October 26th 2017 Update: a pdf of President Gary’s slides from the ASGSR presentation is now available on the SSI G-Lab overview page!
SSI President Gary Hudson
A note from President Gary C Hudson:
To ascertain the effects of microgravity on the human body, Astronaut Scott Kelley spent a year on ISS while his twin remained on Earth to provide a control. The effects aren’t pretty, as he reports in his new book “Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery.”
Why did he do it? He notes:
“Our space agencies won’t be able to push out farther into space, to a destination like Mars, until we can learn more about how to strengthen the weakest links in the chain that make space flight possible: the human body and mind.”
But the unspoken message in his comment is that – with a bit of hard work and picking the right physical specimens for the job – maybe we can go to Mars and back, at the risk of some acceptable amount of permanent damage to the crew. But that’s not what SSI and the rest of the space settlement community needs to hear. Exploration is well and good, but only as prelude to settlement. Unless we build and operate something like our proposed SSI G-Lab, we can’t answer the larger biological question of how men and women, and their offspring, can hope to settle the space frontier.
-Gary C Hudson, President
Space Studies Institute
On Thursday October 26th, 2017 SSI President Gary C Hudson will be speaking at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research in Seattle. President Gary is scheduled to be be taking the stage in Thursday afternoon’s ‘Enabling Tech III: Model Systems Research’ session. For more information on the ASGSR, click here.
For More information on SSI G-Lab, click here.
For a book teaser article written by Scott Kelly and released by the Brisbane Times on October 6th, click here.
