Humanity has dreamed about different visions of what a civilization in space might look like for longer than most of us have been alive.

Weve been planning ways to sustain human life in orbit and on other planets for decades. Now, it feels like were within reach of that goaland we need to be ready for it.

The newly formedAurelia Instituteaims to prep humanity for a long-term presence in space through R&D, policy, and outreach. Ariel Ekblaw, founder of both the Aurelia Institute and the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, spends her time thinking about and designing the next generation of space stations.

Ekblaw sat down to discuss accessibility needs for human spaceflight, technology demonstrations aboard the ISS, and drawing inspiration from real life and science fiction for future space stations.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to found Aurelia in the first place?

I have led a lab at MIT for the past six years, the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. We have worked on a very broad range of artifacts for life and space, but what I saw as a gap, and something that I wanted to fill by founding Aurelia, is a focus on technology, R&D, and infrastructure for life in space. As wonderful as it is to be able to envision all of these different artifacts that we would use on the inside of a habitat, we actually still have a lot of work to do to build the habitat structures themselves in a way that will scale to allow more people to go into orbit.

The stations that we see coming online in the next few years that we all are really excited about, like Axiom or Orbital Reef, theyre still based on the International Space Station axial model with a relatively limited amount of total crew size. What I would love to do is for Aurelia to contribute in partnership or in collaboration with Axiom and Orbital Reef and NASA and others to the next generation of technology beyond ISS-like approaches. And that could be things like self-assembly, or even something like artificial gravity.

The technology to develop these long-term human habitats in space is developing really quickly. How quickly do we need humanity to prepare for a long-term human presence in space? Are we going to be ready when that tech is ready?

I think we will be ready. I think were ready now, in a really wonderful way. The goal of democratizing access to space is to allow more people around the world to see themselves in that future. Right now, if the real estate in orbit is very small and very elite and very hard to access, then that itself is a big gatekeeper to be able to share space with a lot of people. I really do think that the time is now to begin thinking about scaling infrastructure in space. The other piece of Aurelia that complements the R&D work is trying to get more people ready and offer them a chance to really participate in the space exploration feature.

The perception I had growing up, and I think its a common one, is that the people who go into space have to be incredibly smart and well-educated and in incredible physical shape. Is there any truth to that perception? And how do you get that to change?

I think it was absolutely true in the past, right? It was a requirement to be able to get into the astronaut crew to be amazingly healthy, you know, top of the human population. However, that is changing.

One example of that is that we partnered with AstroAccess for several zero-G flights last year. I supported their inaugural flight in October and then we welcomed them back on our flight in May to show that we can begin to prepare space exploration and microgravity environments to be welcoming to people that may have disabilitiesand also recognizing that certain things that we think of as disabilities on Earth could make people very well suited to life in space. As a concrete example, we know that our legs are very overpowered for life in microgravity. Astronauts often have to relearn not to push off too hard, because all the muscle strength that weve gained over a lifetime and gravity is overkill for micro-G. So folks who are in wheelchairs might find themselves particularly free and dexterous and able to move around because they dont need legs in microgravity in the same way that they might need them on Earth.

Well see the beginning of everyday citizens getting to go to space. There might be some limitations on health risks, but I dont see it being much more extreme than the typical health risks that you would go through with your doctor before doing a zero-G flight or before going on a roller coaster.

What do you have to consider from a technical perspective when building more accessible human spaceflight programs?

NASA has done an amazing job with designing the ISS for the top .001% of human talent. So the first step is to design the interior like an architect would on Earth, where you say, Okay, what are the human users? What are their user profiles? What is their experience going to be on the station? What are their abilities or disabilities? How can we actually design the interior vernacular architecture of a space station to be able to be used by people that arent trained like fighter pilots or PhD mission specialists?

Aurelia is working on building TESSERAE, a self-assembling, modular space station that sprung up from your PhD thesis at MIT. Why is it that something like TESSERAE could allow for more people to live and work in space than something like the International Space Station?

The modules for the ISS are prefabricated on Earth, which means that you have to have a rocket big enough to fit that whole module in. That means that the module can be no bigger than the biggest rocket. With something like TESSERAE, you can design tiles that pack flat in the rocket, like Legos or Ikea furniture. Once those tiles are released in orbit to stochastically self-assemble, you can build a sphere, or essentially a buckyball, that is much bigger than that biggest rocket payload fairing. The bigger the structure, the more occupancy. We have many years of work to be able to really convert TESSERAE into habitat-ready technology, but its something were working on.

TESSERAE had a technology demonstration on Ax-1, the first private astronaut mission to the ISS. Tell me a little bit about what you were thinking about going into that mission, and what you were able to learn from those experiments.

We were thrilled to be part of Ax-1. Its a historic mission, a fully private mission to the International Space Station. It was a really good fit for us as well, with the goals that we have around democratizing access to space.

What we tested was a miniature platformthe TESSERAE tiles, about the size of my palm, that allowed us to assess whether our electronics or the custom magnets that we designed to be the joints of the structure and the hardware are working in our theoretical conception or not. So we were actually able to get sensor data about how these tiles are assembling or disassembling in microgravity. And then that informs the next iteration towards a human scale tile.

Can you share anything about how that demonstration went on Ax-1?

We actually just got a bunch of great results, which were very excited about! We were able to demonstrate a successful, autonomous assembly. With no human in the loop, two tiles are able to come together, dock, and form a perfect, good bond. We actually saw that happen with up to three tiles across just a matter of seconds.

We also saw two tiles come in where they dont quite bond right, but they have enough sensing on board to detect that on their own, again autonomously, and they pulsed off, which is great because these are the corrective maneuvers that we need to see.

