As for a spinning station, that's something NASA will probably never do. They're extremely risk averse and you're opening up an unknowable, but very large, number of new possible failure scenarios there - many of them likely catastrophic. If anything that's something of an argument for genuine private stations who may have different levels of risk tolerance. Or we can just wait for China, because they'll 100% do it and probably relatively soon.
However, the research done on mice on ISS suggests that the undesirable effects can be mitigated by creating an artificial gravity (i.e. rotation) lower than on Earth, e.g. of 2/3 of Earth's gravity.
The failure scenarios for rotating spacecraft need not be more severe than for non-rotating spacecraft. For instance if 2 or more spacecraft, which can be also used independently, are connected with cables to enable them to rotate around the common center of mass, if everything is designed carefully the failure of the coupling system should not have any other consequences than the loss of the artificial gravity and from then on the failure risks would be the same as for non-rotating spacecraft.
For one obvious problem with rotation systems, stations need to be regularly boosted. You'll also need to occasionally reboost the local rotation. This sort of basic stuff is already fairly complex with a static station, and becomes exponentially more so with a local rotation going on. Even moreso because you want to be relatively fault tolerant in case of a partial or failed boost. Then you need to compensate for impacts, docking and undocking, and much more.
It's viable and almost certainly a solvable, but NASA is not the appropriate organization to do so. Their risk aversion makes it unlikely that they'll ever be doing much of anything revolutionary where failure could be catastrophic. They're having a tough enough time just trying to recreate what we already did 50+ years ago.
[1] - https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...
[1] - https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...
There are not classified shuttle equivalents launching, not sure what you are talking about there. The X37 has the capability to land, but it is not manned and is tiny compared to the shuttle.
>research that couldn't be done with automation
I'd think there is room for both. Automation makes sense, but don't think the versatility of meatbags is entirely there yet.
A bigger problem is lack of expertise. Astronauts are not specialist in whatever is the topic of the current experiment. You need probably like 5 years of training (assume the second half of the undergraduate degree, and perhaps the first half of the PhD). So experiments must be fully automated except for a button to turn they on and off.
You can send up a lot of less versatile bots for the price of one meatbag.
"0.33g mitigates muscle atrophy while 0.67g preserves muscle function and myofiber type composition in mice during spaceflight"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12985678/
Obviously, we know that the gravity of Earth is sufficient.
But the results make probable that two thirds of the gravity of Earth might be enough, while the gravity of Mars may create some problems and the gravity of the Moon is very likely to be insufficient, so the time spent on the Moon must be limited, though not so much as on the ISS.
I agree with the previous poster that any spaceship designed for carrying humans to Mars or even farther must be designed to spin and anyone who accepts to go on something else is stupid.
Making a spinning spaceship may be cheap if dual bodies or one body and a counterweight are used. It is likely that the safest solution would be to have 2 identical spacecraft, which could also be used independently but which could be coupled with cables to spin around the common center of mass at a distance big enough to create enough gravity at a low rotation speed.
The problem is not the price but the fact that nobody has tested how difficult is to control such a configuration (avoiding oscillations and instabilities) and how difficult is to solve problems like docking in a manner that does not waste energy (i.e. without changing the rotation speed of the more massive spinning spacecraft, which can be done by having 1 or more docking ports on the rotation axis, like on the hub of a wheel; in the case when the rotating spacecraft would be made with 2 bodies or a body and a counterweight that would be linked with cables, one could have the equivalent of an elevator for transporting crew and equipment from the docking port to the main body or bodies).
But someone must build and test such a spacecraft, otherwise we will never learn how to do it right and which are the real problems that are hard to predict in a simulation.
Forgive my ignorance on the topic, but surely "same as earth" would be the starting point? With everything less being a trade-off that is suboptimal
For example, medical interventions against zero-g decay can be tested in any microgravity, spin or no spin. Development of in-space manufacturing and assembly can happen on any sufficiently capable space station.
All of that, however, requires a good amount of ambition. And I'm not sure if NASA under the current political system can deliver ambition.
This seems obvious but I’ve never heard of anyone working on a drug to address it. Strapping astronauts to a treadmill yes, pills no.
And if it's the body doing that, you can, in theory, find a biochemical way to make it stop doing that.
If you rephrase that to correct English then it would make sense. We aren't trying to stop physical damage or weakness we are trying to prevent it from happening. Pills can prevent many things that cause this.
Cargo-cult requires a rigid through-line.
What criteria would you use, to choose to avoid something in order to preemptively avoid hindsight analysis? It's a nonsensical line of thinking.
And here, the US does not decline because of some symbolic action, but rather decline causes the action.
This confusion of cause and effect is literally a kind of magical thinking.