It's all so frustrating that it literally wakes me up at night. I know that it's stupid, but it keeps happening.

MARIE was the First And Only post-Apollo experiment specifically designed to gather data in advance of Humans travelling past LEO. And yet, this important experiment has just fallen off the NASA and NRC maps. Like it never happened.

Radiation in Space is unquestionably the Big Meanie, it's used as an instant end-point any time anyone starts getting too excited about Humans having jobs above the atmosphere. Yet, for it being so incredibly important it is stunning that so very little has been done over the decades.

Earlier this year, NASA made a cattle call for partners to develop active mitigation systems, admitting that the past few decades of their own work on passives and their own lack of research effort dedicated to the matter have added up to a lump of coal... if Radiation is the biggest issue, why has the tax money and effort been so far away from this issue for so long?

"Current conventional radiation protection strategy based on materials shielding alone, referred to as passive radiation shielding, is maturing (has been worked on for about three decades) and any progress using the materials radiation shielding would only be evolutionary (incremental) at best. The overall situation is further augmented by the nonexistence of in vivo or in vitro data or studies about continuous long duration tissues exposure to a radiation and concomitant biological uncertainties." - NASA 2011

If you hit that link you'll see an example of the big urgency NASA puts on this issue, they bring up a 'Recent Journal' where their paper and painting active system research was trashed... "Recently" for NASA means Adv. Space Res. 42 which was published in 2008, and well-known to NASA probably in early 2007.

To try to get this monkey off my back, I've spent months reading all that I could about the matter to try to track the timeline and see if I could spot hints at work being done but not rising to the surface, and in a little Pre-Space-Bureaucracy pamphlet a short passage kicked me in the forehead, not because of the radiation but because of how we Humans have allowed ourselves to be misguided away from Big Goal...

The book had been put in my mailbox just the other day, I almost tossed the thin envelope thinking it was junk mail, but instead it was an original 58 page 1965 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Division of Technical Information book titled "Space Radiation."  It was written by William R. Corliss, former Director of Advanced Programs for the Martin Company's Nuclear Division.  This book wasn't written to impress you with his genious (although Corliss could have done so), the target was regular people and he respected that trust.  It explains very clearly the almost comically accidental history of the research of Space Weather from Auroras to Solar particles to Cosmic Rays and all the odd objects in between. 

Can a 1965 AEC PR booklet be useful in this day and age?  Funny thing is that I've got more than a few books that tell exactly the same stories and detail exactly the same atomic particle lifecycles but do so in hundreds of pages and yet never seem to give any more fundamental information than this little old handbook gives.

That may make it seem like this is just a booklet of terse bullet points but that ain't true, it reads well.  Fact is, there is nothing new under the sun, or more correctly, there haven't actually been all that many major drastic advances to the fundamentals that we'd had covered while Geminis were being tested.

In fact, somewhere along the way from there to now when we should have gained a lot of practical mitigation techniques, we instead lost something... like the data from MARIE... it was a bit of ourselves, I think.

Read this, it's the last paragraph of the booklet's introduction:

"Man was long oblivious to space radiation because of its invisibility.  Cosmic rays, the Van Allen Belts, and the solar plasma were all great surprises when they were disclosed to a world long sheltered from interplanetary weather by our thick atmosphere.  Now, however, the scents of each of these three quarries lure us along trails as intellectually fascinating and physically adventurous as any Antarctic expedition or voyage into the sea's depths." 

Did you catch it?  If not read it again.  It's the attitude.  When was the last time you read a recent book about anything at all coming up in the near future that talked about a possibility of danger being something to be excited about, something to be proud to go out and face?  I read a lot.  People just don't write that way now, because they just don't think that way now.  Now, the possibility of stubbing a toe is enough to make most scientists run for home, happily looking through the filters of robot eyes.  We've replaced the murkiness of the atmosphere with the limited field lifelessness of photographs. 

You've been places that you'd seen loads of times before in photographs, right?  Honestly, when you were actually there seeing it with your own eyes wasn't it striking how the photos, no matter how high their resolution, never ever conveyed the full picture? 

At a meeting the other week, a twenty-something who just got hired at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo chided me for ruffling the feathers of some NASA folks.  She looked me straight in the eye and said that I should relax... because "we will get to space someday, maybe not in my lifetime, but someday"  That is a direct quote, from a twenty year old.  That is the type of person that the Space Industry is happy to hire.  That is your extreme, hip, cool, on the edge of it all generation.   Not quite the same as the commercials make them out to be.  Times have changed, they always do, but what is worriesome about the post-Apollo half century is that we have changed and we have stopped feeling that We Can And Should Go Out To Meet The Mysteries Ourselves at any cost, and that is not a change at all for the better.

With that attitude, there is no drive to get Humans to Space.  Perhaps that is the work that's been going on for the past 35 years, an effort to make it become acceptable and seeming to be worth endless hours of busywork,
"science just for science sake" and loads of tax money to not get living People anywhere anytime soon.

If you can find a copy of the Corliss Space Radiation AEC pamplet, pay the price and read it, it's amazing how just going back to before the Industry was all grown up and fat can strip away the distractions and give you the simple core knowledge.  Plus maybe its attitude will strike you as it did me and get you off yer own crotchitiness back to feeling that Humans still have in them the drive to get Big things done in their lifetimes ... if only we can find some way to remind them that that is the correct way to take on the gift of a lifetime.