Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads, where we pull on the most fascinating,
complex and sometimes controversial strings of science and history to
see where they lead.
Speaker 2: And today we're pulling on a big one, a.
Speaker 1: Really big one. It's a thread that's woven directly into
the fabric of human space exploration. And it suggests that
our greatest leap, maybe our single greatest achievement, was entirely
a lie, and.
Speaker 2: That lie, that conspiracy. It all revolves around an invisible,
truly deadly fact of space physics, the Van Allen radiation belts.
Speaker 1: Right. The central idea, what some people call this invisible
iron curtain, is that these belts are so packed with
lethal radiation that no human could possibly pass through them
and live, which.
Speaker 2: If true, would mean that all human travel beyond low
Earth orbit, and you know, specifically the Apollo Moon missions
they must have been faked.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly powerful idea, and I get why it
STIPs because the science is hostile. I mean, the Van
Allen Belts sound like something straight out of a sci
fi horror movie.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, if you just read the raw numbers, the energy
levels of the particles trapped up there, it sounds like
an impenetrable shield that Earth has.
Speaker 1: So today our mission is really specific. We want to
use the hard science, the engineering solutions that are actually
deployed back then, and critically the data that's validating them
right now to answer that claim.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and for this deep dive, we've got a whole
collection of sources. We're looking at historical reports from the
physicists who actually discovered the belts, James Van Allen himself.
Speaker 1: We've also got modern radiation analyses from researchers like Murky,
Wilson and Rizzo.
Speaker 2: And maybe most importantly, we have the detailed mission data
from the recent uncrude Artemis flight. It's the modern day proof.
Speaker 1: So the goal is to break down the physics of
the radiation, really investigate the Apollo trajectory strategy, which is
fascinating stuff, and analyze the actual radiation doses the astronaut Scott, and.
Speaker 2: Then we'll show how modern missions are building on that
exact same foundation. We're basically going to use NASA's own
data from the sixties and today to mamfle that core
argument of impossibility.
Speaker 1: This is a story about managing risk at the absolute edge.
It's not about arguing whether the belts are dangerous. They are,
it's about whether they're an impossibility.
Speaker 2: A very important distinction.
Speaker 1: So let's start by defining the threat. What exactly are
we flying through?
Speaker 2: Okay, let's set the scene when we talk about the
Van Allen Radiation Belts or the VAB, which you need
to picture are two. Well, they're like these massive doughnut
shaped regions of charged particles.
Speaker 1: And they're just floating there.
Speaker 2: Not floating, they're trapped. They're held in place by Earth's
powerful magnetic field. They're basically a side effect of the
very thing that protects us. Our magnetic field deflects and
catches all these high energy particles coming from the Sun
and from deep space.
Speaker 1: And these belts are positioned right above where we do
most of our current space stuff, like the International Space
Station exactly.
Speaker 2: The ISS is safe. It's in what we call low
Earth orbit or l e O, and that's generally below
the really intense parts of the belts.
Speaker 1: So where does the real danger start?
Speaker 2: The inner belt, that's the one you really have to
worry about. It starts roughly around a thousand kilometers up
and can stretch out to maybe twelve thousand kilometers. It's
where the particles are most concentrated and most energetic, and
the outer belt, the outer belt is much larger, it's
more spread out, and it changes a lot more. It's
also made of slightly different stuff.
Speaker 1: And that stuff, that material is really the whole point.
It's not gas as we know it. It's these highly
energized charged particles, right, that's the danger.
Speaker 2: App The inner belt is just swarming with high energy protons,
basically the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. And because protons
are relatively heavy, they carry enormous energy. They're very, very penetrating.
And the outer belt, the outer belt, is mostly electrons,
along with a mix of heavier particles like helium nuclei,
which you might know is alpha particles. And these things
aren't just sitting there. They're constantly bouncing between the magnetic poles, drifting,
creating this incredibly complex and yeah, hostile environment.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is where the conspiracy theory really gets
its fuel. People here correctly that the VAB contains plasma,
the superheated ionized gas, and they hear that the temperature
can reach what thousands of degrees it can?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're talking anywhere from two thousand kelvin up to
twenty thousand kelvin.
