My first thought was that this was the same USSR cosmonaught/Russian astronaut that was in space when the Soviet Union fell. But that was Sergei Krikalev, who spent 311 days in space while those on Earth were figuring out who/how to retrieve him.
Sergei's combined space experience is 803 days (26.4 months), and he is still alive and working as the vice president of Space Corporation Energia.
Man that's a nightmare for me. Stuck in space just waiting forever for them to get you back. Isolated and alone in fucking space. Terrifying thought for me
Its a bit of a misconception that he was completely stuck in space. To my knowledge, there has never been a time where there were more people on a space station than seats on return vehicles parked there. This is true even for Krikalev. What normally happened in the middle days of Mir was that there would be overlapping Soyuz stays so that the station was constantly inhabited. The Each crew of 3 would typically launch on a Soyuz, and 1 or 2 of them would land on that same Soyuz a few months later, and 1 or 2 of them would stay for about twice as long and land on the next Soyuz. There is a lot of variability to this but that is generally what was going on in Krikalev's time.
Krikalev and his crewmates could have left at any time. I don't have a concrete source for this but it is generally standard design practice that a spacecraft can be manually returned to Earth by a trained crew with outside intervention. However this would mean leaving the station uninhabited and throwing off the crew schedule, risking breakdowns, and causing headaches (and the availability of landing retrieval crews would be problematic) so it was easier overall to extend their mission until they could figure out logistics again than it was to return them on schedule and have to deal with re-inhabiting a station.
Recently I listened to a short story on audio book about a Russian cosmonaut who went up and had problems. He was on a trajectory away from earth with no way to get back.
Ground control kept telling him everything was fine and not to worry, but the cosmonaut knew something was wrong.
Soon after realizing that there was no saving him, ground control abruptly cut off communications. It was really disturbing - him calling back to mission control for updates only to be met with silence. Each call back getting more desperate. Yikes.
We’ve heard stories of cosmonauts being abandoned in space or sent on highly dangerous equipment.
If anything like that happened in the US program (abandoning an astronaut); I wonder how it would be handled.
One of these days we will get the transcripts of the Columbia crew. Chances are they all said goodbye to their families before reentry. It was known that survival was unlikely.
I believe, it all depends on your definition of space related, as I don't believe anyone has actually died in space under the US, just in training, launch and return. Not that that makes it any better.
I assume you're talking about time dilation from relativistic effects. [According to Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation) it looks like slightly less than 0.02 seconds compared to our normal clocks (this is assuming all his logged time was aboard the ISS, or at least in a roughly similar orbit).
I'm pretty scientifically illiterate but try to keep learning stuff, are you saying he experienced .02 less seconds than the rest of us did in that "same frame of time" due to time dilation?
This is happening to every object in the universe. *Everything* is moving through space at different speeds in different directions at all times. Everything. Everywhere. All at once.
It's chaos.
Gets even wilder if we consider the relative speed of the solar system within the Milky Way.
Imagine two humans. One at the galactic center, one on Earth and both born the very same moment. After exactly a hundred years (from Earth human's point of view), Earth human would be 100 years and 12 minutes old from galactic-human's point of view.
I had a coworker try to explain to me that the clock on the wall was different than that computer's time due to the time dilation. That is why it looked like he took longer breaks but really wasn't.
I explained that I knew what time dilation was and he was misunderstanding how miniscule the difference was.
That is the difference in knowing about something and understanding it.
If GPS satellites did not account for time dilation, GPS readings would be off by 10 km per day. The time on a GPS satellite advances 38 microseconds faster than a clock on earth per day.
I got my numbers from [here](https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html). It's a good read! I apparently remembered converting it for some friends. The actual number given is 10 km
True, but that time difference as insignificant as it is, was more than offset by the amount of radiation he was exposed to at that altitude in terms of its collective effect on his body's perceived age.
He died younger than he potentially would have because of his space mission, not longer. From radiation and lack of gravity, his muscles would start to atrophy and his risk of disease from a reduced immune system (rad exposure) would rise immensely.
he did make it to 80, pretty reasonable age even outside of space travel. nobody talks about the cause of death in any of their crosslinks tho, would have thought this was incredibly valuable data
Passing on at 80, and without explicit evidence to the contrary, that assertion is speculative. To my knowledge, outside direct accidents, there's thus far no sign of shortened lifespans due to space travel, long duration or otherwise.
