Radiation can be taken care of by simple clever design measures, without much extra mass needed. They should have tons of water anyway, for life support redundancy. Even used water which is not cleaned, is as useful for shielding purposes.

No need to cover the entire spaceship with a radiation shield, beyond what Bigelow does.

What’s good with this experiment is that they use heavy ions. I assume that it does mimics cosmic rays in interplanetary space well. Oxygen ions representing O and similarly massive C which are the by far mot common astronomical metals. And titanium to represent heavy ions. Sounds quite right. It is unknown whether one can extrapolate from electron, proton and alpha particle rays up to very high speed heavy ions. But this topic is so very complicated that it is impossible to draw theoretical conclusion by extrapolation. One learns about this by doing and measuring what happens.

A realistic experiment would look like this:

First of all, use animals with large heads, maybe pigs, The thick cranium gives protection, and the inner part of the brain is more protected than the outer parts. On the other hand, hard rays might cause more damages in a large brain because of the secondary radiation spraying through a larger volume. And the experiment should be performed during 26 months literally.

During 6 months (transfer time in open space)
Every day:

8 hours behind half a meter of liquid water shield, since the astronauts will sleep in side the radiation bunker which anyway is necessary to handle Solar eruptions. A cylinder that keeps the mission’s water storage and other shielding supplies.

4 randomly scheduled sessions each 1 hour long inside that same bunker, because some waken work and relax will be done there.

10 hours a day next to the bunker, giving one meter water shield from one side. The bunker should be located in the center of the spaceship and most of the time will be spent next to it where the control rooms, the gym, the dining room are located.

2 hours a day inside shielding similar to that of Bigalow’s modules.

During 14 months (on Mars)
Every day:

All of the time with only half the radiation beam turned on to simulate the coverage of Mars itself.

8+4 hours behind a five meter bunker of liquid water while sleeping and working/relaxing in a bunker.

12 hours behind half a meter of water shield which is the roof of the Mars surface base.

Some of the days, maybe every third, 8 hours with shielding simulating only Mars’ atmosphere and the space suit, to represent excursions.

During 6 months (transfer to Earth)
Repeat the first 6 months.

The space hypochondriacs claim that the crew goes mad from radiation, go on strike and mutiny because “they can’t see Earth”, become cripples because of weightlessness, poisoned by Martian dust and infected by alien life. I’d like to see some evidence for those sci fi doomsday stories which the anti civilization crowd mongers. The true risk is that the blow up on the launch pad or in the atmosphere or are killed by a vacuum leak. Those are the only ways 14 astronauts have died to date. No higher cancer rate has been detected among the 500+ astronauts.

references this paper-
“Mars’ Surface Radiation Environment Measured with the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity Rover”
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/12/05/science.1244797.abstract
(which unfortunately, is behind a pay-wall.)

@Edwards I love the space cycle idea (thank you Dr. Aldrin!) But that’s probably not how it will begin, it requires a big upfront investment which is (financially) risky to make before having gone to Mars to figure out how it should be done in detail. The cycler could be reused for 100 years and be steadily upgraded. With Solar electric propulsion, new kinds of cycler orbits are possible. Quite some course correction is possible even for a heavy spaceship when SEP tugs for 26 months. The transfer vehicle to and from the cycler could be as small as Orion.

For safety, a fuel tank with an engine (and maybe some life support resources like air and water) could follow the habitable large cycler a few days behind. If a crewed (Orion type with a couple of weeks of life support) launch fails to reach the cycler, the tanker could pick them up and bring them either to the cycler or back to Earth. It would only be used and replaced once it is needed. It could maybe be refueled at Mars or Earth and be reused, although it shouldn’t happen often enough to make that economical.

The cycler concept does not require launchers (much) heavier than Saturn V. A high delta-v launch is required, but something substantially less than an ITS rocket is sufficient. The problem is to launch something like that from Mars. Maybe the crew would have to launch buckled up in a small crowded Soyuz like spacecraft and less than a day later dock with an “upper stage” in Mars orbit before going for the cycler.

The guy who came up with this drug idea was wondering why stomach acid didn’t cause stomach cancers far more than it does.
This chemical seems to correct DNA damage.

It does not reduce or remove existing tumors but does stop them from forming due to hard radiation.

It was originally named EX-RAD as an homage to the game Wastelands drug RAD X.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2749/1

Yes, I know it’s Zubrin who is biased on the subject, but there is one source I believe address some of the issues that Zubrin has.

The study assumes the LNT model (linear no threshold) which assumes that radiation poisoning is cumulative and assumes 30 cG of radiation over a course of minutes is no different from 30 cG over the duration of 2 1/2 years. Studies call this into doubt.

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/2/443.full.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB22cREdBqw

“why is the exposure level significantly higher than for those in orbit?,,, and do you think this could be a shill for NASA making an excuse why we won’t try to go there sooner rather than later?…..”

The heavy ions have been a growing concern of the Health Physics community for at least 2 decades. They are a decided minority of GCR activity, and detectors that would sort them out are somewhat specialized because their higher mass means greater momentum and larger curved tracks in detectors, and thus more expensive detectors. Also, more expense for the greater mass sent into orbit. Still, they have enormous mass compared to the singleton protons making up most GCR, and their break up into secondary radiation is extremely unhealthy on a per ion basis.

Getting some data, finally, is a good thing for our team’s concepts of using the lava tube caves on the Moon and Mars as shelter for settlers. 50 meters of basalt deals with any radiation this side of neutrinos just fine. As I said above though, a hundred kilometer diameter magnetic field should bend them away from passenger ships with good drops in REM numbers without consuming too much power for the plasma magnets.

Maybe, and it wouldn’t hurt, but even with them, there will be in orbit assembly.

There is also a body of research regarding chemical agents & drugs that provide some measure of protection, to some types/doses of radiation, in some situations. But that’s in no way ready-for-primetime.

(It is sorta “interesting” the number of “Space Is Dangerous” articles of late. I’m old enough to remember that Space-Was-Always-Dangerous.)

I still maintain we should take control of the Moon, first.

A cycler can be large, heavy, and have all the shielding/magnetic field that it needs, because it is not accelerated or decelerated at each end, only the dinghy is accelerated. It could also have a spinning section to provide artificial gravity.

Repairs and maintenance would have to be done (literally) on the fly, but by the time we are that space savvy, that should not be a big problem.

Another is to cut dosages using an extension of the safer squadrons that Musk spoke of for going to Mars, instead of singleton missions NASA speaks about. Basically, using mixed squadrons of cargo and passenger vessels, the squadron formation can be arranged so that the cargo ships are on the outside of the formation and the passenger ships are on the inside of the formation. Then, you can use plasma magnets transmitting 10s of kilometers from one cargo ship to another around the exterior of the formation to generate magnetic fields hundreds of kilometers in diameter, and make those strong enough to bend these heavy charged particles away from the hulls of the passenger ships.

While there *are* more massive ways to do the job, why do it the hard and expensive way?

..and what we’ve known for quite some time:
“Behavioral and Neurophysiological Changes with Exposure to Ionizing Radiation”
https://ke.army.mil/bordeninstitute/published_volumes/nuclearwarfare/chapter7/chapter7.pdf