The third thing we were wondering is, with this many magnets packed into a small space of say, a partial dome of tesserae, would our sensors pick up on that density of magnetic field as an error and close the tiles away when actually theyre happy and theyre in the dome? We were really happy to see that after a dome was manually assembled by one of the astronauts that was helping us with the experiment, it stayed stable, which was really great. It means that the combination of our electronic sensing and the magnet polarity map is working really well.

Amazingcongratulations! Whats the next step after that demonstration?

One of the next steps in this technology roadmap would be to test more tiles. The Ax-1 test was only seven. We would love to test a full 32 title set, which is whats required to form an entire closed buckyball. The second goal is to go bigger, which means we probably have to leave the cocoon of the International Space Station for testing and actually deploy a system off of a CubeSat in orbit, that still contains the tiles in some way because we dont want them flying really far off away from each other but allows us to deploy more tiles.

Are you working on development for the next stages of this project now?

Were actually working on two things in parallel. Were working on the next stages of development for the TESSERAE project, and were starting Aurelia on will be the next project after TESSERAE. So were doing a trade study where were assessing over 50 different space habitat concepts from science fiction and real demonstrated ideas, and choosing between something like artificial gravity or something like an origami or inflatable station.

Why do you need to do the trade study before picking the next project?

Theres been decades of really amazing work in space habitat conceptual design, so we want to make sure that were not reinventing the wheel and that were also being really respectful of all of the amazing shoulders on which we stand. Were standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say.

The trade study helps us assess the trade offs between different concepts. How many separate launches worth of material does it take to create a TESSERAE habitat at scale vs. an artificial gravity habitat or vs. an origami habitat? What are the costs of those three different models? How much total interior breathable air can you get at a certain volume with these different models?

What do you mean when you say youre pulling from sci-fi space station concepts? Is it possible well end up with a Death Star out there somewhere?

We do have a rule within the team, and we try to pull from utopia. So no Death Star from us!

When we pull from science fiction, we do think a lot about the interior design of artifactsa lot from Star Trek. For the actual scale of space structures. Ive been really inspired by two different books. One was Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, where they convert the ISS into this amalgam kind of growing, expanding structure. They also have this notion of little modular spacecraft called arklets that can dock and separate and dock and separate for reconfigurable space architecture. The second science fiction inspiration, really a longtime inspiration for me, is Ringworld by Larry Niven.

A lot of our work is inspired by the NASA 1975 Summer Study, where they pulled together a bunch of really interesting people and developed this report about the future of space architecture. Its where those photos of what looks like 1960s, 1970s suburbia inside of a space habitat of some sorta lot of Gerry ONeill images, Wernher von Braun-inspired images. So thats kind of a crossover between science fiction and planned for reality but never built.

This storyoriginally appearedonPayload and is republished here with permission.

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Ariel Ekblaw explains the future of space stations - Fast Company

There is a layer of Earth's atmosphere that scientists know very little about. Dubbed the "ignorosphere," this layer at the edge of space plays a huge role in determining the intensity of space weather events.

A new space mission is in the works that will attempt to shed more light on the processes that take place there, but it won't be ready before the current solar cycle ends.

When bursts of charged particles from the sun that form the solar wind hit Earth, strange things happen in the planet's gaseous coat. Those heavy particles (protons, electrons and heavy ions) collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere, energizing them, Juha Pekka Luntama, the head of space weather at the European Space Agency (ESA), told Space.com.

Related: Solar storms can destroy satellites with ease a space weather expert explains the science

Most of this energy exchange happens in the thermosphere, the second-highest layer of Earth's atmosphere that extends between altitudes of 60 miles to 360 miles (100 to 600 kilometers). The excess energy warms up the thermosphere and makes it swell. The density of the thin gases that fill this region of space increases. In turn, satellites in low Earth orbit face more drag and sometimes prematurely fall to Earth.

"It's like running against the wind," Anja Stromme, the manager of ESA's Swarm mission, which recently experienced problems maintaining altitude due to bad space weather, told Space.com.

Most of these changes happen in the lowest layer of the thermosphere at altitudes of 60 miles to 120 miles (100 to 200 km), just above the Karman line, a widely recognized boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. Scientists sometimes call this region "the ignorosphere," due to the dearth of data collected there.

"It's too high for balloons but too low for satellites," said Stromme.

Without these measurements, space weather forecasters have little means to improve their predictions of changes that happen in this region in response to solar flares and other sun eruptions. They have no way of providing proper insights to satellite operators whose spacecraft are at risk. In February this year, SpaceX experienced first hand how serious this risk can be when it lost 40 brand-new Starlink satellites that were victimized by bad space weather right after launch.

"When we see an event on the sun, we can give a warning to satellite operators to be cautious and aware," Luntama said. "But it's very difficult to forecast exactly how big the impact is going to be and how much the atmospheric drag for the satellites will increase."

NASA and ESA have plans for a satellite mission that would help fill those gaps. Making such a mission work, however, is quite a challenge, as it would be at very high risk of succumbing to the exact phenomenon it would be launched to study.

"The problem is that, in this region, around 150 kilometers [90 miles] from Earth's surface, there is still too much atmosphere to slow satellites down," said Luntama. "If you were flying a mission there, it would stay in orbit only for a short time, and then it would spiral into the atmosphere and burn."

