Astronauts and scientists explain why living in space is almost impossible

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Billionaires make it seem that we have all the tech we need to settle on the moon and Mars.
But the hard part of living in space is adapting the human body to extraterrestrial conditions.
Business Insider talked to astronauts and engineers about the complexities of space habitation.
Pop stars are floating in zero-G while billionaires speak of building cities in space and on Mars. This is the wild reality we live in that's supposed to help pave the way for long-term space exploration and habitation.
The hardest part of living in space, however, isn't rockets and robots — it's the squishy human body. Until we can fix that or find a feasible workaround, life beyond Earth remains impossible.
To understand just how much of a long shot life in space is, Business Insider spoke with astronauts, scientists, and medical professionals, and one guy who paid $30 million to join Russia's space program. Here's what they said.
Only 757 people have made it to space — and even fewer have stayed for very long.
One of the biggest problems of living in space or on another world is the unknown. We simply aren't certain of what it will do to the human body because no one has lived in space for longer than 14 months at a time, and only 757 people have ever entered space.
What we do know, so far, is that it's not the healthiest way to live.
Common side effects of long-duration stays in microgravity include muscle and bone loss, decreased blood pressure, and blurred vision. While most of these return to normal once an astronaut is back on Earth, some effects of space radiation — like an increased risk of cancer, cataracts, and damage to the central nervous system — can be permanent.
In all probability, the longer a person remains in space, the worse their health becomes. Even brief trips to other worlds like a return trip to Mars, would take two to three years, and "we just don't have a large enough data sample to understand how that would impact human biology," NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who spent a US record of 371 consecutive days on the International Space Station, told BI.
He said it took him six months to return to normal after experiencing "puffy head bird legs" syndrome — astronaut slang to describe how the face puffs up and the legs grow thin as your bodily fluids react to microgravity in space.
Another issue is location: There are only three feasible destinations — and all of them suck.
Low Earth orbit, or "LEO," is convenient, but it's getting crowded with over 9,000 metric tons of space junk, which raises the risk of a devastating collision that could kill everyone on board an orbital craft.
The moon is close but has no breathable air, hardly any atmosphere to protect against deadly space radiation, and nights there can last up to two Earth weeks.
Mars has a thicker atmosphere than the moon, but it also lacks breathable air and has toxic dirt and harmful dust storms.
"The single thing that differentiates the Earth from every other place in the solar system is that there is free oxygen in the atmosphere," said Mike Shara, astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History.
"So we can go take a nice breath, and if you were to do that on essentially any other planet, you would die, almost instantly," he said.
There may be other planets outside our solar system more similar to Earth, but they're just too far away for current technology.
"We're talking decades or at least a decade to get to the outer solar system. And 1,000, 2,000, or 10,000 years to get to the nearest star. Not practical," Shara told BI.
Therefore, to survive anywhere beyond Earth, we need to build protective structures to live inside, which comes with its own challenges.
Many companies worldwide are exploring how to build livable complexes in space, and on the moon and Mars. Blue Origin and NASA, for example, want to 3D print structures and extract oxygen from lunar soil on the moon.
Meanwhile, SpaceX plans to transform Martian air into methane fuel to power colonies and rockets for return journeys to Earth. Space engineers call this ISRU: in-situ resource utilization.
However, no one has proven ISRU works at scale in real life.
"These are not unsolvable problems. The reason they haven't been solved yet is because it hasn't been tried," said Miguel Gurrea, a graduate student who published a paper in 2022 for the Mars Society outlining the weak points of SpaceX's proposed mission to Mars.
Some space visionaries, including Jeff Bezos, say building on another, pre-existing world isn't the best idea. We should just build our own.
Some space enthusiasts, including Jeff Bezos, believe the best option isn't the moon or Mars, but a massive rotating habitat built in free space — an idea fleshed out in the '70s by particle physicist Gerard K. O'Neill.
Such a structure could generate artificial gravity through centrifugal force, but it would be the most ambitious — and expensive — construction project in human history, possibly taking centuries to realize.
"Dr. O'Neill's idea was maybe the moon people will do their thing, and the Mars people will do their thing. But if you want to be able to freely go back and forth to the Earth, you need to be able to grow up in a simulated gravity field," said Rick Tumlinson, space activist and former student of O'Neill.
Regardless of location, there's the serious problem that once you leave Earth's shield, space becomes a human flesh barbecue.