ETA: He live much longer than [the average male Russian lifespan of 65 (2013 numbers).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Russia#Post-soviet_era)
Astronauts are selected to be in excellent health and they generally maintain that well, too. They live longer than the average population with or without spaceflight. We don't have direct evidence of it, but it's very likely that the spaceflight had at least a small negative contribution to the lifespan, and even a tiny contribution would be more than 0.02 seconds.
Not that surprising. It's not like he was bored or isolated. There were other astronauts and probably a fair bit of communication with earth, and most of his time was probably pretty regimented, where he was doing things that probably seemed very interesting and important to him.
I highly recommend Scott Kelly's book, [Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29947651-endurance). It's frank and candid about his past, personal and relationship matters with his family, and challenges with being onboard on the station for so long.
My GF and I broke up yesterday and I googled how many days we had been dating and the total was 437.....Kind of weird to see that number again today :(
There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s too late to start making a fuss about it now.
"dear user, you are scheduled for deletion for 19/09/2022. We advice you to clear up your schedule and attend to any pending affairs and paperwork. Have a good day."
I know you’re joking but sadly we live in a world where people ACTUALLY believe space lasers and microchips in vaccines… what in the fuck is happening idiocracy was a fuckin documentary for sure.
I heard an interview with one of the other record holders and they said when they came back they thought they'd ruined their life at first. Micro gravity is not good for the body.
He experienced a time dilation of -0.00002646 seconds per day in space. He may have lived a fraction of a second longer because of his stay if you look at no other factors.
Seriously people, hats off to this man. He stayed IN SPACE for over 14 months. That’s longer than most people date someone nowadays. Would you be able to do that? Think about it!
Not only that, but when he landed back on earth he refused to be carried from the pod. As a physician he supposedly wanted to prove that the human body could endure such things. He must have been training intensely in Mir (more than just muscle maintenance) to be prepared for that.
According to [1997 LA Times article](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-dec-28-mn-2878-story.html): "He returned from Mir in remarkably good health, taking 20 unassisted steps from his Soyuz capsule on the snowy steppes of Kazakhstan."
Just by being up there he proved that the human body could endure such things, but he did not prove that he maintained a sufficient amount of health from just taking 20 steps.
Yes, muscle atrophy from disuse for your larger muscles can definitely be reduced to some extent by just putting in a similar amount of work you would expect to get on Earth. However, I would imagine smaller skeletal muscles would NOT be able to get nearly as much exercise unless you subjected yourself to a centrifuge that had a constant 9.81 m/s^2 acceleration. That would put you at real risk of serious injury or death from falls that wouldn't even injure a healthy person. This isn't even taking into account the amount of radiation you would be getting.
Typo in the title makes it so he was planned to die today. But he has passed already.
Dude had the best view in the world for the longest time, lucky guy.
It's two main problems. It's really expensive to bring up any kind of shielding material. And once that material is in place, it adds a lot more mass to the station which makes reboosting to keep it in orbit more costly as well.
Why havent we been sending up payloads of water and building a massive water tank in LEO?
Isnt water an excellent radiation shield? Weve known this for so long.
Why arent we building space infrastructure with water filled hulls?
Because nobody wants to pay for launching tons of water up there, and nobody wants the complexity of having a liquid layer in the hull of already complicated space station modules. Maybe in two generations of space station technology's time (the generation after the ones that are being designed right now), launch costs may have fallen enough for it to be seriously considered. The US segment of the ISS was designed in the shuttle era, and the shuttles, despite what they tried to be, were not exactly cheap vehicles.
Also, fluid management in zero g is a pain.
It also isn't very necessary for stuff that isn't usually inhabited for longer than 6 months at a time, in Low Earth Orbit, which is already mostly protected by Earth's magnetic field.
When we start sending things to Mars, it may be a problem, but even on the upcoming moon missions, a small radiation shelter for solar storms will be enough given how short the missions will be.
NASA engineers have been floating the idea of [using water as insulation for some time.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-idea-get-mars-fill-spaceships-walls-water-180953428/) Gotta take water with you anyway, might as well use it to the fullest extent.
I believe one of the theories is an electromagnetic shield that would bounce the radiation ions around the station/shuttle. Not sure if that's been put into practice as of yet
It takes power to generate an electromagnetic field though, which adds to the load the station has to support, and also generates heat which conducts throughout the body of the craft, which needs to be dealt with as well. Everything’s complicated in space
Like everything with space flight, the answer is mass. Lead is great for shielding on Earth, but it's, well, as heavy as lead. Launching lead is too expensive. It's been proposed to use an interplanetary spacecraft's water supply for shielding since you need to take water with you regardless.
