Comment by Sniffnoy
17 hours ago
It's kind of buried in the article, but it's worth noting that this vest is meant only to guard against solar storms, not cosmic rays; those remain a significant problem.
> The vest, though, does nearly nothing against galactic cosmic rays (GCR), which are the other major radiation source astronauts face. Unlike solar storm radiation, GCR arrive continuously at much higher energies, which makes them harder to shield against. “Using the vest against these rays would not be reasonable,” Houri says. “You’d have to wear it at all times.”
See for instance this article on how the cosmic ray problem would affect a Mars mission: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/radiation-tradeoffs-for-ma...
The same protection against solar storms (which does nothing against cosmic rays) WILL also protect against exposure to the Van Allen belts.
Remember the van allen belt radiation is what spawned a lot of fake moon landing theories that suggested transit thru the van allen belts was not survivable with the limited/no protection that our astronauts had at the time.
Well, those confused people mainly ignored the flight profile - Apollo spent a very little time in Earth orbit & boosted for Moon. As a result they flew through Van Allen belts very quickly, so the radio was not an issue.
If for example you built a space ship on low Earth with efficient but low thrust ion drive & wanted to take it to Moon or Mars, it would take it possibly months to slowly (but efficiently) spiral out to higher orbit and eventually towards its destination. Many of those months would be spent inside the Van Allen belts.
So for these mission profiles I have seen the suggestion of the ship being radiation hardened for autonomous flight & the crew arriving by a small fast craft only once it is out of the radiation belts.