Challenges faced by astronauts

Volunteers are trying to live like astronauts on Earth in preparation for manned missions to Mars, but face isolation, confinement and terrible food.

After almost a year without fresh air in the cramped, near-weightless environment of the International Space Station (ISS), American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko seemed remarkably healthy when they touched down back on Earth last spring. They had just completed a 340-day mission onboard in orbit, one of the longest space trips in recent years.

They rank among the more than 200 people who have had the fortune to visit the ISS, and hundreds more who have travelled to space. That’s not a lot in the scheme of things, but plenty of people all over the world are investing billions in the future of space travel in the hope that many more of us may one day follow in their footsteps.

Yet, it is not always necessary to travel into space to experience what it is like living as astronauts do. It may come as a surprise to discover on Earth, dozens of people all over the world have spent months, and even over a year, living in specially built confined spaces that mimic life in space. These simulation pods are found in places like China, Hawaii and Russia, giving researchers the ability to study the effects of long-term isolation and confinement on people in preparation for long-haul space travel.

 

Inside the 'lightning lab'

On average, every single airliner is hit by lightning once a year. How do designers make them safe from a bolt from the blue?

Airplanes have moved on more than a little since the first aviators soared into the sky, clad in leather jackets, caps and goggles. Back then, they needed quite an element of faith before taking to their flying machines. One hundred years on, they board highly complex machines often made from unusual materials such as carbon fibre and flying partly thanks to computers. The days of flying on “a wing and a prayer” are over.

Nowadays, aircraft testing is incredibly elaborate and rigorous. New planes only make it into the air after a long list of tests – from chucking chickens into jet engines to simulate bird strikes to bending the wings to extreme angles.

In the last 10 years, the testing methods have undergone major changes– both on the ground and in computer simulations. The aim, in both cases, is to minimise the number of hours testing planes in flight.

Accidents of the past – such as the crash of an airliner at Dallas Fort-Worth in 1985 during a thunderstorm, or the electrical fault which brought down a TWA flight near New York in 1996 – spurred aircraft designers to bring in more and more safety features into new aircraft at the design stage, long before they started carrying paying passengers.

 

Bending wings

Many of us have experienced a bumpy ride on a plane, but the routine – albeit always scary –of sudden drops or wobbling wings is nothing compared to what an aircraft is subjected to when undergoing tests. Many modern passenger jets can flex their wings nearly 90 degrees in a test rig.

To see how the wings and fuselage would behave under both normal and exceptional loads during their life, manufacturers perform so-called “static tests.”

Airbus, for example, performed the ultimate load test on a specially built static airframe of its A350 XWB Airbus in December 2013. The plane’s wings received loads of up to 1.5 times higher than they would ever encounter in service. And at ultimate load, the plane’s wingtip deflection exceeded five metres – that means the load bent the wing up almost 90 degrees.

The final test involves getting the aircraft wings to snap – this helps find out their breaking point, and ensures it is well beyond the predicted load level.