The two space agencies want such a mission to remain in orbit for years so that it gets exposed to space weather events of various frequency and intensity. The frequency with which the sun produces sunspots, which are the source of solar flares and eruptions that affect Earth, varies based on the sun's 11-year cycle of activity. To ensure that such a mission keeps providing insights as the sun moves through this cycle, mission engineers have to very carefully design the spacecraft's orbit so that it makes only very brief dips into the low altitudes of the ignorosphere while following an elliptical path.

"The perigee [the closest point to Earth] should be between 100 and 150 kilometers [60 and 90 miles] so that we can get the measurements," said Luntama. "The apogee [the farthest point from the planet] should be several hundreds of kilometers 500 or 600 km [300 or 360 miles] which is clearly away from the atmosphere."

The spacecraft would circle the planet about every 90 minutes, Luntama said, using an on-board propulsion system to compensate for the loss of speed during the flight through the dense low-lying regions.

"We would like to measure the charged particles [from the sun] but also the density of the atmosphere in this region," said Luntama. "We also need information about the magnetic field of Earth, because that changes during solar storms. And lastly, we need precise information about how the atmosphere slows down the satellite."

The mission, however, is still in the planning stages and will not make it into the ignorosphere before this solar cycle ends, Luntama added.

"We have established a science team that consists of scientists from Europe and the U.S., and we are now working on defining the mission," Luntama said. "Once we define more precisely the mission objectives and the measurements that we want, then the engineering teams can start to look at how to build such a mission that can do this."

In the meantime, solar weather experts do what they can to improve their forecasts while the sun keeps exceeding their earlier predictions, producing many more sunspots, solar flares and eruptions than expected. After its first-hand encounter with the whims of space weather, SpaceX joined forces with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and started providing some basic data about the drag Starlink satellites experience during orbit-raising after launch, Tzu-Wei Fang, a NOAA space scientist, told Space.com in an earlier interview.

NOAA uses this information to improve its Whole Atmosphere Model, which attempts to predict space weather near Earth just like meteorologists model weather on the planet.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Planned NASA mission to the 'ignorosphere' could improve space weather forecasts - Space.com

Six menus comprising vegetarian and non vegetarian Indian food items are being prepared for the crew of the countrys first human spaceflight aboard the Gaganyaan. The crew of the first ever human mission from India will have a large variety of food to choose from which is being prepared by Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL) Mysore, a lab under Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Confirming this to Financial Express Online, in an exclusive conversation, Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and Chairman DRDO Dr G Satheesh Reddy said, Developing food consumption in zero gravity space is a new and unique challenge, and our scientists are relishing this opportunity.

The initial feedback received was incorporated and modified food products are ready for second phase of evaluation, Dr G Satheesh Reddy added.

According to him, DFRL has a lot of experience in developing food for extreme conditions. This includes soldiers posted in Siachen glacier, sailors in submarines, and scientists on expeditions to Antarctica etc.

What is on the menu?

There will be a wide choice for the crew of the first human mission. The six different menus which are expected to include very light items like upma, poha, idli for breakfast; there will be a choice of meat and vegetarian biryani for lunch and for dinner they can choose from chapatis and some gravy with vegetables and meat preparation to choose from.

Will they get dessert and other food items?

Yes. They will get an option of either halwa or any other alternative. There will be a choice for different fruit juices and tea/coffee.

According to reports, the DFRL is expected to treat the food as mildly spicy and in case there is a need to make it spicier there will be sachets to add on.

The first human mission is expected to be of a short flight of a week, therefore the food packages will be semi-hydrated. And the crew will have to add water to the package and warm it up. Due to zero-gravity, there is a fear of water spillage and to control that the water will have to be added in a confined space.

Is there any bread on the menu?

No. as there is a fear of the bread crumbles floating in the space station.

And there will be special straws for enabling the crew to have water or other liquids. And the special straw is being made by the scientists at DFRL.

Has DFRL made food items for space?

Yes. This DRDO lab has the distinction of making special mango bars for the first Indian in space Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma, who in 1984 was on board Russias Soyuz T-11.

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Gaganyaan: What will Indias astronauts eat during their space flight? DRDO Chief reveals - The Financial Express

With some of the most exciting news of his life, Indialantic resident Steve Young had to keep quiet.That was extremely tough. We are a small town and I had to get waivers from anyone that I told, Young said.And that big secret was that Young will be flying to space on the next Blue Origin flight from Texas. He found out that he got the ticket to fly back in December but had to keep it quiet.He sold his telecom business a few years ago and built the three-story Pineapples restaurant in Eau Gallie to run as a family business with his son.Young moved to the Space Coast back in 1969 as a child. Witnessing first-hand the evolution of spaceflight, he holds intense pride that he will be representing the community on this flight.They label you technically an astronaut, but there are real astronauts that live in this area, Young said.So while the flight feeds his thrill-seeking personality, its also about being part of something bigger to come, according to the 59-year-old. Pioneering something that people are going to do on a regular basis. Hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years, Young said.Although it might be subtle, Young drives around town with the Blue Origin feather logo on the side of his pick-up. But the next vehicle he gets into with that feather will be going a lot faster.I was rewarded with lots of money on the sale of my business, Young said. And who better to spend it on than myself for something very special.Hes not allowed to reveal how much he paid and does not yet know who else will be in the capsule nor when he will blast off in the New Shepard rocket.

With some of the most exciting news of his life, Indialantic resident Steve Young had to keep quiet.

That was extremely tough. We are a small town and I had to get waivers from anyone that I told, Young said.

And that big secret was that Young will be flying to space on the next Blue Origin flight from Texas.

He found out that he got the ticket to fly back in December but had to keep it quiet.

He sold his telecom business a few years ago and built the three-story Pineapples restaurant in Eau Gallie to run as a family business with his son.

