Bodies In Motion: Exploring the Human Limits of Future Travel

The limits of travel are defined not by what vehicles can do, but by what vehicles can do to us. So how much can we take?

By Jacob Ward Posted 05.16.2011 at 10:30 am 13 Comments

Jerk: Also known as "jolt" and "lurch," jerk refers to rapid changes in acceleration, as when a driver repeatedly jams on a car's brakes or an air passenger bounces up and down on a turbulent flight. Jerk is one of the most unpleasant and potentially dangerous forces for passengers. The sudden change can spill a cup of coffee or cause whiplash. Ollie Bland

Military and NASA researchers don’t really investigate human comfort, at least not in the way that a commercial traveler might hope. They aren’t attempting to engineer conditions that will convince the traveler to fly a particular airline or buy a particular car. That distinction was highlighted during the Iraq war, when Baghdad International Airport became one of the few places in the world where civilians regularly encountered the discomfort of military efficiency. Rather than the usual long, low approach to the runway, commercial pilots instead had to drop from as high as 35,000 feet in a hard spiral “corkscrew descent,” the better to avoid rockets and small-arms fire. It’s a standard military approach path. But for a civilian, it’s terrifying. “It’s pretty amazing what airplanes can do,” says Tom A. Peter, a freelance reporter who has flown into Baghdad several times. “I’ve never been in a plane crash, but I have to imagine that a corkscrew landing is about as close as you can come without actually wrecking a plane.”

NASA engineer Dustin Gohmert, who designed seat systems for the crew module of the Orion spacecraft, explains the military-civilian distinction in straightforward terms. “Comfort itself is difficult to quantify,” he says. “We look primarily at the safety of the crew.”

Designing for Safety

"The human body is the only system in engineering that you can't take to failure."The standards are very high for NASA vehicles. Because a spacecraft can crash hours or days from help, “we have to make it such that the crew can self-rescue,” Gohmert says. And sometimes that means doing away with conventional amenities. In the Orion capsule plan, for instance, Gohmert’s team dispensed with seat cushions altogether. Cushions may separate the body from the hard seat underneath by just a few millimeters, but in a sudden deceleration, the body can close even that small distance with enough force to cause injury. The Orion seats fit each astronaut fairly closely, and the weight distribution makes for a more or less tolerable experience. But comfort isn’t the goal. The seats keeps the astronauts alive.

Of course, NASA also gets to be picky about who comes on board, a degree of selectivity that further limits what the agency can teach us about our own comfort. The Federal Aviation Administration requires commercial airlines to safely accommodate nearly the entire spectrum of humanity, from a 5th-percentile woman (about 5 feet tall) to a 95th-percentile man (over 6'3"). Not so at NASA. To make sure each astronaut fits the operating environment of the spacecraft, the agency assesses not just height and weight, but every measurement of every extremity. If you don’t fit, you can’t fly. “We do three-dimensional body scans of the astronauts as part of the screening,” Gohmert says. “If your femur is too long, it might disqualify you.” Air Force pilots must also properly fit their plane—legs longer than the engineered standard could break when the pilot ejects in an emergency.

Civilian passengers, no matter how tall or wide, expect gentle treatment. As a result, engineers must set extremely conservative tolerances. Rail system designers, for instance, consider the acceptable limit of linear and lateral acceleration (the force exerted on passengers by starting, stopping, and rocking from side to side) to be no more than 0.15 G—roughly what you’d feel on the moon. That limit allows passengers to dispense with seatbelts and walk around freely inside.

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13 Comments

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Igot1forya

05/16/11 at 2:39 pm

Interesting read, well written too.

Where cabin pressure being lost is concerned. Too bad there was no system in place to link the auto-pilot to a cabin pressure sensor. Perhaps if such a system was in place, it would allow the plane to lower it's altitude to a safer height. I guess in larger planes the oxygen masks drop when this happens. Scarey when you think about how fragile we humans really are.

