Skin-Tight Bodysuits Could Protect Astronauts From Bone Loss

jamie passes along a report about research from MIT's Man-Vehicle Laboratory into using "superhero-style" skinsuits to combat the effects of extended stays in microgravity on bone density in astronauts. (Abstract.) Quoting: "Astronauts lose 1 to 2 percent of their bone mass for each month they spend in space. As far back as the Gemini missions, conditioning exercise regimes have been used to slow the rate of bone loss, but a 2001-2004 NASA-sponsored study showed that crew members aboard the International Space Station were still losing up to 2.7 percent of their interior bone material and 1.7 percent of outer hipbone material for each month they spent in space. ... With stirrups that loop around the feet, the elastic gravity skinsuit is purposely cut too short for the astronaut so that it stretches when put on — pulling the wearer's shoulders towards the feet. In normal gravity conditions on Earth, a human's legs bear more weight than the torso. Because the suit's legs stretch more than the torso section, the wearer's legs are subjected to a greater force — replicating gravity effects on Earth." See? Seven of Nine's outfit was inspired by science after all.

Re:Wearing it to sleep

[Nadaka]

Or it could be that it isn't as effective as gravity, so to give it an extra bump, the extra 8 hours are needed.

Hotness is questionable...

[CohibaVancouver]

The very important issue here is that while female astronauts are fit & clever, they're rarely hot. Most of them are in their late 30s / early 40s as they've spent 20+ years getting incredible credentials. The ones who have come from the military are somewhat butch, the civilians tend to be somewhat geeky. To wit -

http://www.google.ca/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1424&bih=719&q=female+astronauts [google.ca]

Re:Barbarella had it right

[circletimessquare]

and there is leela in futurama

and we also forgot erin gray's skin tight outfit in buck rogers

"biddi-biddi-biddi. you morons"

Re:Please - this is SERIOUS

[The Living Fractal]

Uhm. Spinning life support modules are the medium-long term, barring artificial gravity of course.

Re:Why not rotate the station to simulate gravity?

[Caerdwyn]

1. The ring, to avoid problems with the aforementioned Coriolis force, would have to be hundreds of feet in diameter. The expense would be extreme.
2. The ring, to avoid problems induced by the mass of the astronauts moving from place to place, would have to either be very massive or have a series of weights that always move by themselves to the opposite side of the ring from where a given astronaut is located. Consider what this would do to the bearings of the interface of the nonrotating section if even a slight wobble were introduced. Think of what happens when one of your car's wheels throws a balance-weight. This counterbalance system would be a complex maintenance-hog with a really nasty failure mode
3. If the station is built without a nonrotating section (a la 2001:A Space Odyssey , docking becomes orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous. We've already had incidents of damage to the ISS caused by bad docking attempts... now we want to add spin?
4. In an emergency, you're dealing with an object that has a lot of rotational inertia. How do you take the spin off? Will the ring tear itself apart if a critical structural member is micrometeored, hit with space junk, or suffers a material failure?
5. How would EVAs to do inspections and repairs work? Sounds like a very high possibility of an astronaut getting slung off into the great black void.

It's a good idea for the health of the astronauts, but the cost is prohibitive. Science fiction authors don't have to deal with the budgetary process...

Re:Why not rotate the station to simulate gravity?

[Anaerin]

As has been mentioned a few times earlier, there are several reasons.

• You need a (very large) spinning area for the correct amount of inertial force to create a gravitic effect. On a station as small as the ISS, having a rotating section (Which would need to rotate pretty fast for the necessary G forces) would induce a very pronounced "Coriolis effect", which would have the astronauts within constantly throwing up and uncomfortable (at the very least).
• The interface between the rotating and non-rotating sections would be extremely difficult to make and keep secure. Any mechanical failure would lead to rapid destruction of the entire station, as the several tonnes of rotating mass will maintain it's inertia and rip itself, and the station, apart against the seized bearings or other failed part.
• Given that well over three quarters of the experimentation on the ISS is related to behavior of items in microgravity, to remove that microgravity would remove most of the incentive to study anything on-board.
• Spinning an area of the ship like that would create a gyroscopic effect, which could severely destabilize the ISS' orbit without constant correction, which would use large amounts of fuel.
• Having just one spinning section would also, by the friction in the interface parts, cause the stationary section to begin turning with the spinning section. Or, if the spinning section is spinning against the stationary section, a counter-rotation in the "stationary" section. The "Fix" to this would be to have two "Spinning" sections, which counter-rotate, but this would mean there would have to be massive upgrades to in-between sections to handle the torque, and of course, twice the potential problems.

