Quote:
Originally Posted by Monotony
You can't cross the Van Allen radiation belt in a ship made of aluminum. Not with alive occupants.
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Sure you can. And they did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
Quote:
The Apollo missions marked the first event where humans traveled through the Van Allen belts, which was one of several radiation hazards known by mission planners. The astronauts had low exposure in the Van Allen belts due to the short period of time spent flying through them. The command module's inner structure was an aluminum "sandwich" consisting of a welded aluminium inner skin, a thermally bonded honeycomb core, and a thin aluminium "face sheet". The steel honeycomb core and outer face sheets were thermally bonded to the inner skin.
In fact, the astronauts' overall exposure was dominated by solar particles once outside the earth's magnetic field. The total radiation received by the astronauts varied from mission to mission but was measured to be between 0.16 and 1.14 rads (1.6 and 11.4 mGy), much less than the standard of 5 rem (50 mSv) per year set by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for people who work with radioactivity.[23]
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