In article ,
says...
"JimO" writes:

Any progress on NASA's studying
the Russian proposal for the next ISS
crew to stay up for 12 months?

From what i can hear, there's
a major internal debate over this
idea -- go for it, or be cautious.

I find some of the comments (in your article) by NASA astronauts very
disturbing. They make it sound like they wouldn't consider taking
that long of a mission. If that's the case, perhaps NASA needs to
"clean house" very soon. If we aren't flying astronauts now that are
willing to perform long duration missions, how do we ever expect to
get to Mars?

If there really are medical issues with flights this long, wouldn't it
be prudent to find out about them a.s.a.p.? If this does turn out to
be the case, the solution could be an engineering one. You split your
ship into two parts, separated by a long cable, and spin the thing for
the trip to and from Mars. If it turns out such a solution is
necessary, it would be nice to know about this as far in advance as
possible so prototype designs can be built and tested in LEO.

Yeah -- I half-expected to see a line like "NASA consultant Bob Haller
said, 'We're never going to fly anyone for that long -- it's an
invitation to disaster! Hell, just going into space is too risky. We
should just sit and shove our thumbs up our own asses and let countries
who have no respect for my definition of 'safety' risk THEIR necks
exploring space."

But seriously, there does seem to be a bad rash of chicken-little
thinking going on here. If Chiao doesn't want to be away from his
family for a whole year, **** him -- find one of the astronauts who
doesn't mind and give the flight to him/her. If the doctors are playing
chicken little, find doctors who can judge based on the facts and not
their "gut feelings" on the subject.

Then again, America is becoming a gutless society whose members would
rather sit in locked homes in terror that some bearded monkey might fly
an airliner into their neighborhood than go out and live their lives --
so this decision doesn't surprise me in the least.

Doug