Speaker 1: Which sounds hot enough to just melt the spacecraft instantly
or flash fry an astronaut. Why doesn't that happen?
Speaker 2: This is maybe the single most important misunderstanding. It's a
perfect example of scientific detail getting taken completely out of context.
You have to understand the difference between temperature and heat.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down.
Speaker 2: Temperature in this context is just a measure of how
fast the individual particles are moving their kinetic energy. And yes,
they're moving incredibly fast, so individually you could say they're hot.
But they exist in an almost perfect.
Speaker 1: Vacuum, so there just aren't enough of them close together
to actually transfer that heat exactly.
Speaker 2: The density is unbelievably low. I love the analogies for this.
Think about a hot oven. You can stick your hand
at a four hundred degree oven for a few seconds, right,
The air is hot, but it's not dense, so the
energy transfer is slow. You don't get burned immediately.
Speaker 1: But if you touch the metal rack inside that.
Speaker 2: Oven, you're instantly burned because the solid metal is dense
and it transfers that heat energy very very quickly. The
Van Allen Belts are like the air in that oven,
but I mean millions of times less dense.
Speaker 1: So the total mass of all those super fast hot
particles is actually tiny.
Speaker 2: It's negligible. That's an understatement. Yeah, I mean, if you
could somehow collect every single high energy particle in both belts,
the total mass would be incredibly small. The danger isn't
your spacecraft melting.
Speaker 1: Danger is the radiation dose.
Speaker 2: It's a cumulative effect. Think of it as being sand
blasted by microscopic bullets. Each one is tiny, but over
time they do serious damage to electronics and to the
human body. It's a dose accumulation problem, not a thermal problem.
Speaker 1: Got it. Okay, that makes sense, So let's talk about
shielding from that dose. If we're dealing with charged particles
protons and all electrons, how hard is it to block them?
Speaker 2: Well, Compared to other kinds of space radiation like gamma
rays or neutrons, charge particles are actually a bit easier
to stop. Why is that Because they have a charge.
When they hit a solid material like the aluminum hull
of a spacecraft, they interact with the atoms in that
barrier and they slow down pretty quickly. For lower energy particles,
simple things work. I mean, a sheet of paper can
stop an alpha particle, a thin sheet of metal stops
a beta particle, an electron.
Speaker 1: But the protons in the inner bell they're not low energy.
They're the big problem.
Speaker 2: They're the big problem. They're extremely high energy. And that's
the challenge. You need enough physical mass in the way,
thick layers of aluminum or other materials to slow them
down and stop them before they get through.
Speaker 1: Before they get into the astronaut's body.
Speaker 2: Right, you want the particle to run out of steam
inside the shield, not inside the astronaut's bone marrow. So
for Apollo, the engineers had to do this incredible calculation,
this trade off how much shielding can we possibly afford
to launch versus how fast can we get through the
danger zones?
Speaker 1: So the barrier is real, but it's an equation. It's time, speed,
and mass. It's not an impossible wall, which brings us
directly to Apollo. How on Earth did a spacecraft from
the nineteen sixties with pretty basic shielding by today's standards
solve that equation.
Speaker 2: This is where the just the brilliance of the Apollo
mission planners comes in. They weren't flying in blind doctor
Van Allen had discovered these belts in nineteen fifty eight.
They knew what they were flying into.
Speaker 1: So they didn't just build a thicker ship.
Speaker 2: We couldn't The launch rockets couldn't handle the weight. So
instead of building a lid bunker, they used what researchers
like Murky call elegant trajectory tuning.
Speaker 1: They flew smarter, not harder.
Speaker 2: A perfect way to put it. They use a very specific,
very complex flight path designed to minimize their time and
the worst parts of the belts. They knew the belts
were donut shaped, thickest around the equator, so they went
over the top in a way. Yeah, they planned their
trajectory to pass through the belts as far from the
magnetic equator as possible, where the particle density is naturally lower.