Young moved to the Space Coast back in 1969 as a child. Witnessing first-hand the evolution of spaceflight, he holds intense pride that he will be representing the community on this flight.

They label you technically an astronaut, but there are real astronauts that live in this area, Young said.

So while the flight feeds his thrill-seeking personality, its also about being part of something bigger to come, according to the 59-year-old.

Pioneering something that people are going to do on a regular basis. Hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years, Young said.

Although it might be subtle, Young drives around town with the Blue Origin feather logo on the side of his pick-up.

But the next vehicle he gets into with that feather will be going a lot faster.

I was rewarded with lots of money on the sale of my business, Young said. And who better to spend it on than myself for something very special.

Hes not allowed to reveal how much he paid and does not yet know who else will be in the capsule nor when he will blast off in the New Shepard rocket.

Continued here:

Brevard County restaurant owner to fly to edge of space on Blue Origin rocket - WESH 2 Orlando

We may not have to wait too much longer for the first-ever orbital test flight of SpaceX's Starship deep-space transportation system.

SpaceX is developing Starship to carry people and cargo to Mars, the moon and other far-flung destinations. The system consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable:a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft called Starship.

Starship prototypes have conducted a handful of high-altitude test flights to date, but the vehicle has yet to go orbital. SpaceX plans to change that soon; the company is gearing up to launch an orbital test mission with the system, which will also mark the spaceflight debut of Super Heavy.

Photos: SpaceX lifts huge Super Heavy rocket onto launch stand

And those preparations are ramping up. Ship 24, the Starship vehicle that will fly the orbital mission, just rolled out to the launch pad at Starbase, SpaceX's South Texas facility, company representatives announced via Twitter today (opens in new tab) (July 6). In that same post, SpaceX shared three photos of the big spacecraft on the move.

Ship 24 will launch atop a Super Heavy known as Booster 7. That rocket is already at the pad and may conduct a static fire test a prelaunch trial in which a rocket's engines are lit while the vehicle stays anchored to the ground in the coming days.

Both Starship and Super Heavy are powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engine. The spacecraft sports six Raptors, and the booster features a whopping 33, as SpaceX showed in another recent Twitter post (opens in new tab) that shared photos of both vehicles with all of their engines installed.

For comparison, SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket incorporates nine of the company's Merlin engines in its first stage and one Merlin in its upper stage. And Merlins are considerably smaller and less powerful than Raptors.

SpaceX recently cleared a significant regulatory hurdle on the road to Starship's first orbital launch: Last month, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that SpaceX could continue its Starship work at Starbase, provided the company takes more than 75 actions to mitigate the effects of that work on the surrounding area, which is a biodiversity hotspot.

There are other such boxes to check, however; for example, the FAA must still grant SpaceX a launch license ahead of the upcoming orbital attempt.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There (opens in new tab)" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).

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SpaceX rolls Starship prototype to launch pad ahead of orbital test flight (photos) - Space.com

Jeff Bezos celebrates after his Blue Origin spaceflight in 2021, at left, and plays it cool as a Starfleet officer in the 2016 film Star Trek Beyond. (Photos: Blue Origin / Paramount via Justin Lin)

Over the course of five decades, advances in space science and exploration have changed the Star Trek saga but its obvious that the sci-fi TV show has changed the course of space exploration as well.

You need look no further than Amazons billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, who took inspiration from Star Trek to green-lighttalking computersand his very ownBlue Origin space effort. The same goes for SpaceX founder Elon Musk, whosmentioned in the same breath as the Wright Brothersin a Star Trek: Discovery episode.

I cant imagine a version of the world where Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos exist, for better or worse, however you feel about them, without Star Trek, says Ryan Britt, the author ofPhasers on Stun,a new book chronicling the history of the Star Trek sci-fi franchise.

Im not saying that those guys embody all of Star Treks ideals, because they may not, Britt says in the latest episode of theFiction Science podcast. But there is an audacity to space travel, whether it is from a government like NASA or another nations government thats putting people in space, or if its from the private sector.

In his book, and in the podcast, Britt traces the ups and downs of Star Treks evolution from a relatively short-lived TV show that creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned as aWagon Train to the Starsto a fan phenomenon that has engendered two dozen spin-offs. The latest Trek incarnation,Strange New Worlds,wraps up its first season on the Paramount+ streaming service this week.

Some of the concepts that Star Trek popularized palm-sized communicators, quantum teleportation, holodecks and medical tricorders have made the leap from fiction to fact well in advance of the 23rd century. But theres another side to the equation: Real-life science and technology have changed Star Trek as well.

Take black holes, for instance. Gravitational singularities and their time-warping effects have been a Trek standby since 1967 (when anencounter with a black starthrew the Enterprise into the 60s). But Britt says Star Trek has upped its black hole game, thanks to science consultantErin McDonald.

The way that theyve depicted the black holes in the contemporary Star Treks, starting in Discovery season two, is very close to how contemporary science thinks that they would look and behave, Britt says. In the original series, sometimes Kirk would throw out what a quasar is, and it wasnt quite right. But now, its very close in terms of the way the spatial phenomena look. In the new shows, its very cutting-edge.

The same goes for communicating with aliens. Star Treks crew members leaned heavily onGoogle Translate er, I mean theiruniversal translator to decipher alien languages. But theres never been any guarantee that the aliens will look like prosthetic-wearing humanoids who communicate through speech. (Seattle-area sci-fi author Ted Chiangexplored an alternate scenarioin ashort storythat was adapted into a screenplay for the 2016 movieArrival.)

