While the Mars-500 living unit looked like your grandmother’s basement (ugh, the wood panels!) it was actually a pretty robust simulation. By design, the capsule was set up to simulate all the aspects of the actual mission, which included having landing module and an indoor mockup of the Martian surface—complete with dirt and rocks. Not [...]
For anybody just jumping in, over the next few comics I’ll be covering aspects of the landmark Mars-500 experiment, which put six guys (Alexey Sitev, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexander Smoleevskij, Romain Charles, Diego Urbina, and Yue Wang) from a variety of backgrounds—including cosmonauts, engineers, and doctors—in a mockup of an Earth-to-Mars spacecraft for 520 days. The [...]
This isn’t the first comic about a Mars-based reality TV premise. Nor is the concept so strange to me anymore. But the difference between MArs-500 and its predecessor is that the former was a real experiment—a series of experiments, in fact. The production crews are probably going through the footage as we speak. While only [...]
That last panel is truefacts, folks. I took some artistic license, but otherwise it’s 100% true. As if astronauts on the ISS didn’t have enough problems with microgravity induced maladies such as headaches, bone density loss, muscle atrophy, and even blindness, they can’t even enjoy food thanks to stuffy heads. Their solution? A tactic near and [...]
Not breaking news by any means, but fascinating nonetheless. A while back I told you about some of the interesting properties of moon dust, one of which was the peculiar smell of it. Every now and then an article about outer space itself having a smell will appear, and in every one it has been [...]
Given that all life evolved in the presence of the Earth’s gravity, it is unsurprising that removing that element has some curious effects on our physiology*. Our bodies compensate for fluids being pulled downwards; our bones actually grow stronger from the normal stresses put on them by exercise; and is the definition of physical strength [...]
UPDATE: I must apologize. I was made aware that an image of the lunar lander, correctly portrayed without the command module, was incorrectly added to this tableau of inaccuracies. I shall fix it at a later time. Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all celebrated to your heart’s content. While you were hungover, the Chinese were plotting. [...]