Or, they could put the astronauts in small spandex suits and swap them out every few months to recover. It's not as if staying on the ISS is a permanent position (yet), after all.

Re:Barbarella had it right

[Pharmboy]

And Aeryn Sun's black leather outfit in Farscape.

Re:rotate the station.

[AmigaHeretic]

I find it funny that every Tom, Dick, and Harry without a high school education thinks that they're a brilliant engineer whenever they read about some problem that hundreds of experienced engineers couldn't solve. Seriously, take ten seconds and go google your idea BEFORE touting it as the magical solution that all of these foolish NASA engineers didn't think of.

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
— Arthur C(harles) Clarke

"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible. "
— Simon Newcomb

"Radio has no future."
- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist.

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer, 1926.

"Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
- Editorial in the Boston Post, 1865

"This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. "
- Western Union internal memo, 1878

"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches? "
- The Quarterly Review, England (March 1825)

"Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."
- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859)

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
- Marshal Ferdinand Foch

"It is an idle dream to imagine that automobiles will take the place of railways in the long distance movement of passengers."
- American Railroad Congress, 1913

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, President of Digital Corporation, 1977

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas J. Watson Snr., IBM Chairman, 1943

"There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the Moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the Earth's gravity."
- Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, University of Chicago astronomer, 1932.

"Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is a ridiculous fiction."
- Pierre Pachet Professor Physiology, Toulouse, 1872

"‘With regard to the electric light, much has been said for and against it, but I think I may say without contradiction that when the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it, and no more will be heard of it.’"
- Erasmus Wilson Oxford University professor, 1878

"The so-called theories of Einstein are merely the ravings of a mind polluted with liberal, democratic nonsense which is utterly unacceptable to German men of science."
- Dr. Walter Gross, 1940

On Nuclear Power, "any one who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine... "
- Ernest Rutherford (1933)

"X-rays are a hoax. "
- Lord Kelvin, ca. 1900

ALL out of context and most just to fend off scams

[dbIII]

Let's look at your list.
"Cold Fusion" should be changed to "Cold Fusion the way Ponds and Fleischman" said it can happen.

Anti-gravity stands until we REALLY know how gravity works instead of just watching what it does. Trivial anti-gravity devices such as rope, elevators and helicopters etc are exempt.

As for electronic telepathy, once again WTF is telepathy? There is no answer right or wrong to examples of such a device and it could even be argued that we have such a thing now with radio, microphones and headphones since information gets from one brain to another with a bit of help from mouth, audio and radio.

Weather Control? I had the good fortune from when I was seven years old to go to a scout hall that had a "geiger vortex gun" cloud seeding device from the 1900s out the front, so I got an exposure to a silly example of psuedoscience bullshit at an early age. It's a very long running scam which is why it usually gets put on the "impossible" list. We don't yet know enough to make such a thing work but scammers getting money from the desperate have been pretending to do so for a very long time. Maybe it will happen some day, but for now it should just ring alarm bells and encourage people to take a close look at the scientific equivalent of the Nigerian spam scam before they lose their cash.

I don't understand why you have transmutation on that list. It happens in nature during radioactive decay, and if you look in the sky during the day you'll see an example of heavier elements being formed from light elements.

Wireless power - why is that on the list? Radio is an low wattage implementation of it and you can have a radio that works with nothing but what it picks up from it's antenna to drive a small speaker (1930's crystal radio). Your toothbrush charger is half of a transformer and Faraday would have be able to look at it and explain to you how it works in seconds - it's not the "wireless power" that is being dismissed as impractical by anyone just a transformer that has more losses with increasing distance.
Possible does not mean practical in all situations - Tesla's idea of setting up a current between a resonating earth and the newly discovered ionosphere had a few major practical problems but we only know that from hindsight. Being on the opposite side of the earth to such a generator would be shocking to say the least (arc from ionosphere to ground). The reason wireless power is on the list is every now and again somebody half understands very well known laws of physics, comes up with something completely wrong based on loophole that isn't there to think they can get far better transmission than we have, and then shouts it from the rooftops without checking first if reality agrees. It's also used in scams. The space elevator power transmission thing is a semi-scam that is amusing. You have theoretical material making up the beanstalk that is one of the best electrical conductors known and you make the elevator powered by a laser and photovoltaic? That's just a way to lose power and pretend you are making progress until the theoretical material for the beanstalk exists.