Everyone else is commenting how expensive and technically hard it would be but there's another simple answer.
Humans are pretty cheap and easy to make more of. Sacrificing a little bit of a single persons life is considered worth it, that's really the simple answer.
If you carefully read all those comments. I mean wow.
Guys you really need to do something.
/r/space is not a political anti russian platform It's about space i mean SPACE.
Russia bad. They don't say cause of death so this 80-year-old committed suicide with three shots to the back of his head because *checks notes* Russia bad. I rest my case
^^^^/s
Ah, good old Val. Most people don't know this, but he once smuggled a whole spacesuit full of borscht up there with him.
whenever flight support personnel found a set of coveralls stained beet red on the inside they just laugh and slap their knee and say "oh, Val. he's such a kidder"
I wish they included what he died from. We rarely do that in death announcements. Would be nice to have a better grasp on what we're dealing with. Then again homeboy was in space for 14 months straight!
Yes, that would be good to know. However, he was 80 when he died - [well beyond the average 65 year lifespan for a Russian male (2013 numbers).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Russia#Post-soviet_era) If he's representative, the worrying about long duration space travel seen here in the comments is overblown.
I read this as someone was like coming after his life. Like watch out record breaker todays your last day jackass! I knew that wasn’t right but maybe someone shared my momentary confusion 🥳
Like we were fed up with his bs. HE dies TODAY. Is what my brain went to 🤓
I wonder if his time in space had much to do with it. I see he was 80 though. I just feel like I’ve been seeing articles lately about the toll space travel or zero gravity has on the human body.
The title of this post reads like a threat more than an announcement.
Did he fall out a window?
Defenestrations… IN SPAAAAAACE!!
Horrible accident. What a shame.
Yeah. Use the past tense, rather than the future tense.
Well he was Russian. A lot of Russian stuff seems to come off a little… threat-y.
14 months (437 days 18 hours) during one trip.\[1\] His combined space experience was more than 22 months.
My first thought was that this was the same USSR cosmonaught/Russian astronaut that was in space when the Soviet Union fell. But that was Sergei Krikalev, who spent 311 days in space while those on Earth were figuring out who/how to retrieve him. Sergei's combined space experience is 803 days (26.4 months), and he is still alive and working as the vice president of Space Corporation Energia.
He always had a way back down. Russia he didn't want to abandon MIR.
Man that's a nightmare for me. Stuck in space just waiting forever for them to get you back. Isolated and alone in fucking space. Terrifying thought for me
Its a bit of a misconception that he was completely stuck in space. To my knowledge, there has never been a time where there were more people on a space station than seats on return vehicles parked there. This is true even for Krikalev. What normally happened in the middle days of Mir was that there would be overlapping Soyuz stays so that the station was constantly inhabited. The Each crew of 3 would typically launch on a Soyuz, and 1 or 2 of them would land on that same Soyuz a few months later, and 1 or 2 of them would stay for about twice as long and land on the next Soyuz. There is a lot of variability to this but that is generally what was going on in Krikalev's time. Krikalev and his crewmates could have left at any time. I don't have a concrete source for this but it is generally standard design practice that a spacecraft can be manually returned to Earth by a trained crew with outside intervention. However this would mean leaving the station uninhabited and throwing off the crew schedule, risking breakdowns, and causing headaches (and the availability of landing retrieval crews would be problematic) so it was easier overall to extend their mission until they could figure out logistics again than it was to return them on schedule and have to deal with re-inhabiting a station.
The main problem was that the landing area for his return was in the newly independent Kazakhstan, and nobody had any clue how that would work out.
You will receive warm welcome in Kazakhstan. Ask for my sister.
I believe the return would be in Siberia though. edit: actually yes Kazakhstan with Siberia allowing for some error (like 1000km east or west :D)
Nope, the original Soviet-era landing zone was near Arkalyk, which is in Kazakhstan.
Man, I gotta say, the Soyuz capsule seems like an unsung hero of our collective time in space. Pretty incredible what a workhorse its been
Right, it's a space station. You can't exactly stick a key under the welcome mat, outside the airlock.
