"G-forces are simply acceleration induced by the Earth’s gravity"
Tsk.
Last time, I explored how difficult it is for computer hardware to operate in the noisy - from an electromagnetic radiation perspective - environment of outer space. Today’s topic is people. Don’t worry, I won’t be boring you with life support systems. That’s the least of a spacer’s worries. Before you need to worry about …
What has Earth's gravity got to do with it other than giving a name to a unit of acceleration that's biologically relevant ?
A rocket far from any gravity source will still generate a force on it's occupants when the engine is running that can be measured in Gs indeed that's an Einstein thought experiment that's used in GR discussions
The G forces would be mostly canceled except for the lungs.
And if you used fluorinert to fill the lungs (for launch/return) you should be able to go to nearly as high an acceleration as you want.
Might not be that pleasant though.
It isn't the G force that is the problem - it is the difference in support for various densities in the body. Air is really bad at supporting the human body.
Water ? -- proven to work really well for 9 months...
The problem with using liquids for atmosphere is weight, under the Apollo missions they would reduce the air pressure inside the capsule to 5psi, but increase the oxygen content, to save weight.
I am uncertain if they still do the same thing.
I cannot find the mass for fluorinert, but I would guess it's heavier than air for a given temperature and pressure.
I don't think it's that simple. There's an issue with the mass of the body compressing blood vessels and cutting off the flow of blood to various organs (especially the brain inside the skull). There are some mechanisms for counteracting blood pooling in various parts of the body (e.g., legs), such as pressure pants, but I don't know that there is anything that can be done for the brain.
I remember some "science" videos from the 1960s involving rats and fluorinert (or, whatever that Oxygen carrying liquid was). Sheeze, that's been a LONG time ago.
Dave
P.S. Mines the one with the bottle of Oxygen in the pocket.
I got a ride in a NASA centrifuge decades ago. It took me up to a sustained 3G. The effect was weird, but not too unpleasant, at least until I turned my head sideways. Then, I was hit with a violent wave of nausea (No, I didn't toss my cookies, but it took all my self control to prevent from doing it!). The nausea had something to do with the fluid in my inner ears swirling in an unaccustomed manner. And, I'm not sure how that could be counteracted, at least without a rather substantial dose of Dramamine or something like it.
One of the weirdest feelings was trying to lift my arm, which weighed three times the normal
amount.
I suspect I could have handed a considerably higher G, but I wasn't out to set a record that day.
Oh, the couch was reclined back at a rather comfortable angle.
Dave
P.S. Mine's the one with the beer in the pocket. Doesn't beer counteract space-sickness?
When I look at these figures, I realize that the legendary Top Guns are going to be looking for other work very soon. It would be much preferable to being shot down by UAV or worse, an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle, such as an advanced type of Globalhawk.
Not only is it now possible to build aircraft that can fly themselves better than humans can operate them, they can hold up better to the forces encountered during aerial combat for longer. All the UAV/AAV needs to do is to stay in a performance envelope that causes its human opponent to succumb. You cannot do anything useful while you are unconscious, but the ruthless machine goes right on flying--and shooting.
Having now proved the engine technology for Skylon we can all travel to space with no more G force than you'd get on an aeroplane flight.
"To end up on a lunar bound coasting trajectory, Apollo astronauts were subjected to three different levels of acceleration, one for each stage of the Saturn V. " Err, no. In Apollo, Trans Lunar Injection required a fourth burn: the third stage was restarted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-lunar_injection#History