Hitting the Books: What astronauts can learn from nuclear submariners - Yahoo Finance Australia

In his latest book, Spacefarers: How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond, Christopher Wanjek examines humanity’s obsession with space travel, why our dreams of living among the stars haven’t yet come to fruition and what it will take to finally get our interstellar efforts off the ground.

This is an unworldly environment of complete darkness, low temperatures, abnormal environmental pressure, no natural supply of breathable oxygen, cramped quarters, and chilling isolation, with limited ability to contact any other humans—a place where you and your crewmates need to generate your own electricity to power your lights and machines; to produce air to breath and water to drink; and to maintain the integrity of your food supply.

The environment I refer to is deep in the Earth’s oceans, on a nuclear submarine.

Life on a nuclear submarine provides the closest example we have of what living would be like on a moon, another planet, or a space voyage.

Occupants of a nuclear submarine are in a constant life-and-death struggle with the hostile environment that surrounds them.

NASA is eying a nuclear submarine design to explore the ice-covered oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa and the hydrocarbon lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan, missions that are many decades away from fruition.

And the fuel efficiency alone offered by nuclear fission has space agencies contemplating ways to similarly power bases on the Moon and Mars cheaply and reliably.

The first requirement underwater or in space is to generate oxygen.

A perhaps surprising source of this precious oxygen on a nuclear submarine is the ocean water that surrounds it.

Through the process of electrolysis, a machine passes an electrical current through distilled seawater to create oxygen gas, O2, and releases the hydrogen back into the ocean.

The process may mimic what needs to be done on the Moon and elsewhere with extraction of the oxygen from water ice deposits.

Drinking water on submarines also comes from the ocean water, through the energy-intensive process of desalination.

Energy also is needed to maintain a constant air pressure of 1 atmosphere as the submarine dives from surface level down to its half-mile-deep cruising depth.

This pressure regulation is somewhat the opposite of what is needed on airplanes and what would be needed in space, where celestial bodies contain little or no pressure.

We call this amount, conveniently enough, 1 atmosphere of pressure.

On the top of Mount Everest, the atmospheric pressure is only about 5 psi, or a third of an atmosphere, because there is less air on top of you.

On Mars the atmospheric pressure is about 0.09 psi because there’s hardly an atmosphere; on the Moon, the atmospheric pressure is essentially zero.

The pressure increases about 1 atmosphere for every ten meters of water depth.

Submarines maintain constant pressure via a double-hull system comprising an outer waterproof hull and an inner pressure hull made of tough steel or titanium.

As sophisticated as nuclear submarines are, they are dangerous beasts.

One other element that helps the submariners maintain sanity is their deep sense of purpose that comes with the awesome responsibility of controlling a stealth war machine capable of launching a nuclear attack.