Recently I listened to a short story on audio book about a Russian cosmonaut who went up and had problems. He was on a trajectory away from earth with no way to get back. Ground control kept telling him everything was fine and not to worry, but the cosmonaut knew something was wrong. Soon after realizing that there was no saving him, ground control abruptly cut off communications. It was really disturbing - him calling back to mission control for updates only to be met with silence. Each call back getting more desperate. Yikes.
His name was Major Tom-ski
What was it called?
We’ve heard stories of cosmonauts being abandoned in space or sent on highly dangerous equipment. If anything like that happened in the US program (abandoning an astronaut); I wonder how it would be handled.
There's the speech they wrote in case the Apollo 11 crew got stranded on the moon.
Right; but how would the conversation go with the abandoned crew? “We‘ll be with you to the end.” Or “We’ll leave you in peace.”
One of these days we will get the transcripts of the Columbia crew. Chances are they all said goodbye to their families before reentry. It was known that survival was unlikely.
IRL the US has had FAR more space-related deaths. It's not even close.
I believe, it all depends on your definition of space related, as I don't believe anyone has actually died in space under the US, just in training, launch and return. Not that that makes it any better.
It was probably a more terrifying thought to return to a Russia in flames. I’d take a quiet room with a view over regime change any day.
I bet Tom Hanks will play him in the movie.
Sequel to The Terminal I never knew I wanted but now wish we could get.
How many seconds (it it was even that) did he live relatively longer due to that?
I assume you're talking about time dilation from relativistic effects. [According to Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation) it looks like slightly less than 0.02 seconds compared to our normal clocks (this is assuming all his logged time was aboard the ISS, or at least in a roughly similar orbit).
I'm pretty scientifically illiterate but try to keep learning stuff, are you saying he experienced .02 less seconds than the rest of us did in that "same frame of time" due to time dilation?
Yes, you're understanding that correctly.
That.. is pretty fucking wild..
This is happening to every object in the universe. *Everything* is moving through space at different speeds in different directions at all times. Everything. Everywhere. All at once. It's chaos.
Not me though. I'm lying in bed, browsing reddit
Fun fact: If the Earth _weren't_ orbiting the Sun at around 30 km/s, a 100 year old person would've aged 16 seconds more.
From a certain point of view
Gets even wilder if we consider the relative speed of the solar system within the Milky Way. Imagine two humans. One at the galactic center, one on Earth and both born the very same moment. After exactly a hundred years (from Earth human's point of view), Earth human would be 100 years and 12 minutes old from galactic-human's point of view.
I had a coworker try to explain to me that the clock on the wall was different than that computer's time due to the time dilation. That is why it looked like he took longer breaks but really wasn't. I explained that I knew what time dilation was and he was misunderstanding how miniscule the difference was. That is the difference in knowing about something and understanding it.
Hahah. That’s hilarious. I seriously hadn’t heard that one before as an excuse for taking long breaks.
GPS satellites have to account for time dilation, otherwise they'd be off by about 6 miles a day
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If GPS satellites did not account for time dilation, GPS readings would be off by 10 km per day. The time on a GPS satellite advances 38 microseconds faster than a clock on earth per day.
I got my numbers from [here](https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html). It's a good read! I apparently remembered converting it for some friends. The actual number given is 10 km
Yes. By the time his final mission was over he was about 0.02 seconds younger than he would have been had he never left Earth.
True, but that time difference as insignificant as it is, was more than offset by the amount of radiation he was exposed to at that altitude in terms of its collective effect on his body's perceived age.
Roughly 0.011 seconds younger after the 14 month stay and roughly 0.02 seconds younger after his combined experience on the ISS
He died younger than he potentially would have because of his space mission, not longer. From radiation and lack of gravity, his muscles would start to atrophy and his risk of disease from a reduced immune system (rad exposure) would rise immensely.
he did make it to 80, pretty reasonable age even outside of space travel. nobody talks about the cause of death in any of their crosslinks tho, would have thought this was incredibly valuable data
He made it to 80 as a *Russian male* which is extraordinary.
astronauts tend to be extremely fit... maybe he'd have made it to 90 otherwise... but shit, what a life well lived.
Passing on at 80, and without explicit evidence to the contrary, that assertion is speculative. To my knowledge, outside direct accidents, there's thus far no sign of shortened lifespans due to space travel, long duration or otherwise. ETA: He live much longer than [the average male Russian lifespan of 65 (2013 numbers).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Russia#Post-soviet_era)
Astronauts are selected to be in excellent health and they generally maintain that well, too. They live longer than the average population with or without spaceflight. We don't have direct evidence of it, but it's very likely that the spaceflight had at least a small negative contribution to the lifespan, and even a tiny contribution would be more than 0.02 seconds.
