Garret Griggs
10/23/14
ESS 102 AB
Research Paper
Human Hibernation in Space Travel The biggest difficulty of space travel is just that: space. Even with recent advancements in technology allowing rockets to traverse beyond the atmosphere, the sheer magnitude of empty void between Earth and the destinations of our long-sought manned missions creates quite the antagonist for future plans of exploration. The travel to Mars alone, the most realistic destination for a near-future manned mission, would take 6-9 months of space travel—and that’s just accounting for the way there (Wall 2013). Round trip, a Mars mission would be leaning towards more than a year and a half total of space travel. This long amount of time would not only cost massive…show more content… Just imagine being locked in confined quarters for a year or more at a time with minimal human contact; the monotony would be intense enough to bring the claustrophobia out of any human being. The logical step to solving this major issue would be to somehow reduce the time it takes to traverse the distance between celestial bodies. Currently, however, upper limits on reaction propulsion point out that drastically shorter trips between planets won’t be realistic in the near future, especially given the mass penalty accompanying manned missions (Ayre et al. 2004). So, rather than banking on a miraculous new propulsion method to surface in the near future, many scientists have contemplated a method of passing long periods of uninhabitable time utilized by many mammals here on Earth: hibernation. Beyond the physiological and psychological challenges involved with bottling up human beings for months or years at a time, hibernation during space flight offers solutions to problems such as mass penalty conservation, safety requirements, and minimizing of life support requirements such as food, air, and water supplies. Though human hibernation in space travel is not yet a solidified reality, it is