Radiation-blocking vest tested on Moon mission proves effective
We've flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked
A radiation-shielding vest called AstroRad, developed by StemRad and Lockheed Martin, flew to the Moon and back on Artemis I and has been shown to reduce radiation exposure by up to 60% during a simulated solar storm. The vest, made of flexible HDPE rods, protects critical organs and bone marrow, offering a lightweight alternative to heavy spacecraft shielding.
We’re actually able to reduce the effective dose by 60 percent without protecting the head, the arms, or even the legs.
- Sniffnoy
It's kind of buried in the article, but it's worth noting that this vest is meant only to guard against solar storms, not cosmic rays; those remain a significant problem.
> The vest, though, does nearly nothing against galactic cosmic rays (GCR), which are the other major radiation source astronauts face. Unlike solar storm radiation, GCR arrive continuously at much higher energies, which makes them harder to shield against. “Using the vest against these rays would not be reasonable,” Houri says. “You’d have to wear it at all times.”
See for instance this article on how the cosmic ray problem would affect a Mars mission: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/radiation-tradeoffs-for-ma...
- anishvarghese
This targeted shielding is a classic aerospace mass tradeoff much like armoring a fighter pilot instead of the entire plane.
- saltcured
I remember reading, long ago, an assertion that most shielding ideas were counterproductive for astronauts.
It was stated that most shielding would turn high energy photons into much more harmful showers of particles, worse than the original photon going directly through tissue. Was this an untested myth?
HDPE has been around since the beginning of the space race, so it seems like someone ought to have considered this before? Has the understanding of particle interactions improved a lot since then, such that HDPE shielding would not have been considered before?
- ericd
This seems sort of interesting as a sort of emergency backup, but it seems like the real solution for any sort of long distance/long duration in space is just making mass to orbit dramatically cheaper and shielding the spacecraft.
- stevenwoo
Thought it might be useful for the untapped market for air crews on passenger airlines but the company said it does not block cosmic gamma rays.