burrow underneath the lunar soil. A lunar base inside a cave would be able to stay warmer during lunar night, and it would be shielded from the constant stream of moon dust. You're also shielded from cosmic rays and solar rays if you're in a cave, like you're protected from being bombarded by any kind of micrometeoroids or radiation. And this isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Just this past July, NASA found a series of deep pits or moon caves that hover at a constant temperature of 63 degrees Fahrenheit, which means there's a real possibility that the first permanent settlers on the moon could be cavemen. You know, go back to what worked for humans the first time around. Yeah, that's true. Go back to the caves and make their own art, and people in the future can talk about what they meant when they drew their rovers instead of

bulls. It's a fantastic thing to imagine. A moon base in a lunar cave, a mining operation at work in the background extracting material to power deep space rockets, an orbiting lunar space station serving as a staging point for these missions, and a rocket heading out toward Mars, slowly transforming into one of many tiny lights as it gets further and further away. But at the end of the day, it's also worth asking, why? Given that we still only know just a tiny sliver of the risks of being far from Earth for a long period of time, is all of this worth it? Why do we want humans to be living in space to begin with?

I mean, that's kind of the million-dollar question for a lot of these programs is, what's the point? The million-dollar answer answer after the break. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting250 when you join Ramp.

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Artemis 2 is going to take humans around the moon and back. And Artemis 3 in 2025 will hopefully put the first humans back on the moon in over 50 years. After that, they're hoping to build a permanent moon base that'll teach us about living in space long-term, far from Earth, and ultimately prepare us for a mission to Mars. But that all raises a question. If this is really about space exploration, why should we be sending humans into deep space at all? Why not just keep sending rovers? To start, there are some clear geopolitical reasons. China and Russia are planning to build a joint permanent moon base by 2036,

so it may just be as simple as being first. But to NASA astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang, living off-world is more urgent, something that isn't as much a choice as it is a necessity. I think any life like to spread, you know, and for the long-term survival, you need to move. If you stay one place, you're not going to survive long. For all we know, Earth could be the only planet in the universe with life. Suppose we are alone and we are precious. If we are destroyed, it means the life in the universe was done. And it's not like this kind of destruction is so hard to imagine. There's a long list of apocalyptic events that could destroy us.

Asteroids, pandemics, climate change, global nuclear war. People say, ah, it's not going to happen. But you check the Domestika website, the chances have a global nuclear war right now. It's not zero. And when you start looking at longer and longer time frames, this kind of destruction starts becoming more plausible. Suppose you buy a lottery ticket. The chances to win the lottery ticket is very low. But you buy a lottery ticket every day for millions of years, you're going to win.

And zooming out even further, Jonathan says that it'll eventually be necessary to move way further out than just Mars, because the sun isn't going to be around forever. If we want to have a future for the humanities, even if our sun is dead, we got to become multi-planetary species. To even think about the dangers of that far, far future, we need to survive long enough to make it there. For Jonathan, the best way to ensure the existence of humanity is to start learning how to live far from Earth right now, no matter how difficult it might be.

But not everyone wants to think billions of years into the future. I don't want to give up that easily on Earth. You know, this is the planet that we evolved on. Science writer Rebecca Boyle again. We have one home, and I think it's a little sad to imagine that, like, well, it's too late. This place sucks now because we messed up. We've got to go somewhere else. And look, something terrible really could happen to Earth.

But Mars is pretty apocalyptic right now. It's already kind of like what Earth might end up being after some sort of catastrophic event. So yeah, eventually, like very, very eventually, we're going to have to leave Earth to survive. But it's not exactly the greatest justification for a mission to Mars right now, or even in 2040. Still, there are other compelling reasons to learn to live far from Earth. It's a difficult place to go. It's a difficult place to be. It requires a lot of energy and risk, both in terms of life and capital, to do that at all. Tackling the dangers of space leads to innovation.

New technologies from phone cameras to wireless headphones to athletic shoes, they've all got their roots in the Apollo program. Plus, studying these extreme environments can really help people on Earth. A lot of research on things like bone density loss and microgravity has a lot of impact for people with bone density issues on Earth, like osteoporosis. And finally, when it comes to science, there's certain things that people can do

that rovers just can't. To me, it's the concept of kind of the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Astronaut Anne McLean again. Rovers and unmanned aerial vehicles, those are very good for answering questions that we know what the question is. We know where we want to look.

We know what we want to look for. But when you put a person in a situation, they have the ability to look off to the side and go, hey, what was that? What just caught my eye? Why does that look different right there? This exact thing actually happened on Apollo 15 when astronauts

were looking for lunar rocks. Scientists had speculated that finding this specific kind of rock called basalt would indicate volcanic activity. And Houston had put together where they thought they were going to find these rocks, and they had done this whole mission, and they were going back. But then one of the astronauts noticed something off the planned route. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees what he knows to be a basalt rock. Oh, man. Hey, somebody, just hold on one second. And he said, we've got to go get that.

