"Bruce Sterling - Outer Cyberspace (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

reveals that astronauts are highly trained technicians whose primary
motivation is not to "boldly go where no one has gone before," but
rather to do *exactly what is necessary* and above all *not to mess up
the hardware.*

Astronauts are not like Lewis and Clark. Astronauts are the
tiny peak of a vast human pyramid of earth-bound technicians and
mission micro-managers. They are kept on a very tight
(*necessarily* tight) electronic leash by Ground Control. And they
are separated from the environments they explore by a thick chrysalis
of space-suits and space vehicles. They don't tackle the challenges of
alien environments, hand-to-hand -- instead, they mostly tackle the
challenges of their own complex and expensive life-support
machinery.

The years of manned space-flight have provided us with the
interesting discovery that life in free-fall is not very good for people.
People in free-fall lose calcium from their bones -- about half a percent
of it per month. Having calcium leach out of one's bones is the same
grim phenomenon that causes osteoporosis in the elderly --
"dowager's hump." It makes one's bones brittle. No one knows quite
how bad this syndrome can get, since no one has been in orbit much
longer than a year; but after a year, the loss of calcium shows no
particular sign of slowing down. The human heart shrinks in free-
fall, along with a general loss of muscle tone and muscle mass. This
loss of muscle, over a period of months in orbit, causes astronauts and
cosmonauts to feel generally run-down and feeble.

There are other syndromes as well. Lack of gravity causes
blood to pool in the head and upper chest, producing the pumpkin-
faced look familiar from Shuttle videos. Eventually, the body reacts
to this congestion by reducing the volume of blood. The long-term
effects of this are poorly understood. About this time, red blood cell
production falls off in the bone marrow. Those red blood cells which
are produced in free-fall tend to be interestingly malformed.

And then, of course, there's the radiation hazard. No one in
space has been severely nuked yet, but if a solar flare caught a crew in
deep space, the results could be lethal.



file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...ten/spaar/Bruce%20Sterling%20-%20Outer%20Cyberspace.txt (4 of 10)20-2-2006 23:34:32
 file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Bruce%20Sterling%20-%20Outer%20Cyberspace.txt

These are not insurmountable medical challenges, but they
*are* real problems in real-life space experience. Actually, it's rather
surprising that an organism that evolved for billions of years in
gravity can survive *at all* in free-fall. It's a tribute to human
strength and plasticity that we can survive and thrive for quite a