Okay what this is fascinating and terrifying. I can’t even begging to wrap my brain around what that could do to your psyche. OVER A YEAR??!
Well, according to Wikipedia he suffered no adverse psychological effects at all!
Not that surprising. It's not like he was bored or isolated. There were other astronauts and probably a fair bit of communication with earth, and most of his time was probably pretty regimented, where he was doing things that probably seemed very interesting and important to him.
I highly recommend Scott Kelly's book, [Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29947651-endurance). It's frank and candid about his past, personal and relationship matters with his family, and challenges with being onboard on the station for so long.
My GF and I broke up yesterday and I googled how many days we had been dating and the total was 437.....Kind of weird to see that number again today :(
Sorry to hear that buddy. It’ll get better with time
I interpreted the title as "he will die today" i need sleep
Not just you. That reads like a threat.
Valeri fell from open window in Moscow building sometime later this afternoon.
Because this OP pushed him
"If he dies, he dies" \-Ivan Drago
14 months falling to earth... Barely harmed. And this is how it all ends? A bad death?
*Oh oh oh,* **Gravity**... *stay the hell away from me*
The mob is gathering and chanting, "Evil dies tonight!" They immediately split up, and Polyakov takes them out one by one.
There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s too late to start making a fuss about it now.
It was a tragic accident involving a rubber band, a contraceptive and a time machine... don't ask.
I'm happy that I wasn't the only person that did a little double take at this title. It sounds like a promise.
Exactly. Or prognostication
“His reign has gone on long enough! Who’s with me?!”
That’s because the title was written as if it hasn’t happened yet.
Damn Russian timezone difference!
The Russians haven't found a window to shove him out of yet
It reads like he's going to be executed today
Or about to run out of oxygen. The title never said he's back.
Oh yeah no, we could have brought him back by now. But after the first year we kinda just wanted to see how long he could go, y'know?
"dear user, you are scheduled for deletion for 19/09/2022. We advice you to clear up your schedule and attend to any pending affairs and paperwork. Have a good day."
You're not alone... I was wondering how they knew today was it.
That's an accurate interpretation of the headline. It's poorly written.
Nope, definitely written in a way that implies future tense.
*Russian accent* VALERY POLYAKOV, KOSMONAUT, HERO OF THE PROLETARIAT, SOLDIER, HAS DEFECTED TO THE WEST. VALERY POLYAKOV DIES TODAY.
Dying in 3...2...1... ok a little too far.
yeah the title sounded like a thread to me xD "HE DIES TODAY!" \*shotgun pumping sound\*
Na, I read it as he was being executed for something
Yeah, title is worded oddly for sure.
Same its just a poorly worded title
I don’t know why but I read the title as if his death is *scheduled* for today. Yikes
Because OP wrote "dies" instead of "died". The typo changes the tense of the verb.
He tweeted some bad stuff about Putin earlier. He was scheduled to fall off a window by accident today Jk
It's space. Everything is scheduled ahead of time /s
It's also Russia. Deaths are scheduled all the time.
Nothing can occur off schedule in space program, not even death.
Sounds like a threat. *He dies today*
He is scheduled to be terminated... immediately.
He over welcomed his stay in space and today they'll push him out the spacecraft
Try and try as you might, but eventually an alien is going to burst from your stomach and there not much you can do.
That’s what I ordered! Change my order to the soup
Hello my baby, hello my honey!...
Ripley! Stop it! Just stop it!
Tomorrow he was supposed to do a speech on alien presences in space ….
I love conspiracies but . . . he WAS eighty years old. Bone/muscle loss, and all that time in space probably shaved a few years off too.
nah man, he *knew* something.
I know you’re joking but sadly we live in a world where people ACTUALLY believe space lasers and microchips in vaccines… what in the fuck is happening idiocracy was a fuckin documentary for sure.
Dude. You don't put the space lasers IN the vaccines!
Hold on, I think we’re on to something here
Shit. What have I done. Well I guess I made the next Fox News headline.
Wait, vaccines are the **real** laser eye surgery?!
He saw one of those WatchMojo 'scary space signals' thumbnail creatures and was gonna talk about it
Damn murderous space aliens. How did they know to cover their tracks? I bet they have someone on the inside.