Britt says Star Treks writers addressed the issue in a Star Trek: Discovery episode focusing on analien species that the crew couldnt figure out how to communicate with. It ends up being pheromones it communicates through these sorts of feelings and these emotions, Britt says. They can translate that back into math, and then they can go from there and create a bridge language.

In retrospect, it shouldnt be so surprising that Star Trek anticipated technologies such as communicators, translators and tricorders. Britt points out that Roddenberryworked with a researcher at the Rand Corporationto figure out which sorts of way-out innovations would lend authenticity as well as a gee-whiz vibe to his sci-fi show.

Arguably, Star Treks most valuable contribution to science and exploration came in the form of inspiration: Britt recountsthe story of how Martin Luther King Jr. persuaded Nichelle Nichols to stick with the showbecause her Uhura character provided a rare opportunity to inspire fellow African-Americans. Nichols, in turn, took on acampaign to inspire women and minorities to apply for spots in NASAs growing astronaut corps.

When Nichelle started her campaign, NASA had very few Black or female applicants, Britt quotes documentary filmmakerTodd Thompsonas saying in the book. Im not saying zero. ButSally RideandRon McNair; yes, they were there as a direct result of her campaign with NASA.

More recent Trek shows have continued to widen diversity on the final frontier: Star Trek: Discovery, for instance, featureda romance between a non-binary human character and a trans alien character played, respectively, by a non-binary actor and a trans actor.

One of the worlds most prominent Trekkie techies is Jeff Bezos: He was just 2 years old when the original Star Trek premiered, but the show inspired one of his favorite childhood games. Wed fight over whod get to be Captain Kirk, or Spock, and somebody used to play the computer, too,Bezos told The Washington Post in 2016. Wed have little cardboard phasers and cardboard tricorders.

Decades later, Bezos acquired a more expensive prop: a model of the Starship Enterprise that was used in the early Star Trek movies and is now on display at Blue Origins headquarters in Kent, Wash. And in 2016, Bezos played Star Trek for real: He talked his way intoa cameo as an alien Starfleet officialin Star Trek Beyond.

It was super-fun for me, Bezos said. It was a bucket-list item.

Five years later, Bezos made a different sort of bucket-list item come true for Star Trek actor William Shatner. The guy who played Captain Kirkfinally got his chance to fly into space for real, courtesy of Bezos and Blue Origin. What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine, Shatner told Bezos afterward.

Elon Musk has his own set of Star Trek ties. In April, when Musk declared his intention to buy Twitter,Shatner jokedthat the billionaire should dump the bird and hire him as the face of Twitter.

You will always be my Captain,Musk tweeted in reply.

Like Bezos, Musk was given a moment of Star Trek immortality: On an episode of Star Trek: Discovery, a character named Captain Gabriel Lorca (played by Jason Isaacs) upbraids a fellow officer by asking him if he wants to be remembered as a pioneer like the Wright Brothers and Elon Musk or as a failed fungus expert.

Spoiler alert: Theres a bit of irony to the reference, in that later episodes reveal Captain Lorca to be more nefarious than he seems.

Britt says he doesnt mind that Star Treks accolades for Elon Musk come from a controversial character like Lorca. In fact, he thinks the controversies in which Musk is currently enmeshed fit right in with one of Star Treks major themes: that we humans may be flawed, but that we are nevertheless capable of doing great things.

These things that happen when humanity leaps forward are not always going to be without their drawbacks, Britt says.

I always thought that was also a secret commentary on Gene Roddenberry himself, oddly, Britt adds. I thought that was like a way of saying the person that created this will be sort of deified, but here they are when theyre actually in the trenches building it, and theres messiness. I like that Star Trek is willing to do that.

Will Star Trek continue to live long and prosper? Britt, whos in his early 40s, says theres a chance hell still be writing about the Star Trek saga when the franchise turns 100 years old in 2066.

It will have to do a couple more radical reinventions, though, to stay relevant, Britt says. And I think that some of that might be a true reboot, right? Where you just completely throw it all out and you just start over, and you say, Well do Starfleet,the Prime Directiveand the Enterprise, but thats all. And then everything else can bereinvented.

Check out the original version of this item on Cosmic Log to find out how close Star Trek came to predicting the course of early 21st-century history, and to look back at 20 years of Trek tech talk. Stay tuned for future episodes of theFiction Science podcast via Anchor, Apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, Breaker, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Reason.

Alan Boyles for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writerwho lives in Berkeley, Calif. To learn more about Phetteplace, check out her website,DominicaPhetteplace.com.

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How the Star Trek saga blazed new trails for space exploration with a hand from superfan Jeff Bezos - GeekWire

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has selected candidates for its next round of space missions, which are projected to launch between 2026 and 2030.

Out of the 13 missions proposed, it is expected that between five and seven will be chosen for launch, SpaceNews reported.

The new missions will be part of CAS's third Strategic Priority Program (SPP III) project, also known as the New Horizons Program (The program has no relation to NASA's New Horizons mission.). A description of each of the 13 candidates was published in a paper in the Chinese Journal of Space Science on June 28, 2022.

Related: China is on the hunt for 'Earth 2.0' with proposed space telescope

Three of the proposed missions will conduct astrophysics and astronomy research:

Four of CAS's 13 potential missions are heliophysics efforts:

Four of the potential missions are aimed at studying Earth and other members of our solar system:

Finally, two missions would search the cosmos for habitable exoplanets:

Each of the 13 proposed New Horizons Program missions will be assessed by a CAS committee on criteria such as budgetary requirements, technological readiness level and how quickly the required technologies could be manufactured ahead of Chinas 15th Five-year plan, which begins in 2026. The New Horizons Program also includes funding for research projects that would support future science missions.

