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Human spaceflight and space stations
Human spaceflight: India's crewed programme and its test flights, space stations, astronauts on foreign missions, and keeping a crew alive in orbit and bringing it home. Prelims has asked about Gaganyaan and other microgravity missions.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2025: Axiom-4, SpaDeX and Gaganyaan as microgravity missions
Showing 1 of 3 subjects, those that changed from 1 to 15 September 2026.Show all
Radiation shielding for a crew
Copy link to Radiation shielding for a crewPrelims and Mains
Away from the shelter of the Earth's magnetic field, a crew takes whatever the Sun sends, and an eruption during a long mission is the case that has to be planned for. Shielding has to stop charged particles without adding weight a rocket cannot lift.
- Weight for weight, hydrogen rich polymers stop protons better than lead, because a hydrogen nucleus is a single proton.
- AstroRad, a vest of such material made by Israel's StemRad, was shown to cut the dose a crew would take in a solar storm.
- It flew uncrewed on Artemis I, a Moon mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
- The modelled dose fell by about 60 per cent for the August 1972 storm and about 40 per cent for October 1989.
- Such shielding holds off the charged particles of a solar storm but not galactic cosmic rays.