Apparently long space missions may damage eyesight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17354304
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17354304
lSeriously, if anyone knows the downfall of that idea for the wheelie space station, let me know, OK?
I always thought that they made docking seem a tad too easy in 2001.
Well, in 1968 they made this odd little hippie loved film called 2001: A Space Odyssey, and in this film they had this space station, this big, double wheel looking thing that spun and simulated the effect of gravity through inertia. What a great idea.
A space station like that would have to be very big. In fact the rotating spaceship later in the 2001 filem is one of the technically weak points in the film. It too rotated to give pseudo gravity, however in this case the diameter of the rotating section is too low meaning the speed of rotation would be moderately high. The crew would have terrible trouble with their inner ears due to the coriolis effect. In order to avoid this problem the rotation must be very slow and if you want significant pseudo gravity then the space station wheel would have to be significantly big. Big in space means seriously expensive. The ship in 2010 was, as I recall, much more realistic.
It was certainly much harder in Elite, until you bought a docking computer.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Big and expensive. I think I heard (or read) something like two miles (was that diameter?), but I'm not sure. Been a while. In fact, that sounds a bit small...
I'm not that old, but my memory tends to be elusive sometimes.
It was certainly much harder in Elite, until you bought a docking computer.
That's because no one writes science fiction - or makes science fiction films - which actually show what it's really like. It's all magic technology and a blithe disregards for the difficulties and dangers of getting into space and travelling through space.
Bravo. We sf fans need a little more reality injected into our awareness from time to time, seems to me.