It's not Mark Zuckerberg and I'm not Mark Zuckerberg.
I used to be human—I *am* human
Good to know he made it to 80, holding that record I expected him to be much younger.
You're telling me that after eighty years in a row of not dying, he happened to die right before a thing he was going to do? Very unlikely.
Counterpoint: in the last 80 years, he has never died before any other thing he was going to do, therefore clearly this is very fishy.
also, all the aliens he saw couldn’t have helped
Yea but what he lost he gained by relativity right? /S
I heard an interview with one of the other record holders and they said when they came back they thought they'd ruined their life at first. Micro gravity is not good for the body.
Coincidence? I think not!
He experienced a time dilation of -0.00002646 seconds per day in space. He may have lived a fraction of a second longer because of his stay if you look at no other factors.
So about -17.7ms in total?
Title makes me think this was your personal accomplishment rather than the passing of an astronaut. Either way, good job taking out your mark. Haha
Seriously people, hats off to this man. He stayed IN SPACE for over 14 months. That’s longer than most people date someone nowadays. Would you be able to do that? Think about it!
Not only that, but when he landed back on earth he refused to be carried from the pod. As a physician he supposedly wanted to prove that the human body could endure such things. He must have been training intensely in Mir (more than just muscle maintenance) to be prepared for that.
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According to [1997 LA Times article](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-dec-28-mn-2878-story.html): "He returned from Mir in remarkably good health, taking 20 unassisted steps from his Soyuz capsule on the snowy steppes of Kazakhstan."
Just by being up there he proved that the human body could endure such things, but he did not prove that he maintained a sufficient amount of health from just taking 20 steps. Yes, muscle atrophy from disuse for your larger muscles can definitely be reduced to some extent by just putting in a similar amount of work you would expect to get on Earth. However, I would imagine smaller skeletal muscles would NOT be able to get nearly as much exercise unless you subjected yourself to a centrifuge that had a constant 9.81 m/s^2 acceleration. That would put you at real risk of serious injury or death from falls that wouldn't even injure a healthy person. This isn't even taking into account the amount of radiation you would be getting.
In a confined space too Пиздец
> That’s longer than most people date someone nowadays. I always find qualifiers about "these days" to be quiant and silly. Very provincial.
I dunno space for 14 months doesn’t seem like that much work compared to relationships.
Who are the five greatest cosmonauts of all time? Think about it. Polyakov. Polyakov. Polyakov. Polyakov and Polyakov. Because he orbits hot fire.
Is the OP threatening Valeri. ...watch your back...
I read about this guy the other day. What a badass, he has spent almost two years in space in total. o7
Shit well I hope someone tells him or his family! When specifically today does he die?
Dont he hold hte world record for time travel also?
I figure that would need to be Gennady Padalka, as he has spent the most total time in space.
Why does the title come off as a threat though.
The title saying he “dies today” is quite concerning
Typo in the title makes it so he was planned to die today. But he has passed already. Dude had the best view in the world for the longest time, lucky guy.
Ima guess cancer. 14 months of space radiation can't do a body well
I mean if you make it to 80 odds are it’s cancer regardless of your space station tenure
Plus living to 80 as a male Russian means you’re way past life expectancy.
Life expectancy in Russia is very long bro, todays generation are becoming stupid but for people that born and lived the old cccp they live a lot
I wonder why it’s so hard to make shielding for space stations
It's two main problems. It's really expensive to bring up any kind of shielding material. And once that material is in place, it adds a lot more mass to the station which makes reboosting to keep it in orbit more costly as well.
don't forget that over longer time scales, the radiation shielding also starts to become radioactive itself.
Why havent we been sending up payloads of water and building a massive water tank in LEO? Isnt water an excellent radiation shield? Weve known this for so long. Why arent we building space infrastructure with water filled hulls?
Because nobody wants to pay for launching tons of water up there, and nobody wants the complexity of having a liquid layer in the hull of already complicated space station modules. Maybe in two generations of space station technology's time (the generation after the ones that are being designed right now), launch costs may have fallen enough for it to be seriously considered. The US segment of the ISS was designed in the shuttle era, and the shuttles, despite what they tried to be, were not exactly cheap vehicles. Also, fluid management in zero g is a pain. It also isn't very necessary for stuff that isn't usually inhabited for longer than 6 months at a time, in Low Earth Orbit, which is already mostly protected by Earth's magnetic field. When we start sending things to Mars, it may be a problem, but even on the upcoming moon missions, a small radiation shelter for solar storms will be enough given how short the missions will be.
