The Private Space Race

Technology and so much else has changed over the last 40+ years since Neil Armstrong’s first footprints in the lunar dust that there’s now a good chance a NASA astronaut won’t be the first to walk out onto the next new world. The competition isn’t from some other country but from the robust private spaceflight industry — and possibly even redirect humanity’s future. It is certainly becoming the century where corporations are rapidly becoming more important than nations. The space race used to be between Russia and America, today it’s between Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk already announcing he is going to put humans on Mars by 2023.

However, how is the human body going to behave for such a long time away from Earth. It will take 7-8 months to get to Mars. Astronauts will then spend 3-4 months there before flying back home. The Mission will take two years to complete.

Recently astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year in space aboard the International Space Station while twin brother and former astronaut Mark Kelly stayed on Earth. Meanwhile, scientists studied both men for hints of how extended time in space might affect the human body.

The researchers have started to go through all the data they collected to discover something very interesting. Scott Kelly's telomeres, grew to be longer than his brother's during his time in orbit.

Telomeres are the caps that protect the tips of chromosomes when cells divide, which they do continuously throughout life. But with each cell division, wear-and-tear occurs and telomeres get shorter and shorter. At the simplest level, the structures at the end of chromosomes—telomeres—are analogous to the glued tips of shoelaces that prevent the laces from fraying and unraveling. Shortened telomeres are associated with premature aging and are found in many chronic diseases, especially in cardiovascular disease and cancer.

What's interesting about this is that telomeres are associated with aging and longer telomeres are associated with longevity. Stress is one of the things that can shorten telomeres over time, something many airline pilots are subject too, flying today’s grueling flight rosters. To everyone’s surprise, the stress of long-term space travel did not seem to negatively affect Scott Kelly's telomeres.

"That is exactly the opposite of what we thought," Susan Bailey, a radiation biologist at Colorado State University working with NASA to study the effect of space on telomeres, told Nature.

NASA reckons, Scott Kelly's space-stretched telomeres could be related to the increased exercise regimen and diet while aboard the space station, designed to keep astronauts healthy. They don’t have McDonald’s and KFC on the Space Station. After Kelly’s return to Earth, his telomeres began to shorten again.

Could living in space or in microgravity could be the key to living longer? After all, space seems weird, foreign and stressful, but in reality, it literally takes all the stress of living with gravity off your back.

At this point, a data set of just one human twin isn't nearly enough to be able to draw any conclusions about the impact of space travel on telomeres and aging. But it is an interesting and counter-intuitive data point that will inspire further research.

If space really does have a positive effect on telomeres, that's potentially good news for future missions to Mars and beyond.

What About Traveling to Another Star System?

Could we travel to the nearest earth-like planet, Proxima B? Photonic propulsion, which involves pushing a small space probe with a laser beam, is perhaps our best bet to reach the Proxima Centauri system quickly. Russian Billionaire Yuri Milner reckons it is financially and technologically doable and has invested $100 million in research and development as part of the Breakthrough Starshot project, with the likes of Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerburg serving as board members.

With photonic propulsion, you don't have to take your reactor with you. You can basically have a giant power source on Earth and beam the lasers. If you don't have to take your source of fuel with you, your craft is a lot lighter. In this case, if you just had a lot of nanoprobes, it wouldn't take a lot of energy to accelerate them.

In the frictionless vacuum of space, a constant stream of photons from a laser beam could propel a small craft to relativistic speeds in the range of 20 percent of the speed of light, or more than 100 million mph. At those speeds, it would only take 25 to 30 years to get to Proxima B.

I am not sure it is safe to fly through space at these speeds, it would just take a minuscule debris of some sort to destroy the spaceship in a matter of seconds.

There are definitely two challenges to space travel: the technology and the human factor. The quicker (not faster) we get there the less risk the human factor becomes, or at least until we encounter another race…

 Private, commercial spaceflight. Even lunar exploration, mining, and colonization – it’s suddenly all on the table, making the race for space today more vital than it has felt in years. Who knows where this will all take us? To boldly go where no man has been before…

Fabrizio Poli is Managing Partner of Aircraft Trading Company Tyrus Wings. He is also an accomplished Airline Transport Pilot having flown both private Jets and for the airlines. Fabrizio is also a bestselling author and inspirational speaker & has been featured on Russia Today (RT), Social Media Examiner, Bloomberg, Channel 5, Chicago Tribune, Daily Telegraph, City Wealth Magazine, Billionaire.com, Wealth X, Financial Times, El Financiero and many other Media offering insight on the aviation world. Fabrizio is also regularly featured as an Aviation Analyst on Russia Today (RT). Fabrizio is also aviation special correspondent for luxury magazine, Most Fabullous Magazine. Fabrizio is also considered one of the world's top 30 experts in using Linkedin for business. You can tune in weekly to Fabrizio's business Podcast Living Outside the Cube available both in video & audio. You can also follow Fabrizio's aviation videos on Tyrus Wings TV. Fabrizio's latest book "Health4Flyers", the first natural-health book for pilots, flights attendants and frequent flyers is now available worldwide.

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