They essentially skim the thinnest parts of the donut, not
punching through the middle.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about that specific move, the translinar injection,
the TLI burn. That was the moment it all happened.
Speaker 2: Right now, that was the key. The spacecraft would do
an orbit or two of the Earth, checking all the
systems in the safety of ILIO. Then at the perfect moment,
as they were at the lowest point of their orbit,
they'd fire that big third stage.
Speaker 1: Engine and that gave them a massive push toward.
Speaker 2: The Moon, a massive push. And that one burn did
two critical things. First, it put them on the fastest
possible path, and second, it meant they were traveling at
their absolute maximum speed right as they entered the Inner Belt.
Speaker 1: And speed was the other half of the equation, because
dose is all about time. The less time you spend there,
the less radiation you get. How fast were they going as.
Speaker 2: They were leaving Earth during that burn? Sources say they
hit speeds of around two thousan forty miles per hour
over three two hundred kilometers per hour. That kind of
speed means your exposure time is just slashed.
Speaker 1: And we know exactly how long they spent in there.
Speaker 2: We do, and this comes from Van Allen himself. He
confirmed it. He stated that the Apollo spacecraft spent only
about fifteen minutes in traversing the region of the Inner Belt,
fifteen minutes fifteen minutes in the worst part. The much larger,
much less dangerous Outer Belt took less than two hours
to cross, So the whole trip through the belts was
a little over two hours, but only a tiny fraction
of that was in the high danger zone.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a game changer. Fifteen minutes that speed and
trajectory have to drastically reduce the dose. So now we
have to hit the core claim head on. The theory
says this dose was lethal. What were the actual measured
doses the astronauts received.
Speaker 2: This is the data that just ends the argument. The
total measured radiation for the entire trip that's through the
belts twice and the time on the Moon was incredibly low.
How low it varied a bit by mission, but it
ranged from a low of point one six rads to
a high of one point one fear ads. That high
reading was on Apollo fourteen.
Speaker 1: One point one four rads. That number doesn't mean much
to most people. Can you put that in context for us?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Smithsonian has a great comparison. That highest skin
dose one point one four RADS is about the same
as getting two head CT scans.
Speaker 1: Okay, so not great for you, but certainly not.
Speaker 2: Lethal, not even close to lethal. To understand the scale,
you need to know the benchmarks acute radiation sickness, where
you get really sick that starts at around one hundred
to two hundred rads. A dose it's generally considered fatal
is up around one thousand rats.
Speaker 1: So if the highest dose was one point one four
and sickness starts at one hundred, we're talking about a
boase that's one hundred times smaller than the danger.
Speaker 2: Level, exactly two orders of magnitude. And again Van Allen
himself put this to bed at the time. He said
the round trip exposure was and I'm quoting, less than
one percent of a fatal dosage. The math checks out
the risk was managed.
Speaker 1: I see why the vib transit part of the theory
falls apart then, But I do have a question. I
think a lot of our listeners would have, Okay, one
point one five rads isn't going to kill you on
the spot, but doesn't any dose of radiation increase your
long term cancer risk?
Speaker 2: That is an excellent, excellent point, and that's where the
conversation has to shift from short term survival to long
term risk. That small dose was considered an acceptable risk
for a short nine or ten.
Speaker 1: Day mission, but for a three year mission to Mars
it would be a different story.
Speaker 2: A totally different story. The chronic low dose exposure is
the central problem for Mars missions, but for Apollo they
could handle that small, one time hit. There was, however,
one risk they absolutely could not engineer their way around.
Speaker 1: And that was the Sun.
Speaker 2: That was the Sun. It's often called the luck factor
of Apollo, and that's not an exaggeration. They could plan
the trajectory to the millimeter, but they couldn't perfectly predict
a solar particle event.
Speaker 1: Or an spe a solar flare.