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jralfonso

05/16/11 at 3:54 pm

Do not worry! After i graduate college, i will be the one to create the next breed of super soldiers. Not tehnology based, but rather biologically. for you see, we humans could withstand harsher conditions if we wanted to. Of course it would not be an option for you to decide since the procedure must begin at a few months old. but it would create super soldiers!

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Navy1270

05/16/11 at 5:52 pm

That's quite a grim story. What happened to the Learjet? Did it keep going until it ran out of fuel? Most likely.

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Ghostwriter

05/16/11 at 9:09 pm

A great article, very well written (as mentioned above), interesting and extremely informative; The illustrations are nothing short of smart too.

My hats off to you. Count on one more loyal reader for the ones to come.

By the way, "what happened to the Learjet?"

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jonny2010

05/17/11 at 1:47 am

I expect at least in space flight to be using gravity in the future. It is the solution to the issues of g-force. An anti-gravity space craft creates it's own gravity field and therefore it's passengers would not be affected by light speed travel. Of course this technology is currently fictional but would also the only way to travel the long distance necessary to reach other solar systems.

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lightairtravel

05/17/11 at 10:03 am

Well unfortunately I might be too young and inexperienced to be the person who could spearhead such a thing. With recent developements on the capability of stealth helicopters such as; the one used in the Osama raid, the new extremely silent rotor blade(article can be found in aviation section), as well as VTOL(vertical takoff and landing) technologies such as the Osprey and is sister more comercial craft that unfortunately I cannot recall the name of right now. It is no longer impractical and disturbing to residents to have heli-copter type air-craft in and around major city centers. What I would propose to connect major metropolises would be Light Air Travel (or LAT for short). What this would consist of is serveral VTOL aircraft, similar to many buses on a bus route, but would run on a time scheduel similar to that of a train. To take passengers into heavily populated city centers. I say I may be too late as the proposed investments in high-speed trains over the next decade is massive to say the least. Where as LAT would require no rails to be built, no vaccum tube around the rails for increased speed, and no high powered electrics involved in a mag-lev train. All that would be necessary is essential a train terminal, where one would drive to from their suburb. then buy a ticket and wait for the next availible air-craft. The costs of even several aircarft and several ternimals would be far less expensive then propsed train designs simple because you don't need to build a track to fly through the air. And with recent advances in helicopter technology they are getting twice as much lift with the same power of traditional helicopter designs. Also unlike a train that must have a clear path from destination to destination, LAT could simple place a terminal in a larger suburb, that would subsequently make ever farther reaches of suburbs to get to a city center thus increasing just about everything from the economic increase from more people but less traffic, and the fact that one could live hours by car outside a city center and still get to work under a hour by taking LAT. This could greatly reduce congestion around city centers as people need to be close in order to have some kind of ability to make it to work, shops, etc. Obviously the two main issues that arise are one: how do you plan on getting passengers on the aircraft in timely yet security oriented fashion, and two what about the dangers of aircraft going down, and unfortunately crashing into a heavily populated area. To answer the first it would involve what i call "air-locking". Hard to explain but essential the air-craft will never actually land during time of operation by floating on a dynamically changing air cushion created in tandum by the aircraft and the ternimal. Passengers would then board similar to aircaft boarding at a airport but with the difference of people exiting the aircraft from one side and loading from the other(front and back as well, meaning load from front-right, exit from back-left). As far as dangers of downing aircraft, depending on the failure there have been quite a few safety features i have thought of, some no different than that of an airliner, some as audacious as a rpg-quick fire kevelar net that would catch and rpg and explode it several meters from the aircraft, so that LAT could even be possible in volatile regions. If anyone knows about a company that is pretty much already doing this i would love to hear about it cause would save me all kinds of time instead of trying to pretty much invent wheel, when we already have cars lol.

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theinsolentfish

05/18/11 at 6:37 pm

The learjet failed to make the westward turn toward Dallas over the north of Florida, and continued flying for almost four hours and 1,500 miles (2,400 km), until it ran out of fuel and crashed into a field near Aberdeen, South Dakota after an uncontrolled descent.

