Thinking Of Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Thinking Of Sir Arthur C. Clarke On His 100th Birthday
“Today would have been Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 100th birthday. Arthur C. Clarke has had more influence on me as a writer than just about anyone else has – and it started at a very early age. … In the early 1990s I was a NASA employee and served as Payload Accommodations Manager for the 2.5 meter Centrifuge Facility that we planned to attach to Space Station Freedom (you call it ISS now). Eventually it was dropped by the program. At every possible opportunity I would sneak in gag charts showing the crew of Discovery from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” inside the “25 meter centrifuge” and then say “oops, wrong chart”.”
How much of the centrifuge ever got assembled? is it something that could eventually be finished and launched?
Well, there was a shell and some generic support hardware. It is sitting in a parking lot in Japan. The Centrifuge itself was never built. Some of the lab hardware that would have been in the Centrifuge Accommodation module went elsewhere in the space station.
Sir Arthur Clarke, along with Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Willy Ley inspired the generation that took us to the Moon. That is why so many kids went into STEM. We need a new generation of writers like that to inspired to inspire this generation of kids to reach for the stars.
Given what we have learned in the last year on eyesight changes resulting from brain fluid production and expansion, now artificial G experiments using, presumably, centrifuges, is supercritical for future long duration exploration. And yet some ISS manager, in order to save almost nothing out of a hundred and fifty billion $$, wrecked the opportunity to do specifically that kind of research. The shortsightedness is amazing.
This is a somewhat sporadic effect with unclear risk factors and unconfirmed mitigation strategies. It’s premature to suggest that a specific countermeasure is needed or the artificial gravity would be an optimal countermeasure. It might be an effect of intense exercise, and just dropping the CSF pressure with diamox might be enough to prevent it.
Artificial versus zero G seems even more like an area in which we ought to be focusing research, yet with no artificial G capabilities, we cannot research that factor.
I’ve always believed that we as a species will never explore the solar system without artificial gravity, I’m sure Mr. Clark would agree.