Paul A. Czysz, a 30-year veteran of the industry, continuing consultant to the U.S. military and professor emeritus of aerospace engineering at St. Louis University, thinks NASA can curb the travel time to the outer planets from nearly a decade to a matter of weeks - something he considers critical for the human exploration of the solar system. What's required, he said, is a renewed commitment to nuclear propulsion.

Czysz, who with Claudio Bruno has just published the book, "Future Spacecraft Propulsion Systems" (Springer-Verlag Telos) explored this possibility recently in an interview with SpaceDaily.com.

SpaceDaily: What's wrong with existing propulsion concepts to take astronauts to Mars and beyond?

Paul Czysz: You have to look at the Russian data on microgravity (compiled over the years by long-term missions aboard the Mir space station). Anything after two years and there's an extremely significant re-adaptation of the human physiology to a zero-gravity world. It's not just that the calcium goes out of your bones. The Russian data show that the human body very quickly wants to get rid of processes that cost it energy to maintain all of this bone strength when there's no load on the bones and the heart doesn't have to pump against gravity. The one guy who stayed up well over a year was so badly deteriorated that after the Russians tried to get some of his processes to restart, they realized they had to put him back up into space for the rest of his life - but then about a week before he was going to go up, his body finally responded, but his health has never fully recovered.


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