Speaker 2: A big one. Yeah, And Marque's analysis on this is
really clear. He points out that even though Apollo eleven
launched in nineteen sixty nine, which was a solar maximum year,
a very active year for the Sun, during their specific
slight window, the Sun was totally.
Speaker 1: Quiet and they needed that quiet sun For all the
missions we did.
Speaker 2: They relied on solar weather forecasting, which was pretty basic
back then.
Speaker 1: What would have happened if they had been wrong? If
a big flare had gone off while they were on
the way to the Moon, it would.
Speaker 2: Have been catastrophic. A major X class flare can blast
out a wave of proton radiation that could deliver a
dose of up to ten.
Speaker 1: Seaverts and ten severts is is.
Speaker 2: A lethal dose. Murky is blunt about it. He says
an event like that, in fact should be deadly.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just a theory. We have a real
world example of a terrifying near miss that proves this
exact point.
Speaker 2: We do the solar storm of August nineteen seventy two.
It was one of the biggest storms ever recorded, and
it happened right in the gap between the Apollo sixteen
and Apollo seventeen missions.
Speaker 1: So if either of those missions had shifted by just
a couple of weeks.
Speaker 2: The Smithsonian reports are very clear on this. Had astronat's
been in transit or on the lunar surface during that storm,
they would have received a lethal dose of radiation. Period.
Speaker 1: Wow, that near miss is almost the most compelling evidence
that they really went. It proves they understood the real
risks precisely.
Speaker 2: It does. It shows the VAB was a non solvable
engineering problem. It was a sprint, but the random acute
thread of the sun was the real potential killer out there.
The conspiracy focus is on the wrong problem.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've established that Apollo was short, it was fast,
and it was lucky, but that was then now we're
talking about going back to the Moon to stay and
going to Mars missions lasting months, even years.
Speaker 2: And that's where the radiation environment changes completely. The challenge
shifts from surviving a short acute dose to surviving a long,
chronic one.
Speaker 1: Right once you're outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field,
what are you dealing with?
Speaker 2: You're dealing with two main things constantly. The first and
maybe the most insidious is galactic cosmic RaSE GCRs.
Speaker 1: Okay, what are GCRs? Where do they come from?
Speaker 2: They come from way outside our Solar system. They're mostly
from supernovae exploding stars. They are the constant background radiation
of the universe.
Speaker 1: Like a constant drizzle of radiation.
Speaker 2: A good way to think of it, but it's a
very nasty rizzle. These are extremely high energy particles. We're
talking atomic nucleiron silicons stripped of their electrons and moving
it nearly the speed of light. They're what we call
high loote tarticles linear energy transfer, it's a measure of
how much energy a particle dumps into pissue when it
passes through highlight. Particles are like cannonballs on a cellular level.
They can shred DNA strands in ways that are very
difficult for the body to repair.
Speaker 1: So that's the chronic constant threat. What's the other one.
Speaker 2: The other one is still the sun. Solar particle events
or spees. They're not constant, they're sporadic. But when a
big one happens, the sheer number of particles the flux
can spike to insane levels.
Speaker 1: So you've got the GCR drizzle and the SPE thunderstorm.
Speaker 2: Perfect analogy, and shielding against that GCR drizzle is way
way harder than shielding against the stuff in the Van
Allen belts.
Speaker 1: Why is this so much harder?
Speaker 2: Two big reasons. First, the energy levels are just off
the charts. You need a huge amount of mass to
stop them. But second, and this is a huge problem,
is something called spillation spellation.
Speaker 1: What's that.
Speaker 2: It's when one of those high energy GCR cannon balls
hits the aluminum shielding of your spacecraft. It doesn't just stop,
It shatters the nucleus of an aluminum atom, creating a
shower of secondary radiation neutrons other particles inside the ship.
Speaker 1: So the shield itself becomes a source of radiation.
Speaker 2: It can Yeah, the secondary shower can sometimes be more
biologically damaging than the original particle would have been. It's
a nightmare for engineers. You can't just use lead. Lead
would actually make the secondary radiation worse.
