Double Ditto to your comments. Last year I spent the most interesting plane ride of my life sitting next to a former air force office that now was in charge of managing grant money for NASA. He was flying back to Houston from a visit to Dartmouth College among other institutions.
He was specifically involved in funding to find solutions to your:
2. effects of micro gravity on the human body.
3. the damage that cosmic radiation does on the human body.
Under number #2 the biggest problems were bone loss and changes to your eyeballs. People become near sited in space and shorter. Plus you have muscle loss. At Dartmouth they were working on measuring the effects of low gravity on your eye balls.
Under number #3 he told me of a fabric that was being tested that had 10x the tensile strength of Kevlar. It was millimeters thick. He also told me of other college/university grants he monitored that were working on materials that could block radiation with a very light mass/thickness.
Many of these experiments end up on the International Space station.
“Under number #3 he told me of a fabric that was being tested that had 10x the tensile strength of Kevlar. It was millimeters thick. He also told me of other college/university grants he monitored that were working on materials that could block radiation with a very light mass/thickness.”