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DickOvens

05/18/11 at 7:52 pm

I was greatly saddened by the loss of one of the USA's finest golfers, who is sadly remembered by most golf fans: Payne Stewart (he wore the NFL team colors with his spiffy knickers and socks or hose). Other wonderful folks too were lost and theinsolentfish has correctly told those who forgot about the ending of that flight in South Dakota. At that time is was questioned by many: should the Air Force shoot the Lear Jet down to avoid a possible crash into a highly populated city?

I too wondered at that time if smaller corporate jets and other prop plains had a simple warning of cabin pressure loss. Time to get into an Oxygen mask is just several seconds when you are above 20,000+ feet for most healthy people before blackout.

Mask yourself first, then your child; those are our instructions on every flight. If the child falls asleep the O/2 will revive them quickly; but if you pass out first trying to put the mask on the child, that does neither of you any good.

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lightairtravel

05/18/11 at 9:03 pm

yeah nvm looked around on the site and realized someone else is doing it, and it was a terrible way to end a great career for Payne Stewart, and very saddening for all others lost as well. But is definitely good to understand why you have to put on your own mask before helping others as I would have always been with most about helping a child first always.

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DickOvens

05/19/11 at 12:05 am

I too wondered at that time if smaller corporate jets and other prop planes had a simple warning of cabin pressure loss. Time to get into an Oxygen mask is just several seconds when you are above 20,000+ feet for most healthy people before blackout.

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xxxxxx68

05/19/11 at 11:57 am

I agree with Igot1forya. I have been thinking about how fragile humans really are despite all the flexing. Roosters can strut too, all the way to the market. We can push and condition ourselves and tap into an unreliable bevy of mysteries but we were designed to be a controllable experiment, easily contained if necessary. We have the least natural armor of all the mammals with the exception of hairless domestic animals. Insects are my least favorite things but they are winning and they shouldn't be. If we stay in space too long we turn into useless blobs. This may seem a bit off track but you can't get around it. If anything, we should definitely make life more comfortable by fixing the ugly genes that really make us weak as a whole mentally and physically. It is worth the risk at this point. We can afford to lose a few diseases and shortcomings. Our weaknesses have become more of a capitalistic venture than anything; parasitic. We are waiting vulnerably to be dominated by the next big thing.

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psciz

05/20/11 at 11:36 pm

@ ightairtravel: An interesting idea, for sure. I don't know in dollars how much difference this makes but I do know that helicopters and VTOL craft do require a LOT more maintenance and inspections than fixed-wing craft. In the end the anticipated cost savings compared to a Maglev rail system might be less than one might think. I wonder how the maintenance costs on currently operational Maglevs would compare?

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HolisticDNA

12/11/11 at 11:49 am

The Sixth Sense - New GROUNDBREAKING Book in 2012! The Sixth Sense leads to Enlightenment
DNA Healing Code - Hardwired in ALL Humans

As an example of what I mean by “Groundbreaking” info that can be found in the 2012 release of my new book on The Sixth Sense (not yet titled )…..
There is a sequence required to communicate with Infinite Intelligence – to gain insight and/or much more complicated yet achievable, HolisticDNA Energy Healing. The sequence required is on multiple simultaneous levels, not just “step by step” like an instruction manual for assembling a piece of furniture.
The “Key” sequence has to do with applying known facts, beliefs, emotions and faith (not religious) – if not applied exactly as detailed, the Sixth Sense will remain dormant, and not be “activated”. As an example:

fact --
fact --
fact --
belief --
fact --
in theory --
belief --
fact --
belief --
Faith --
fact --
fact --
fact --
Faith

you won’t find this in any existing text, which is why The Sixth Sense is so rarely utilized and hard to confirm. This will allow the Scientific Community to experiment and confirm my claims — remember, just a few decades ago, it was impossible to have a Man walk on the moon. Time for the next impossible to be challenged and confirmed — real

Steve Meyer HolisticDNA