Email Brett at BTingley@Space.com or follow Brett on Twitter at @bretttingley. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.

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Search for habitable exoplanets included in China's upcoming space missions - Space.com

Victoria Tarpley solders the device while Tyler Ardrey, at left, looks on.

Space Hardware Club

For the first time in almost a decade, a payload created by a student-led group at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) has rocketed to space.

Students are now analyzing the data sent back by the flight monitoring equipment they built as part of the Terminus Spaceflight Research Group (TSRG) operating under the auspices of the Space Hardware Club (SHC) at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System.

The payload rocketed to a suborbital flight to space and back aboard a Terrier-Orion rocket out of NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on June 24, with 32 other university student projects in the NASA RockOn and RockSat-C programs. The last UAH student-led project to go to space was the SHCs ChargerSat-1 in 2013.

We were really happy it worked and we had data available the same day it launched, says Ben Campbell, a masters student in aerospace systems engineering who is TSRGs founder and project manager. Campbell, a graduate research assistant who says his career goal is to become an astronaut, used his undergraduate spacecraft development experience and connections to teach the team to produce the device and then to get it into space.

At the moment, we have a large collection of raw data that was recorded by all the sensors, and we are now in the process of correlating everything together to basically produce the big picture, or life story, of what our payload experienced during the mission, Campbell says.

We have things worked out for the initial ascent phase of the launch, where we have clear data indicating events such as the operation of the two stages that were used on the launch vehicle, and our crossing of the Karman line which is the boundary of space thats about 100 kilometers above sea level at around 114 seconds after liftoff.

The team is still going through data to determine activity while in space and when the rocket began to re-enter the atmosphere and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.The UAH payload has been retrieved by a boat team, brought back to land and is being shipped back to campus.

The payload was essentially a small deck of electronics, about the size of a dinner plate, which hosted a suite of various sensors to monitor flight conditions throughout the mission, Campbell says.

Ben Campbell holds the payload. Hes flanked by, from left, Matthew Bray, Tyler Ardrey, Tristan Carter and David Tutunzhiu.

Space Hardware Club

Sensors onboard included:

The payload was designed so students could use a collection of systems familiar to them from past work, such as common sensors, microcontrollers and other electrical components, and apply them to a spacecraft to be flown in suborbital space with all the design and manufacturing considerations that go into making a payload flight-ready.

Campbell has been working for over a year on TSRG, making use of contacts he made while in three CubeSat programs and two sounding rocket projects as a mechanical engineering undergraduate at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho.

I started the group so I could try to use some connections and resources I have from my time prior to coming here to establish routine access to space for UAH to try and getus back to space, he says. Through that, I can use it as a way to give students here the opportunity to interact with NASA personnel and be involved in every step of spacecraft development beyond just building something and giving it to NASA, like what's traditionally done with a lot of CubeSat projects.

The completed flight monitoring payload.

Space Hardware Club

The goal is to have UAH students regularly building spacecraft and going to a NASA launch center to participate in activities like payload integration, sequence testing, vehicle assembly, launch pad prep, recovery and other activities.

The group aims to climb the levels of NASAs student launch programs. NASAs RockOn program is introductory suborbital spaceflight research, RockSat-C is the next level up with a larger payload size and RockSat-X is the third level, where there is maximum freedom of design and purpose. The three programs are a collaboration of the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia and NASAs Wallops Flight Facility.

With each program's increasing intensity, the students get to become more involved with the whole process of working with NASA, up to the point where students have the capability of helping assemble and test the rocket itself, Campbell says. There are tons of great and capable students in theSHC thatwant to send things to space, and this is one way I know to make that happen.

Campbell credits ChrisKoehler, a contact from his past who directs the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, with helping get the first TSRG project off the ground.

He runs the RockOn, RockSat-C, and RockSat-X programs. He's a really awesome guy who knows a lot, has a passion for helping teach students about space, and is really fun totalk with, Campbell says. He was our main point of contact with getting things situated with us joining RockOn 2022 and everything supporting that.

The team is considering future projects that include communications systems, propulsion technology, experimental avionics, geology, biology, heliophysics and atmospheric science.A possible mission to the lunar surface is also being discussed.

One of the great things about the situation we are in right now is that, depending on the nature of different experiments, we can try to combine multiple experiments onto a single flight, and if some concepts don't get flown this coming year, we can try to pursue them a later year, Campbell says.

By working to establish routine access to space at UAH, Terminus will help enable future space missions supporting a wide field of research areas and help grow the technical expertise of UAH students.

Read more:

UAH student-built payload goes to space for the first time in almost a decade - UAH News

In March of this year, Mark Vande Hei returned to earth after spending 355 days in outer space. Today on the show, I talk to Mark about what it was like to spend nearly a year in orbit, and how he ended up setting a new record for the longest spaceflight by an Americanastronaut. We first talk about how Mark went from being a soldier in the Army who served twice in Iraq, to working for NASA. Mark explains the application process for becoming anastronautand what he thought were the hardest parts of his training. He then shares how you exercise in space, what a typical work day on the International Space Station is like, and how it feels to do a space walk. I ask Mark whether he wasworried when the Russians threatened to abandonhim in space, whether life on the space station is hard on morale, what its like physically to returnto earth, and whether theres a letdown when its time to hang up yourastronautpack.

Photo Credit: NASA

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. In March of this year, Mark Vande Hei returned to earth after spending 355 days in outer space. Today on the show I talk to Mark about what it was like to spend nearly a year in orbit, and how he ended up setting a new record for the longest space flight by an American astronaut.

