Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 16, 2014

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REAL LIFE NEWS: TWINS... IN... SPAAAAAAACE!

by Hazed

When I was a child I read a series of space adventure books by a British author called Hugh Walters, which chronicled the first space missions to various planets in the Solar System. I loved those books and I wish I could read them again now, although I suspect they’d seem impossibly dated. Sadly, they are out of print and only available secondhand at inflated prices.

The reason is bring them up now is because in one of the stories, a pair of red-haired twin telepathic young women were involved in a mission, one of them sent into space and the other remaining on Earth. There was much speculation about whether the poor fragile female body could withstand the rigours of space travel – see what I mean about being dated?

Then I read Robert Heinlein’s book Time For The Stars which also involved twins – many sets of them, all telepathic, with one remaining on Earth so mission control could stay in contact with distant space missions.

Ever since reading this book I’ve been fascinated by the notion of twins being separated so that one can go to space and the other remain groundbound. Now NASA is going to be doing it for real.

Sadly, astronaut Scott Kelly and his brother Mark are not telepathic, but when Scott goes to the ISS for a year in 2015, NASA will be studying both brothers closely to see exactly what changes being in space has on the human body.

The study will look at how spaceflight affects perception, reasoning, decision making and alertness. It’ll also examine how it might change the human digestive system’s gut flora, and how proteins and metabolites in the human body are affected by conditions on the ISS such as microgravity, radiation and close confinement.

Before you feel sorry for poor Mark, left on Earth while his brother Scott has a space adventure, you need to know that Mark is also an astronaut and he’s already travelled to the ISS for four previous missions.

Now, if only they could develop telepathy…

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/07/twins_in_space/

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