But NASA had already told them to end the mission, and he knew they wouldn't give him extra time to go check out the rock. And so they said, okay, let's just tell him our seatbelt's broken so that we have to stop and adjust it. Okay, get my seatbelt. Roger, Mark, you stop. And he gets out of the rover and he runs over and he picks up this rock.

Well, the other astronaut's like, I don't want Houston to ask us any questions. So I'm just going to talk. And so you just hear him go, Houston, I just want to paint this picture for you. It's just a beautiful landscape. And he just kept on talking so that he'd go pick up the rock. That rock was very, very scientifically interesting. This rock became known as the Seatbelt Basalt. And along with other samples, it pointed to the fact that the moon once had volcanic activity,

the same activity that shaped the caves that could house a potential moon base. And Anne says that this rock is the type of thing that only humans would likely be able to find. But if we had relied on rovers, we would never have it. So given all of this, the compelling reasons to send humans to space for long periods of time, weighed against the very real risks to health and human survival, most of which are honestly pretty much unknown, I wanted to ask the people I spoke to if they would take part in this new era of living in space. Some people like Jonathan are so dedicated to this idea of a multi-planetary future

that they'd be willing to make a permanent move. I think many people like me, we are not afraid of even death. We want to explore, to find something new. Jonathan told me that if his daughter was up for the trip too, he'd actually sign up for a one-way ticket to Mars. If there's an opportunity to go to a completely new place,

I start something new, I die there, it's fine with me. Other people, like Anne, were less into the idea. It is all about responsible exploration. And for me personally and the team at NASA, responsible exploration means that it's a two-way ticket. I also checked in with Scott Kelly, who until recently held the American record for the longest space mission at 340 days.

I do stupid things sometimes. Scott said he'd be willing to go back, but not if it were permanent. I understand that there are people out there, most of them have probably never spent any time in space, that say they would be okay with living the rest of their lives on the surface of Mars in some kind of habitat, I am not one of those people.

But I would watch that reality show, because I think after a couple of years, it'd get pretty interesting. More kind of interesting. Have you ever read the book The Lord of the Flies? Sure. Probably that kind of interesting. But for other people, the idea of going on any kind of long-term mission outside low-Earth orbit is just too risky. Even for Sergio, who's intimately involved with Artemis' scientific experiments. It's not just the radiation. It's not just the microgravity, right?

It's the isolation. It's awesome, the idea of going, but for a long term mission, probably not. Yeah, no, I'm not looking forward to that myself. Even Rebecca, who spent her career writing about the moon, who knows everything there is to know about it, she's not sure that given all the risks, she'd actually want to spend time there. I think I would do it if I could be promised that I would be safe. But as we've been talking about, that's not a promise anybody can make. And so I don't think I would do it. As much as I would love that and to see the curvature of the Earth,

which I spent so much time imagining and trying to write about and trying to recreate for people, I don't think if it came down to it that I would actually strap myself into a rocket to have that experience. It's easy to compare space exploration with the history of migration and exploration on Earth. You know, we're born to explore, that life always expands, that Mars is just the next logical step on our journey toward this future Star Trek universe. But it's also worth remembering just how risky a proposition this all is and the humans that are involved. This isn't just migration or exploration.

This is learning to live in an environment that's actively trying to kill us in a whole bunch of different ways all the time, most of which we don't really understand yet. Sometimes we need to ground ourselves in the reality that we have this planet that gave birth to us all. And I think we should remember that, you know, we have a lot to still save here and that we're made for it. And, you know, keeping both of those things in mind

keeps us a little bit more feet on the ground, even as we look to the heavens. This episode was reported and produced by Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Catherine Wells, Brian Resnick, and Meredith Hodanat. Music from Noam. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, fact-checking from Zoe Mullock, and production help from Bert Pinkerton, Mandy Nguyen, and me, Neil Dinesha.

Also, just a quick update. Bert was looking at that octopus key she found in the woods, and she realized she'd actually seen that same octopus inscription on a small plaque near her house. She knows she has to go back. Rebecca Boyle's book isn't out yet, but it's got a name. It's called Walking with the Moon,

uncovering the secrets and holes to our past and our future. You won't want to miss it. Special thanks to Chris Lainhart, Anna Schneider, and Rachel Hoover for their help this week. If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us. We're unexplainable at vox.com. We'd also love it if you left us a review or rating. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week, but we'll be back in your feed on November 30th.