As bizarre as it seems in retrospect, NASA officials have managed to ignore one of the biggest challenges in human space exploration in decades. In 1975, as part of the required work for a post-graduate course in bioengineering, I did a literature survey on human adaptation to artificial gravity and to rotating environments. Most of the work had been done in Russia. In 1976 and 1977, my research paper was expanded to discuss the effects of rotation on people living in O’Neill space colonies. Gerard K. O'Neill and I wrote and published a paper on that work in 1977.
A few years ago, I was somewhat eager to look into what progress had been made on “artificial gravity” in the intervening 38 years. The results astounded and appalled me. Little progress had been made and some of the research facilities had been shut down. Very little meaningful additional work had been done on the use of artificial gravity or the effects of rotating environments!
Considerable work has been done on microgravity’s negative effects on different systems of the human body. Astronauts and cosmonauts largely recover from these effects after a few weeks or months back in surface gravity with the exception of vision problems. Some have required glasses to correct their vision anomalies.
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