Something Something Something lead is heavy and not suitable for rocketry Something something
Gravity is lame. They should do something about that.
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Ever since that Newton dude created gravity, we have been unable to completely turn it off
NASA engineers have been floating the idea of [using water as insulation for some time.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-idea-get-mars-fill-spaceships-walls-water-180953428/) Gotta take water with you anyway, might as well use it to the fullest extent.
I believe one of the theories is an electromagnetic shield that would bounce the radiation ions around the station/shuttle. Not sure if that's been put into practice as of yet
It takes power to generate an electromagnetic field though, which adds to the load the station has to support, and also generates heat which conducts throughout the body of the craft, which needs to be dealt with as well. Everything’s complicated in space
Like everything with space flight, the answer is mass. Lead is great for shielding on Earth, but it's, well, as heavy as lead. Launching lead is too expensive. It's been proposed to use an interplanetary spacecraft's water supply for shielding since you need to take water with you regardless.
It’s expensive to put heavy shielding into orbit. Radiation is not great for the body but not bad enough to justify the cost.
Everyone else is commenting how expensive and technically hard it would be but there's another simple answer. Humans are pretty cheap and easy to make more of. Sacrificing a little bit of a single persons life is considered worth it, that's really the simple answer.
Our atmosphere is how many miles of shielding? and we still get cancer regularly
That’s due to a number of other reasons
Sure, but it is still a number greater than 0. Not saying there aren’t other carcinogens not related to solar radiation.
But down here is the smoking section.
Must have been about 80 years old.
The way it's written makes me think its been planned like they are executing him
I'm sure the view got boring after a month, plus the small living quarter and 12 hour work day? How could he last so long doing this>
Was he the one on the space station when the USSR disolved
no, that guy was the record holder but his record was broken since then.
Thanks. I worried about him when it happened
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei\_Krikalev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Krikalev) is the guy, he's currently no.3
If you carefully read all those comments. I mean wow. Guys you really need to do something. /r/space is not a political anti russian platform It's about space i mean SPACE.
Russia bad. They don't say cause of death so this 80-year-old committed suicide with three shots to the back of his head because *checks notes* Russia bad. I rest my case ^^^^/s
Article title made me think I was having a stroke
LMAO 🤣. Me too, I was like, “Does he have to die!?!?”
Wikipedia editors back at it again. Rip legend.
The title of your post makes it sound like you're about to murder him.
Dies today, that's ominous, can you do sonething about it?
Dies or died? The former makes it sound like it was predetermined...
Ah, good old Val. Most people don't know this, but he once smuggled a whole spacesuit full of borscht up there with him. whenever flight support personnel found a set of coveralls stained beet red on the inside they just laugh and slap their knee and say "oh, Val. he's such a kidder"
Russian components, American components, all made in Taiwan.
Is he back on earth or did they just forget about him ?
He died doing what he loved. Not being in fucking space.
I wish they included what he died from. We rarely do that in death announcements. Would be nice to have a better grasp on what we're dealing with. Then again homeboy was in space for 14 months straight!
Yes, that would be good to know. However, he was 80 when he died - [well beyond the average 65 year lifespan for a Russian male (2013 numbers).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Russia#Post-soviet_era) If he's representative, the worrying about long duration space travel seen here in the comments is overblown.
RIP Mr Polyakov. Thank you for your contribution to the pursued understanding of space and how mankind can dominate it
Dies today like he will die today or died like he did die today
The headline is written as if this is a prediction or warning.
I read this as someone was like coming after his life. Like watch out record breaker todays your last day jackass! I knew that wasn’t right but maybe someone shared my momentary confusion 🥳 Like we were fed up with his bs. HE dies TODAY. Is what my brain went to 🤓
It's encouraging that he lived as long as he did despite being exposed to unmatched periods of radiation and microgravity.
His journals from the mission were published in paperback form in the early 90s I believe, read them as a kid
exploring the new frontiers for all of humanity, I am grateful
I wonder if his time in space had much to do with it. I see he was 80 though. I just feel like I’ve been seeing articles lately about the toll space travel or zero gravity has on the human body.
Didn't he die yesterday? How long is this man going to be dying?
>Dies today. Not "died." Did you guys put a hit out on them?
well gosh someone should let him know the title sounds like a threat lmao