Question: Is there any possibility that humans can live in space.

Abbie Hutty answered on 3 Jun 2020:

It is definitely possible right now, if the spacecraft they lived on was in a low orbit around the Earth. for further away places, like the moon, or in deep space, or Mars, it is possible to design spacecraft and to get humans there, but the big problem with them “living” there, for any major amount of time is radiation.

The Earth has a magnetic field and it extends out into space a bit, not as far as our moon but far enough that some satellites are within it. Within this magnetic field, you are protected from the radiation in space, as a lot of the radiation bounces off it and doesn’t penetrate into that zone. So the International Space station is within that field, and so protected from the worst of space radiation. Even so, if there is a “solar flare” or other event like that that causes a big release of radiation from the sun, the astronauts there go to a special place on the space station which is more protected to wait for the radiation to die down again.

Outside of this protection the radiation would be much worse. The average background radiation is quite bad- enough to give astronauts a much higher risk of illnesses and cancers, but the solar particle events like I mentioned before could be very bad- they could kill the astronauts instantly or give them radiation sickness, depending on the severity of the flare. These events happen on average a few times a year, so any long duration mission would have a major risk here.

People are looking into ways of shielding spacecraft from the radiation to make it safer – one way is by making a really thick shield of lead or other dense material like that around the spacecraft. But that would be very expensive and difficult to launch enough shielding into space, if the spacecraft had to also be big enough inside for humans to live in it. Our current designs for rockets can only launch things that fit inside their nose cones- and none are big enough for that at the moment, so we would have to launch lots of separate bits and somehow assemble them all in space, a bit like how we made the International Space Station over many years. So this would take a long time and lots more funding than we have right now!

Another thing that is being researched is how to produce a little magnetic field like the Earth’s, to bounce the radiation off. Some researchers have managed to demonstrate it on a tiny scale, producing a magnetic field for a short amount of time around a small object in a lab, but it takes LOADS of energy. So to do it the whole time on a spacecraft big enough for people to live in, when you have to make all the energy that you will use on board that same spaceship, is a huge challenge! So until we have developed new energy sources that probably won’t work either.

Once you actually arrived at the moon or another planet the best way to avoid the radiation would be to dig deep bunkers to live in, or to find caves that already exist so that the soil will protect you from the radiation. You could just go out to the surface every now and then to do experiments, and stay down where it was safer for the rest of the time. That seems a bit of a shame though, if you’ve travelled all the way to Mars, to then have to live in a dark hole most of the time and not even enjoy being there!

These are the kinds of challenges you could come and work on if you became an engineer!