Cosmic Radiation

On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 01:30 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

> The fallacy as I see it, is that your model presupposes that the
> Earth has has to block the radiation equivalent of what the
> atmosphere does. It doesn't.

Consider just cosmic radiation. It comes from all directions. When we
are on the Earth, the Earth's mass blocks all of the radiation coming
from below us, the atmosphere attenuates the radiation coming from
above. On a space colony, the shielding attenuates radiation coming
from all directions. To reduce radiation to the level experience on
Earth you need more shielding than the Earth's atmosphere provides.
The 2x number assumes everything is linear, which it probably isn't.
There was one post correcting this to first order.

Space tourism could be our ticket to the stars. Save your pennies,
suborbital flights for $100,000 may start in 2005! See
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Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

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