Speaker 1: So what do you use?
Speaker 2: Materials with lots of hydrogen are good water plastics like polyethylene.
Hydrogen is good at absorbing those secondary particles without creating
more of its own.
Speaker 1: This all sounds like a massive weight problem for a
Mars mission. How much shielding are we talking about?
Speaker 2: The numbers are pretty daunting. Researchers like Donald Rapp have
run the models, and for a long interplanetary trip, say
six months to Mars, you need what they call substantial
omnidirectional shielding on the order of about thirty grams per
square centimeter.
Speaker 1: Thirty grams per square centimeter, How does that compare to
what we use now?
Speaker 2: It's a huge jump. A spacecraft like the ISS or
the Space Shuttle only has about five to ten gram
for square centimeters shielding on average, So moving to thirty
means you have to triple your shielding mass.
Speaker 1: Which means a much bigger, heavier ship that's much more
expensive to.
Speaker 2: Launch prohibitively so with current rockets, It's why Apollo use
speed over mass. They couldn't afford the weight. We still
struggle with that exact same trade off for mars today.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the health effects of that chronic
GCR dose. What happens to an astronaut's body over hundreds
of days out there.
Speaker 2: The risks become less about immediate sickness and more about
long term breakdown. The sources break it down by dose.
At the lower end, from zero to half a severt,
you start to see measurable damage to the immune.
Speaker 1: System, which is really bad In a tiny, confined space
capsule with other people.
Speaker 2: It's critical. Yeah, latent viruses can reactivate, You're more susceptible
to infection. As the dose climbs up toward one or
two seaverts, you start seeing damage to things like bone marrow,
which affects your blood cell production.
Speaker 1: And then, of course the big one is cancer.
Speaker 2: The long term cancer risk is the primary concern, and
beyond that, there's growing evidence that GCRs can cause neurocognitive damage.
The highly t particles can damage neurons in ways that
might not show for years, but could affect memory and
cognitive function.
Speaker 1: And the danger doesn't even stop when you land on
Mars or the Moon.
Speaker 2: Not at all. You're still outside Earth's magnetic shield. You've
got the planet below you blocking half the sky, but
you're still getting blasted from above. We have real data
on this.
Speaker 1: Now from the Chinese lender on the Moon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the chasy Form mission measured the dose on the
lunar surface. It came out to about thirteen hundred and
sixty nine micro severts per day. To put that in perspective,
that's about two and half times the dose astronauts get
on the ISS Wow.
Speaker 1: And Mars is a little better, I assume, because it
has an atmosphere a little.
Speaker 2: It's very thin, but it helps. The Curiosity Rover measured
about six hundred and twenty four microceivers per day on
the Martian surface. It's still a significant dose. It confirms
that any long term habitat on the Moon or Mars
will have to be buried.
Speaker 1: You'd have to use the regulif the soil as a shield.
Speaker 2: Yep, bury the habitat under a meter or two of soil.
It's the only practical way to provide enough passive shielding
for a long term stay.
Speaker 1: All of this, this incredible complexity brings us to the
modern era to Artemis. The Artemis emission was uncrude, but
it was really a full scale test of all this,
wasn't it.
Speaker 2: It was if Apollo was the proof of concept, Artemis
I was the full scale validation. They were testing the
environment and the strategies to mitigate it for the next
generation of astronauts, and they.
Speaker 1: Had some really sophisticated tools to do it. Tell us
about that key experiment with the phantoms, right, the Marror
experiment fantastic.
Speaker 2: They use two female anthropomorphic phantoms named Helga and Zohar.
These are basically high tech mannequins designed to perfectly replicate
how different types of radiation affect human organs and tissue.
Speaker 1: And they are packed with sensors.
Speaker 2: Thousands of them, all sorts of docimeters to get a
really detailed map of the radiation dose throughout the entire journey.
Speaker 1: Why two of them and why female models?