Astronauts on board the International Space Station absorb about 100x more radiation than people on Earth.
Moreover, a person on a 3.5-year round trip to Mars would be exposed to the equivalent of about 16,500 chest X-rays — enough to cause cancer and other long-term health problems.
And if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, a single solar flare could kill your entire crew within hours.
Astronauts should prepare to burrow underground and stay there to avoid deadly radiation on the surface of the moon or Mars.
The ground provides a natural barrier against radiation. Hence why many fallout shelters are underground.
Similarly, astronauts on the moon or Mars should prepare to live underground like "moles or earthworms" to avoid radiation damage, said Dr. James Logan, a former NASA medical officer.
Meanwhile, our spacecraft to get between worlds may need to look more like meatballs.
Logan says protecting astronauts from radiation might mean ditching long, slim ship designs.
Instead? Dense, spherical craft that surround the crew with as much mass as possible.
For example, some proposals place the crew's living quarters in the center of a sphere of liquid water that would absorb much of the space radiation, thus protecting the crew within.
Then, there's the matter of food.
Even if we could build our own structures to safely live off-world, growing food to survive is another challenge entirely.
Astronauts grow plants on the ISS under LED lights, but it's not enough to survive on and they rely on food they bring with them from Earth, a luxury that would likely be impossible on Mars.
While the moon and Mars have soil, it's nothing like Earth's. Martian soil, for example, contains many toxic compounds. So, you can't simply grow red planet potatoes like Matt Damon.
You'd have to process the soil first, likely by flushing it with precious water to wash out the toxic compounds, using energy to bake it at high temperatures, or harnessing engineered bacteria to break the toxins down — all before planting a single seed.
There's also no 911 in space.
In space, blood doesn't run; it pools in floating blobs.
You can't use aerosol anesthetics because in microgravity, leaked gases don't rise or settle — they just linger and spread throughout the cabin. So even a small leak could circulate through the air supply and accidentally sedate or impair the entire crew.
Even anesthesia delivered via spinal injection may not flow right without gravity.
And on Mars, an emergency signal could take 20 minutes to reach mission control on Earth.
That makes surgery in space risky and deeply under-researched.
"Most of that research is happening on parabolic flights on pigs," said Kelly Weinersmith, co-author of "A City On Mars," referring to planes that dive bomb to simulate zero-G. "So the answer to when we'll understand this problem better is — when pigs fly."
We once built a closed ecosystem on Earth — and it nearly fell apart.
In the early 90s, Biosphere 2 tested whether humans could live in a self-contained bubble.
Built in the middle of the Arizona desert, it had sun, gravity, backup air — and it still went haywire.
Fast-growing microbes in the soil unexpectedly caused oxygen levels to dip and carbon dioxide levels to rise.
Crops failed, and the crew split into factions. They made it the full two years inside the sealed ecosystem, but barely.
And that was only eight people. Imagine thousands or millions of settlers on Mars.
To be fair, NASA has run many self-contained experiments since the 90s — including its HI-SEAS and CHAPEA Mars simulation missions — that did not have the same issues as Biosphere 2.
Nobody's had sex in space… we think.
Despite a few rodent experiments aboard the ISS, there's never been a successful mammal pregnancy in orbit. And no humans have "done the deed" up there yet, at least not officially.
Moreover, trying to start a family off-planet could be unethical because we're unsure how space radiation would affect a growing fetus.
It would be as unethical as if people had tried (they didn't) experimenting with human pregnancy in Chernobyl after the nuclear meltdown "just to see what happens," said Zach Weinersmith, co-author of "A City On Mars."
Meanwhile, celebrities are already floating in space, albeit very temporarily, for fun.
Katy Perry, Star Trek actor William Shatner, and other ultra-wealthy passengers are already taking joyrides to space.
Entrepreneur Nik Halik took a similar ride to suborbital space and spent $30 million of his own money to join Russia's space program.
"I would gladly walk away, leave Earth, leave everything, and yeah, just be a colonist," said Halik, adding that his life goal is to walk on the moon or Mars.
However, riding in a capsule for about 10 minutes, or becoming a backup cosmonaut, isn't the same as building a new civilization. For that, we need a lot more than flower selfies.
This story was adapted from Business Insider's video series "The Limit." Watch the full video to see what it might really take to live in space.
Read the original article on Business Insider