The radiation risk to space tourists

SPACE.com reports on a little-discussed safety risk for future space tourists: exposure to space radiation on their flights. That’s less of a concern for suborbital spaceflights, where passengers spend only a few minutes above the protection of the atmosphere, than for future orbital or extraorbital excursions. The need for monitoring space weather conditions by future space tourism operators was discussed at last week’s Space Weather Week event in Colorado. (It has also been brought up at previous Space Access and Space Frontier Conferences by Barbara Thompson of NASA Goddard; at last month’s space Access conference, immediately before Space Weather Week, she encouraged the community to be involved with space weather professionals regarding the types of data they need and how to collect and disseminate those data.)