Speaker 2: They used two so they could test a shield. Zohar
wore something called an astra red vest, which is a
wearable radiation shield, while Helga was unprotected. It was a
direct ab test, and they used female phantoms because based
on our current risk models, women have a higher lifetime
risk of developing cancer from the same radiation dose as man.
Speaker 1: So by designing the protection for them, you're essentially protecting
everyone to the highest possible standards.
Speaker 2: Exactly, you engineer for the most susceptible case.
Speaker 1: So what did this incredibly detailed experiment tell us about
the Van Allen Belts, the original Apollo hazard?
Speaker 2: It provided really the ultimate modern validation. First, the orion
capsule is a beast. It's heavily shielded, much more so
than Apollo. Some spots have over twenty grams per square
centimeter of shielding. But even with all that, when they
path through the proton belts, the sensors saw a four
full difference in dose rates between the most and least
shielded parts of.
Speaker 1: The cabin So where you sit really really matters.
Speaker 2: It matters a lot. It concerns The VAB is still
intensely dangerous, but just like Apollo, the transit was quick.
Once they were out in deep space, the overall dose
was completely dominated by those galactic cosmic rays.
Speaker 1: So the VAB is a dangerous hurdle, but the GCRs
are the marathon you have to run.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. The VAB transit
accounted for less than a quarter of the total mission dose.
Speaker 1: Okay, but did Artemis prove that the Apollo strategy was
sound the whole idea of using speed and orientation.
Speaker 2: It did, And this is one of the coolest findings
from the mission. As Orion was punching through the inner belt,
they did a planned five minutes ninety degree rotation, a
simple turn.
Speaker 1: And what did that do?
Speaker 2: It resulted in a fifty percent reduction in the radiation
dose rates being measured by the sensors.
Speaker 1: Wow, just by turning the ship.
Speaker 2: Just by turning the ship to present its most heavily
shielded area to the most intense part of the flux,
it's definitive proof that active maneuvering is an incredibly effective countermeasure.
It proves the nineteen sixties engineers had it exactly right.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. So we've got trajectory passive shielding like the hull,
and tactical shielding like vests and moving around the cabin.
What about the big sci fi idea active shielding generating
a magnetic field like a mini magnetosphere to deflect particles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everyone asks about this. It sounds like the perfect solution,
but the physics for now is just brutal research from
people like doctor Ronald Turner makes it pretty clear that
it's just not practical right now? Why not two huge
problems mass and safety. To generate a magnetic field strong
enough to stop high energy GCRs, you'd need massive souper
conducting magnets. The weight of the magnets and all the
cooling systems you'd need would be well, it would weighs
much or more than just adding more passive shielding.
Speaker 1: So if it weighs the same, what's the point exactly?
Speaker 2: Why add all that complexity and risk? And the risk
is the second part. The amount of energy you'd have
to store in a magnetic field that powerful is enormous.
We're talking about the same energy as a small.
Speaker 1: Tactical nuke, and if that system fails, a failure.
Speaker 2: What they call a quench event, could release all that
energy instantly and catastrophically. It's just too dangerous and too
complex with our current technology. So passive shielding, just putting
mass in the way is still the only game in town.
Speaker 1: All of these challenges, the GCRs, the shielding mass, the SPEs,
it all forces the agencies into this really tough ethical
spot right how do you decide what's an acceptable level
of risk for a human life.
Speaker 2: This is one of the most critical debates happening in
space exploration right now. For a long time, NASA's career
radiation limits were really complicated. They were different based on
your age and your sex.
Speaker 1: Because the risk is different for different people.
Speaker 2: Right It's all based on a metric called risk of
Exposure induced death or READ. The goal is to keep
the extra lifetime cancer risk for an astronaut below three percent.
Because younger astronauts and female astronauts have a longer life
ahead of them and different tissue sensitivities, their dose limits
had to be much much lower to stay under that
three percent cap.
Speaker 1: Which must have been a nightmare for planning missions, a
huge one.
Speaker 2: So NATA has proposed a major change, a single universal
career limit for every astronaut.
Speaker 1: And what's that limit?
