The Radiation Problem on Mars is Completely Solvable

Aside from the health problems associated with zero-g, which I talked about here and, you know, blowing up on launch or excessive lithobraking into the Martian surface, the big health risk we have to deal with on a mission to Mars is radiation. There are a lot of gloomy headlines about this problem, with this one going so far as to propose genetic engineering as our savior from radiation.

All of this strikes me as a staggering overreaction — which is not surprising, given how most people (especially the government) think about radiation. The radiation problem for a Mars mission is completely solvable, and I’m going to take a two-pronged approach to explaining why — first, explaining in a little more detail what radiation is, and how it works, and then taking a look at the big picture with exposure limits and shielding

The Two Sources of the Problem

We tend to overaggregate the idea of radiation as a strong beam of light that we need an especially heavy set of curtains to block out. But it’s useful to split the risks for space travel into two types of radiation, solar radiation and galactic cosmic radiation (GCR).

Solar Radiation

Solar Radiation is pretty much what you think it is — radiation from the sun.