We first talk about how Mark went from being a soldier in the Army, he served twice in Iraq, to working for NASA. Mark explains the application process for becoming an astronaut and what he thought were the hardest parts of his training. He then shows how you exercise in outer space, what a typical work day in the International Space Station is like, and how it feels to do a space walk.

I ask Mark whether he was worried when the Russians threatened to abandon him in space, whether life on the space station is hard to morale, what its like to physically return to Earth, and whether its a let down when its finally time to hang up your astronaut pack. After the shows over check at our show notes at aom.is/space.

Mark Vande Hei, welcome to the show.

Mark Vande Hei: Well thanks, Brett. Its great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are an astronaut and you just got back in March from a nearly year-long stay in the International Space Station, and were gonna talk about it cause thats an American record. Well talk about the day, how that happened. But before we do, lets talk about just being an astronaut, how long youve been an astronaut, whats kind of the stuff youve been doing as an astronaut?

Mark Vande Hei: Oh, I became an astronaut in 2011. Prior to that, I was an astronaut candidate here at Johnson Space Center, started in 2009. And from 2011 on, a lot of its maintenance training, trying to make sure youre ready for a space flight, and I served as the director of Operations in Russia for a year, so I spent that year in Star City, Russia, where the three members that were then assigned to launch in a Soyuz spacecraft to get to the space station were training. That was definitely a highlight for me of that time.

I also studied Russian a lot, quite honestly, in the intervening years. Theres a lot of neutral buoyancy lab training we do to get ready for spacewalks, thats a big part of it, and thats some of the recurring training I mentioned. And probably about once a month, I would do a public affairs event, where I go and talk to anything from organization to elementary school.

Brett McKay: How many missions have you flown as an astronaut?

Mark Vande Hei: I have flown two, both to the space station and both getting there and back on a Soyuz spacecraft.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And so is being an astronaut, is this like, were you like a typical kid who, When I grow up, I wanna be an astronaut.? Was that something youve always wanted to do, or did it just kind of happened?

Mark Vande Hei: It wasnt something that I wanted to do, only because I didnt think it was possible. It was I think I was just trying to be too cool. I didnt want to say I wanted to be an astronaut some day, cause it felt a lot like saying I wanted to be Spider-Man or Superman someday, and it just, that wasnt something that I thought made sense.

I still am quite shocked that I actually have gotten to be an astronaut, and even getting to go through the interview process to be an astronaut I thought was amazing, and being able to say that Ive actually been to space as long as I have, Im still a little puzzled by that.

Brett McKay: Well, whats interesting about you and your career, unlike a lot of astronauts who get to NASA via the Air Force, theyre a pilot or fighter pilot, something like that, you had a military career but it was through the Army. So how did the Army lead you to NASA? Cause you typically dont think of Army and space in the same thing.

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah. Actually, we have pretty consistently had at least one Army officer in most, not every, but most astronaut candidate classes. Its something that the Army, unlike the other services though, initially it wasnt getting very well represented and we dont have high performance jet pilots in the Army. So in that regard. And that was what NASA is looking for initially, almost exclusively.

So at some point, if I understand correctly, the Army said, Hey, what can we do? Weve got some really good people, and then I think the Johnson Space Center director at the time said, Why you let us borrow a few of them, and then well see how they do? And so we would send typically helicopter pilots eventually, once that was a thing for the Army, sent in helicopter pilots here, and again, they werent high performance jet pilots, but they were great leaders and did a wonderful job, and so that was a way to get those folks in.

And for me, it was kind of a strange path. I had switched Because I got the opportunity to go to grad school as part of the preparation to teach at West Point, I was in grad school studying physics and the physics as I was most interested in was space physics. And then at the same time I was in grad school, the Army opened up a new career field called Space Operations, and I recognized that I was gonna spend five years away from the tactical environment I was familiar with in academia, and recognized that was gonna potentially, in a 20-year career that was gonna set me back quite a bit.

So when Space Operations came up as a possibility, I thought, Wow, I should This is something that might be uniquely suited to help out with. So I checked into it, I thought it sounded really interesting, and I managed to become a Space Operations Officer. And then it turned out that because this whole field was new, there was an Army astronaut who was talking to the general in charge of Army space operations and are talking about this new career field and how it would be nice to have the ability to broaden the experience base of Space Operations offices by having one of them actually work at the astronaut office and be exposed to human space flight in that regard, and then come back to the Army.

And so, shockingly at some point, I got invited to work at NASA, when I always thought it would be cool to work at NASA, but I never thought it would actually happen. So thats kind of a long story for how I ended up working at NASA in the first place. I actually started working at NASA in 2006.

Brett McKay: So youre more of like a liaison between the Army and NASA?

Mark Vande Hei: Actually, what I did when I was working here as what we call an engineer in the astronaut office was I was working as a capsule communicator, so my job was to have the astronauts perspective and work in the mission control center and understand enough of what the mission control, the flight controllers were talking about in the mission control team.

So that when the flight director said, Tell the crew this, I understood well enough what that was about to be able to explain to the crew. Which was a fantastic job. Youre sitting Youre communicating, history is happening, youre getting to watch what theyre doing in space as part of your work day. I just, I loved it. It was fantastic.

Brett McKay: Tell me a bit more about space operations in the Army. This is new to me, I didnt know this existed. What is the Army trying to do with space operations?

Mark Vande Hei: Granted, I have been out of it for quite a while, because the last time I was really involved in Army space operations was prior to 2006, so a lot of it might have changed, but the Army recognized that there is a lot with all the digitization thats coming on, that the Army can take great advantage of assets in space. But we werent really doing a good job of influencing investments in space that would benefit the Army, so we recognized that was a lack.

