I’ve been fascinated by the discourse on the all female space mission (the one with Katy Perry). Those speaking in defense of their flight (like Emily thespacegal on instagram) tend to point out the legitimate scientists on board brought “research” with them to conduct while in zero gravity. Space tourism ethical debates aside, my question is this:
Practically speaking, how is any usable data collected in the 11 minutes they were in ‘space’? Are they really performing rigorous work contributing to the advancement of their projects while the tourists are filming themselves upside down behind them?
Comments
Some experiments can only takes a few moments, some take milliseconds, some even less.
In the Large Hadron Collider, the experiments there last for I believe nanoseconds and in nanoseconds, we unlock mysteries of our universe. It all depends upon the defined parameters for your experiment for how long the experiment can take.
The pitch experiment where, now, a camera is watching pitch flow has been going on for over a century I think.
Before you do any experiment, you define the parameters of it. If your experiment involves the effects of something 11 minutes in space. To make it a viable experiment, you need controls. Controls are things that are the same in all aspects of the experiment so you can only change 1 thing and see what changing that 1 thing does. That is science. So, what they do is do the same experiment on Earth the same exact way they are going to do it in space and make is lastr 11 minutes on Earth since it will only be 11 minutes in space. The only difference is, the experiment is in space, not on Earth. Everything else is controlled. In an experiments, these are your control variable, the things you do not change. Then you have your experimental variable, the 1 and only 1 thing you change. How else can you determine what happens when you change something if you change more than 1 thing at a time? You cant, so you change 1 thing only. For this, the thing that was changed was location. Earth vs Space an now what happens when you do this in space in 0 G vs on Earth in 1 G.
[removed]
As others have said, the amount and quality of research done by this crew during this very short flight, is limited. And for those conducting the research, the ladies, this was very educational and is clearly something that few people get to do in their life. I think that we are overlooking the real reason that it happened, however, just like with Shatner, this is a PR stunt to improve the image of Blue Origin and Bezos. Probably to promote his space tourism plans or just to generate some positive press for him and his companies. The amount of airtime and discussion on talk tv and news outlets is worth more than the cost of the flight.
There is no need to try and justify the flight by saying that real research was performed, let it be what it was, a joy ride for the rich and famous.
Yes, you can ABSOLUTELY get usable data from a short period of time like that. I know because I did. In college, I was part of an engineering team that built a prototype for a module that would end up going onto the Space Shuttle. We were building it for Walter Reed, and at the end of the year we tested our prototype on the “Vomit Comet” which simulates zero/micro gravity by doing parabolas of -1g dives and 3g pullouts. The -1g dives create “zero gravity” on the inside of the plane and we were able to test the stresses and performance of our device(s) under those conditions even though each parabola lasted less than 30 seconds each.
This testing is necessary because there’s a ton of things you just “take for granted” when it comes to gravity, and it’s really easy to design something that doesn’t work because you simply didn’t take a lack of gravity into account with some aspect of the device. So for us, we ran the device and checked all of the functionality at 0g, and 4g and hoped that things didn’t break (they didn’t. We were very proud).
Addendum: Here’s a link to info on the final module that went up for testing almost 20 years after our prototype proved out the process: https://www.nasa.gov/general/space-tissue-loss-sts-131/
Drop towers are used to study the effects of micro-gravity on all kinds of things and only in the space of a few seconds.
11 minutes is a long time in this domain.
Simple. They put something on the craft and check if their hypothesis about its properties holds when it comes back down.