The Pros And Cons Of NASA

These past decades, NASA has advanced so far from where we started at from 1958. From that time, we have made countless spectacular achievement NASA is now known for today. From our infamous Moon mission ¨Apollo 11¨, where Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Buzz Aldrin, went 4 days into space to finally land on the Moon and place the United States in a global stardom of being the first to go to the Moon. Since then, we have improved from what we gathered back from the Apollo mission and advance for the upcoming plans to go to Mars. One of those issues was how to sustain the astronauts in space where there are no chefs, doctors, or a local grocery store to get food from every day. Everything is carefully calculated on what they predict

to be how they keep astronauts in check in terms of health.

Problems included the effects of zero gravity, how to make a sustainable food source in space with a limited supply of water, how to stay fit, & how to keep food from spoiling in space for the long-term trip from Earth to Mars and back.

Contrary to popular belief, there’s no such thing as zero gravity. Weightlessness and zero gravity are two different things. The earth’s gravity keeps the moon in orbit. And astronauts are generally much closer to earth than the moon is, which means that the earth’s pull on them has to be much stronger. While we’re on Earth, we feel our weight because, as the Earth’s gravity pulls us into its center, the ground pushes back against our feet.When astronauts orbit the earth, they’re still subject to gravity, but they’re moving sideways so quickly that even though they’re being pulled toward the earth, they’re not getting any closer to the planet’s center. In other words, they’re basically in a state of constant free fall, and that’s why they’re weightless. Even so, astronauts are still affected by this sense of ‘weightlessness’, in a study conducted by NASA’s Zero Gravity Test, over time their participants slowly loss bone and muscle mass the longer they stayed

in the zero gravity position. This is by the fact on earth, if you don’t use a part of your body, it will slowly remove or reduce the percentage and mass of that part of your body because it processes it as unimportant and needs to be removed. NASA has learned that without gravity working on your body, your bones lose minerals, with density dropping at over 1% per month. By comparison, the rate of bone loss for elderly men and women on Earth is from 1% to 1.5% per year. Even after returning to Earth, your bone loss might not be corrected by rehabilitation, so you could be at greater risk of osteoporosis-related fractures later in life. If you don’t exercise and eat properly, you will lose muscle strength, endurance, and experience 2 cardiovascular deconditioning since it does not take effort to float through space. The fluids in your body will shift upwards to your head, which could put pressure on your eyes causing vision problems. You’re apt to develop kidney stones due to dehydration and increased excretion of calcium from your bones. Medications react differently in your body in space. Nutrition, including eating enough, becomes important, otherwise you could compromise your health since nutrients are required for the function of every cell and system in your body. Basically, weightlessness affects your muscle and bone mass because in space, there is no force working against you to increase those factors, thus bone and muscle percentages decrease, however, there is a plan to add a room on the rocket that acts as artificial gravity to prevent such outcomes from occurring from the long term space travel.