Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...solar-flare warning was sounded. One idea is to build the shelter with the heavy-walled oxygen and water tanks that must be brought along anyway. Soviet scientists are experimenting with generating strong electrically charged fields around the spacecraft. These would have an effect similar to that of the earth's magnetic field, deflecting the speeding particles around the ship...
Another possible hazard on a long space journey has its source on planet earth: human nature. Soviet flights have demonstrated that performance levels begin to decrease as the days stretch into months. Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, whose 326 days aboard the space station Mir set a space endurance record last year, was down to only two hours of productive work a day toward the end of his eleven-month flight and had become decidedly peevish. "Leave me alone," he once snapped to mission control. "I have a lot of work...
...enthusiastic talk about a manned mission to Mars, many influential voices have been raised against it. None is more formidable than that of University of Iowa Physicist James Van Allen, the discoverer in 1958 of the earth-girdling radiation belts that today bear his name. With other scientists, he has long been critical of the shuttle, the space station and other programs that draw funds away from space science. "Any serious talk of a manned Mars mission at this time is grossly inappropriate," he says, arguing that the top priority of the U.S. should be to develop and build expendable...
...world's reigning experts on mythology, was fascinating stuff, if you're really into fertility cults, purification rites and the like. But the show wasn't all Upanishads and Choctaw legends. Once in a while, with Moyers smirking approval in the background, Campbell would offer some solid, down-to-earth advice. Live mythologically, he would say. It's a means of keeping one's inner spirit attuned to the archetypes and myths that surround us even in this secular age. Well, that seemed a pretty shrewd observation...
Despite the experience gained from Apollo moon shots and the longer Skylab missions, U.S. doctors have some doubts about the ability of humans to withstand the effects not only of prolonged weightlessness but also of the transitions from gravity on earth (one G) to zero G in space to 0.38 G on Mars. "We're nowhere near ready to send a human to Mars," says Dr. Michael Bungo, director of NASA's Space Biomedical Research Institute at the Johnson Space Center. "We've got years more of basic research...