54: Private Space Enterprise, Artemis Debate, and the Human Body in Space. Bob Zimmerman (Behind the Black) reviews the private space sector, highlighting VAST, which is developing the small manned demo space station Haven One using its own investment capital

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Private Space Enterprise, Artemis Debate, and the Human Body in Space. Bob Zimmerman (Behind the Black) reviews the private space sector, highlighting VAST, which is developing the small manned demo space station Haven One using its own investment capital, unlike other NASA-funded consortiums. VAST's larger planned station, Haven 2, is designed to rotate, creating artificial gravity. This capability is crucial for mitigating the damage extended weightlessness causes the human body, such as cardiovascular weakening, bone density loss, and vision problems (the eye flattens). Zimmerman notes the ongoing debate over NASA's Artemis program, where former administrators clash over SpaceX's ability to build the lunar lander on time, often driven by lobbying interests. He also reports that China recently set a new national record for successful launches in a single year (67 completed).
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0:00.0	This is CBSI on the world behind the black. This is Thanksgiving subscription donation time
0:10.3	because we're speculating about all being spacemen someday, but there are negatives.
0:16.1	And Bob is taking us to a study on ISS turning up new negatives all the time. It's not going to be science
0:23.5	fiction just jump from one ship to another. What do we know about what it does to the human body
0:28.7	extended weightlessness, Bob? Weightlessness. Well, yeah, this new study had to do with changes
0:34.2	in the eyeballs. A previous many studies over the last half century started with the Russians, but with
0:40.1	Skylab and the American ISS and Mia stations, the Russian Mia station.
0:45.4	We found that your bone density gets very weakens, which means your bones become fragile.
0:52.0	Your cardiovascular system gets very weak. Your spine straightens
0:56.4	causes back pain. One of the more recent discoveries is vision problems. They discovered that the
1:03.4	eye flattens in weightlessness, which affects, and this is what the new study has found, looking at
1:09.7	28 individuals that flew on ISS for long missions.
1:14.2	They found that about half of them had this problem, a little more than half, actually, about half, where the eye flattened and it caused vision problems.
1:24.3	What the study also found is that women had less of a problem this than men.
1:29.3	Of course, the study has a very small number of people, so they recognize that that distinction
1:33.3	between men and women might not be valid.
1:36.3	But this is just another example of why we really need to do in orbit experiments with some
1:43.3	form of artificial gravity.
1:44.4	It might not be necessary to duplicate Earth gravity completely.
1:47.9	Maybe only 10% Earth gravity will do,
1:50.3	but we need to do some of that research,
1:52.7	and we have not for many reasons.
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