Page 167 - MY STORY

necessary nutritional content. LIke hard-tac used in the

days of long voyages on sailing vessels. Sort of like –
eating yourself out of house and home!

At that time we did not know how much water was
retained as ice at the Martian poles, not had we figured
out how to harvest it for human consumption. We also

tried to consider using our nuclear power capability, on
land, to dissociate the water into hydrogen and oxygen to
satisfy both breathing needs (oxygen) and propulsion fuel

(hydrogen) for the return trip. Lots of things to figure out
quickly.

Low or Zero Gravity
We already had an inkling that muscle tone and bone
quality degraded in zero gravity. There was a pretty

strong consensus that artificial gravity would be a
necessity for the months-long space travel. This was

definitely doable by rotating the crew quarters to maintain
at least some level of gravity, but it sure made the
propulsion system and structure more complex. Our

latest test of this was the one-year flight of Scott Kelly in
the International Space Station. He came back with
somewhat degraded capabilities, but still functional. It’s

not clear if he would have been physically capable of the