"Bruce Sterling. Outer Cyberspace (F&SF-01) {angl., new}" - читать интересную книгу автора

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.

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
while without any gravity. However, we now know what it would be
like to settle in space for long periods. It's neither easy nor pleasant.

And yet, NASA is still committed to putting people in space.
They're not quite sure why people should go there, nor what people
will do in space once they're there, but they are bound and determined
to do this despite all obstacles.

If there were big money to be made from settling people in
space, that would be a different prospect. A commercial career in
free-fall would probably be safer, happier, and more rewarding than,
say, bomb-disposal, or test-pilot work, or maybe even coal-mining.
But the only real moneymaker in space commerce (to date, at least) is
the communications satellite industry. The comsat industry wants
nothing to do with people in orbit.

Consider this: it costs $200 million to make one shuttle flight.
For $200 million you can start your own communications satellite
business, just like GE, AT&T, GTE and Hughes Aircraft. You can join
the global Intelsat consortium and make a hefty 14% regulated profit
in the telecommunications business, year after year. You can do quite
well by "space commerce," thank you very much, and thousands of
people thrive today by commercializing space. But the Space Shuttle,
with humans aboard, costs $30 million a day! There's nothing you can