[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

Hi, all... as I may have mentioned earlier, I had a knee surgery scheduled for today. Just a relatively simple arthroscopy to remove and trim back a couple of very badly torn meniscii that were causing a *lot* of pain.

All went well, I'm back home and parked in front of my computer for the next three or four days.

I'm also under the influence of some pretty powerful pain meds -- oxycodone, to be specific -- and while I feel completely rational and all, and while I'm sure my posts will make as much sense as they ever did, I just wanted to give a very brief explanation in advance, just in case...

-the other Doug

[jamescanvin]

You could also design and test a centrifugal artificial-gravity module within ISS operations, and I don't see anyone even mentioning the concept. Seems to me it would be cheaper and easier to check out how well such things work at the ISS than it would be to just design one and fly it, untested, as part of the first major manned interplanetary expedition.

Not to mention that we have no idea how much gravity is really needed to eliminate the medical problems of microgravity. This is impossible to test on Earth but could be tested on animals in quite a small artificial-gravity module.

Yeah, it's a real shame the CAM isn't going to fly. There could have been some really interesting experements done with that (for once)

James