I SAID you people need better spaceships!

Alright. When I started this blog, I intended my first topics to be things like:

11. Only self-destructive weirdo cultures would forego the social benefits of allowing ALL adults to marry whomever they want, including same-gender couples.

and

12. Anyone who does not enjoy the prospect of pogroms in the United States of America should really speak up in defense of the plan of New York’s peaceful Muslim-AMERICAN community to build a cultural center at 45-51 Park Place. (Really, you people are playing with fire there.)

But something else has come up, so for now we’ll just add those to the list of how things work in the real world of the civilized galaxy and come back to them later.  Native Goddess has brought my attention to a new study of astronauts on the International Space Station:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100820/ap_on_sc/us_sci_space_weaklings

It seems that long-term exposure to the microgravity environment on the ISS turns athlete astronauts into virtual geriatric weaklings.  Duh.  See item #8 on The List  -- You people need better space ships. As with so many news stories in your media, there’s almost no news here.  The headline should read: Astronauts STILL BECOME as weak as 80-year-olds in space. Every experiment, going back to the days of Skylab, has shown how, despite whatever exercise regime you use, muscle mass, bone mass and heart function all atrophy horribly after any appreciable amount of time spent cooped up in the crappy tin cans you call “spaceships.” 

The above-linked article crystallizes how you guys are needlessly stuck in the stone age of space travel when it asserts that a mission to Mars will take “a minimum of three years,” and that the way to fight the effects of microgravity disease is exercise and eating right.

Um, no. One fights dehydration with water, malnutrition with food, and microgravity disease with (all together now) gravity. In space, that means artificial gravity, something you have known how to do this since the ‘40s and tested as long ago as Gemini 11 in 1966.  Here’s how you prevent microgravity disease in spacecraft and space stations: you spin them, or at least that part of them where the crew lives.  The centripetal force of a correctly spun spacecraft can very closely mimic the effect of Earth gravity on the vessel’s interior walls.  It’s easy.  You’ve seen it in sci fi movies from 2001 to Green Slime. Now take a look at American spacecraft launched since the Gemini program: Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle, ISS, the proposed Orion craft.  No spinners. But continued research into the effects of, and how to combat, “Zero g.”

Okay.  Slow learners.

And here’s ANOTHER important component of any anti-microgravity disease regimen: don’t spend so long in the microgravity environment.  Does that mean astronauts will never be able to endure the “minimum” 3 year round trip to Mars?  Here’s a new flash from the 1960s: Mars round trip doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, take 3 years.  Back in the 60s they had a WORKABLE plan to send 8 astronauts to Mars and back by 1975 in 450 days.  The program offered moonships the size of Navy destroyers with crews of 20 men. All safe, affordable, fast as all get-out; and doable with then-current technology.  It was called Project Orion (no relation to the crew vehicle now being designed as the United States of America’s next manned access to space after Shuttle retires next year.).  This is what the 1975 Orion ship would have looked like:

( Learn all about Orion here: http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/orion/index.html  , with actual technical and design reports from the program!)

Boss ride!  Even on my planet. 

Instead, here’s what your tax dollars are paying for, and it won’t be ready to fly til at least 2015, and it probably won’t be going anywhere but the ISS in Low Earth Orbit to ferry home microgravity disease-suffering weaklings in case of emergency:

You can get the gist of this giant leap backwards for righteous, American, space-faring hardware here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_crew_vehicle .  A lame horse-n’-buggy ambulette for lame spacemen. 

But, the upshot of all this is: you people really need better spaceships.