Speaker 2: Around six hundred millisecrets. And here's the crucial part. They
got to that number by calculating the dose that would
give the most susceptible person, a thirty five year old female,
that three percent excess risk. Then they made that the
standard for everyone.
Speaker 1: So they're taking the highest safety standard and applying it
across the board exactly.
Speaker 2: It simplifies everything and it ensures everyone is protected to
the same high standard. But what it really means is
that as an institute tution, they're formally accepting that a
three percent excess risk of fatal cancer is the potential
cost of sending humans to Mars.
Speaker 1: And other agencies have even higher limits they do.
Speaker 2: The European, Russian and Canadian space agencies already use a
universal limit of one thousand milliseiverts. The whole world is
trying to figure out what level of risk is acceptable
for this next great leap.
Speaker 1: So this whole journey from that fifteen minute dash through
the belts in nineteen sixty nine to this deep ethical
debate today, it brings us right back to that initial
conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2: It does the claim that the Moon missions were faked
because the radiation was just insurmountable, and when you look
at all the evidence, the argument just completely collapses on itself.
Speaker 1: It's what Professor Brainkeaton calls paradox right, a logical fallacy,
a total paradox.
Speaker 2: The people making the claim have to rely on NASA's
own data, their very detailed radiation maps, their dose measurements
to try and prove that NASA is lying.
Speaker 1: You have to trust their science to call them liars.
Speaker 2: Exactly, you're saying, I believe you're may tsurements of how
dangerous this region is, but I refuse to believe you
were smart enough to use those same measurements to plot
a safe course through it. It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: If they were competent enough to map the danger so
precisely before they even went, why would you assume they
were too incompetent to solve the problem they had just defined.
Speaker 2: The low dose readings from the Apollo missions aren't evidence
of a lie. They're evidence of a stunningly successful engineering
and navigation achievement. They are the proof that the science worked.
Speaker 1: It's just a classic case of cherry picking gata. You
start with your conclusion it was faked, and then you
look for any scary sounding number that seems to support it,
while you ignore all the context and all the solutions.
Speaker 2: And the final irony is that the man himself, James
Van Allen, whose name is on the belts, was a
huge supporter of Apollo. He was the one who provided
the initial maps that let them plan that safe route.
He never ever said it was an insurmountable barrier.
Speaker 1: So the bottom line here is that the Van Allen
Belts are not some magical instant death ray.
Speaker 2: They're a complex, dangerous, but ultimately manageable risk management problem.
Apollo solved it with speed, trajectory and a bit of
luck from the sun, and Artemis is proving that strategy
was sound and building on it with even better technology.
Speaker 1: The fact that those astronauts survived and that we have
the hard data to prove exactly how they did it
is really the greatest testament to the genius of that program.
The challenge was absolutely real, but so was the solution.
Speaker 2: So what does this all really mean for us now?
I think it means the Apollo missions did more than
just plant a flag. They gave us the first real
data set on the deep space radiation environment, and scientists
today are still using and validating that data for our
missions to Mars and for lunar basis.
Speaker 1: The radiation barrier is real, it's formidable, but it's an
engineering problem. It's not a law of physics that says
you shall not pass right.
Speaker 2: And that leads to the final thought here. As we've said,
the Apollo astronauts were lucky with the Sun. Future long
duration missions to Mars can't depend on luck. And the
fact that NASA is now formally debating setting a career
radiation limit that accepts a three percent excess fatal risk,
that shows you just how seriously they take the GCR threat.
Speaker 1: We are consciously as a species deciding on the acceptable
human cost for becoming multiplanetary. That three percent risk is
the price of admission. So we want to leave you
with this question. If you are an astronaut selected for
the first crude mission to Mars, and you knew that
your career radiation limit was set at that level, a
universal standard based on protecting the most susceptible person, but
still representing a three percent increased chance of a fatal
cancer down the line, would you feel protected enough? Would
you take that risk? Is that price too high for
humanity's biggest lead? Let us know what you think.