Guest: Josh Hopkins. Topics: Mission planning, design for crew hardware for deep space missions. You are invited to comment, ask questions, and discuss the Space Show program/guest(s) on the Space Show blog, http://thespaceshow.wordpress.com. Comments, questions, and any discussion must be relevant and applicable to Space Show programming. Transcripts of Space Show programs are not permitted without prior written consent from The Space Show (even if for personal use) & are a violation of the Space Show copyright. We welcomed Josh Hopkins back to The Space Show for this special webinar broadcast. Note: for video streaming we used Adobe Encoder Live & we believe it failed to record the video. At this time, we only have the traditional Space Show audio for archiving. If we recover the video recording, we will archive the video URL along with the audio URL for this program. This program with Josh Hopkins is very important. Josh took us from the theoretical regarding the primary human factors issues including radiation, bone loss, muscle atrophy, and mental/psycho-social issues, and told us how they were designing & building the Orion crew capsule referred to as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) for deep space. In our first segment, Josh introduced us to mission planning, both for near term and longer term missions & the differences in the planning process. Here, he is referred us to www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/ssc/Orion/humanexplore/SteppingStone… for their outline of Human Exploration Stepping Stones. Check out their main website for even more information: www.lockheedmartin.com/products/Orion/humanexploration.html. We talked about NEO mission planning for a 5-7 month mission using an Open Loop Environmental Systems. From here, he briefly outlined the radiation risks & the related mission planning: Trapped particles in the Van Allen Belts, Solar Flares, Cosmic Rays. He described how they use calculation paths to model radiation of each type in each part of the crew capsule & how they design to protect & shield the crew from the radiation risks. I asked Josh how they plan, design, & build in protections against the problems associated with microgravity. We learned about "trades" that need to be designed for as there are microgravity requirements that are contradictory with radiation requirements. Josh spoke to these contradictions. Also in this segment, much was said about closed loop environmental systems re a Mars mission. One way to avoid recycling, its mass, & costs would be to use lots of mass for a Mars mission. The crew would take more supplies & materials with them. He explained all the trades in doing these evaluations. I asked if this scenario negated smaller rockets/ propellant depots. This was a comprehensive discussion. In the second hour a caller focused on nuclear submarine analogs. This led to my asking about gender issues for planning & operation in the subs as compared to the capsule. We also talked about the mental issues in this segment, crew planning & development around these issues, plus the trades with microgravity and radiation. Another listener asked about Demron for shielding & antioxidants to combat radiation damage. Josh talked about issues re the size of space for crew repairs, health concerns, even spacesuit egress & repairs. We talked about Orion being built to operate in a depressurized state. Crew communications with each other as well as with Earth for longer missions were discussed. We discussed artificial gravity. Final topics included Orion time line to operations, Apollo crew volume compared to Orion's, capsule vs. lifting body, reentry speeds from Mars & risk factors with a fast return speed. Post your comments on the blog URL above. If you want to email Josh Hopkins, send it to me & I will forward it.
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