[AR] Re: The Atlantic: Elon Musk and SpaceX Want to Fly From NYC to Shanghai in 39 Minutes
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2017 14:02:53 -0400 (EDT)
On Sat, 7 Oct 2017, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
As for barf bags, for a less-than-an-hour flight that'll make a roller
coaster look tame...
I think this issue is being grossly exaggerated. The reason why the NASA
Vomit Comet made almost everyone sick was not that it exposed people to
2-3G, or that it exposed people to 0G, but that it went back and forth
between them *over and over and over*.
As I understand it, merely cutting the number of parabolas from NASA's
usual 50ish to 10-20 dramatically reduces the incidence of motion
sickness. And here we're talking about doing *one*.
The comment about getting motion sick on a quick glance out the window at
high G is just mistaken -- it's confusing linear high-G with *centrifuge*
high-G, where the *rotation* scrambles your gyros if you turn your head
suddenly. There's no reason for a ballistic transport to be doing
high-angular-rate maneuvers.
...the passengers can just stay strapped in the entire time. Helps some,
I understand. (Helps some in my experience too, come to think of it.)
Indeed, spacesickness wasn't really recognized as a problem until the
spacecraft got big enough for people to unstrap and move around; that made
the symptoms unmistakable. (Although milder forms of it were undoubtedly
present earlier -- the politics of astronauts vs. flight surgeons meant
that in-flight medical problems were bad for an astronaut's career, so
inconspicuous problems often went unreported. Despite what the article
implies, astronauts *do* get spacesick: about 60% admit to having
symptoms "and most of the rest are lying" -- only maybe 10% are completely
unaffected.)
The short duration would probably help too. Spacesickness takes time to
develop; it's not instantaneous.
The economics of the idea do seem questionable, especially with an
expendable upper stage. The medical side shouldn't be a big issue.
Henry
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