So that was part of it, getting some people in the Army, all with some experience in the field, pretty fairly senior officers at least with 10 years under their belt, typically back then, getting involved in space operations. And space operations in the Army was We could provide some promotional imagery, for example. There are some detection assets that we had access to.

Theres satellite communications we could help out with. It was really to help the military units were supporting take full advantage of the space assets that are available to the country.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Okay, so you end up at NASA, youre working there, an opportunity arises for you to apply to be an astronaut. Whats the application process like? Its very thorough, I imagine.

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah, it actually starts out with something pretty simple. Its just you go to usajobs.gov, and its the same application process that you use if you want to be a fireman for the federal government. Every federal government job is out there, including astronaut. So thats where you start. And if you make it through the thousands of applications to actually get an interview, then it definitely gets more intense.

Brett McKay: How long does the application process take?

Mark Vande Hei: Oh gosh, its probably on the order of more than six months, I would think, because And thats really because every one of those applications gets reviewed by somebody, and weve had up to 18,000 applicants in some recent classes. And that process gets the, that number down to about 400 that are considered really highly qualified, and then we start checking references. And after that, once the references have been checked, well pick a 120 people or so to actually start coming in for the first round of interviews.

Brett McKay: Thats really competitive. And then so theres multiple rounds of interviews, and I imagine theres tests involved too. Are they doing psychological tests to make sure this is your fit for this position?

Mark Vande Hei: There are definitely psychological tests, and Im not sure if this is a good idea, but I admitted during my first interview week that after three hours of filling in the dots, I stopped. So at first, every dot I filled in I thought, What are they gonna think about me when I put this in there? and I was really, really putting a lot of thought into everything. And then after three hours of that I just didnt care.

I just wanted to finish the darn thing. So I told them that they had definitely gotten the real me at some point because I was, I just was exhausted by the process.

Brett McKay: Alright, so you go through this process, youre selected. Lets talk about training to become an astronaut. Now, I imagine a lot of people who apply to be an astronaut, theyve been training to be an astronaut their entire lives, either physically training and doing all the math and getting hours in the cockpit. What did your training look like after you got picked?

Mark Vande Hei: After I got picked. So weve got this astronaut candidate time period, you effectually call the people that are in that situation, you call them ass cans.

Its two years where you are Almost everybody passes. We have had some people not make it through. The training is everything you need to do to demonstrate potential to be assigned to a space flight. So we train people on EVAs in our neutral buoyancy lab, in a very large pool. We And when I say EVAs, I mean spacewalks.

We train people on the International Space Station systems, and when we had a shuttle program, were training people on the shuttle system as well. So whatever spacecraft we have available, we train people on those systems. We use a T-38, thats a NASA jet, that helps get people in an operational mindset.

The other things we do, weve got robotics training, thats a very challenging task too, learning how to operate the robotic arm that we have on the space station, so we put people through a course on that. And then its, our space station program is an international program so, and theres a lot of training that happens in Russia. So a big part of the training is a learning Russian, and that is no small task either.

Brett McKay: Are you now fluent in Russian?

Mark Vande Hei: I would say I have been pretty fluent in Russian, but its a surprisingly perishable skill. I think the most fluent I was in Russian was on the day I launched for my first flight. Because I had spent so much time in Russia learning how to be a co-pilot for a Russian spacecraft, and I felt pretty comfortable.

I was fluent enough to be able to talk on the radio very publicly, to make reports about their spacecraft in Russian and understand what they were saying. So in some regards yes, but theres so much further to go. Theres certainly topics, many, many topics I could get into where I would be very clueless about how to communicate.

Brett McKay: Weve had another astronaut on the podcast, and he mentioned part of the training was like wilderness survival training. Did you do that?

Mark Vande Hei: We have what we call Land Survival Training. Im not sure, I think youre talking about Terry Virts, is that correct?

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah.

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah, I listened to that podcast too. [chuckle] And actually, I was an office neighbor with Terry for a while. We do land survival training up in Maine, and back then, at least we used to, I think its changed now, it used to be run by the Navy. I think we switched down to the Army at Fort Rucker in Alabama. Alabama, I hope Im saying the right thing.

Brett McKay: Out of all the stuff you had to do, this two-year process, what was the most difficult component of your training that you had?

Mark Vande Hei: Oh I would say both the Russian and EVA training. And theyre very different. The EVA training, the space walk training is very physically demanding, but its also very mentally demanding, so its a combination of being in good enough shape to have enough mental capacity left over to do the right things in an environment where you really do not wanna mess that up.

And then the Russian is just so humbling. Its one of those things where I think if youre a person who really likes to know that youve got a grasp on this and this is gonna work out, its just something about language just feels like Its shocking that it works, but you dont Its either there or its not. Its a skill, and you dont really know Im not sure how to describe it. Its just challenging.

Brett McKay: So being in space without gravity is surprisingly hard on the body, and were gonna talk about that here in a bit. So what did you do as far as fitness training to get ready for a space mission?

Mark Vande Hei: I always liked exercising, so I dont think I changed anything specifically to get ready for a space flight, I just did the variety. I would look Honestly, I would look at the CrossFit website, Im not trying to condone any products, but they had a variety of workouts and I would pick one of their workouts and I would go for it.

I did recognize at my age if I try to do the prescribed workout set, I would hurt myself. So I recognized that if I hit muscle failure five times, it was time to stop that exercise or drop the weight to half of what I was doing, something like that. So I certainly had a learning process with how to survive those workouts.

Brett McKay: Does NASA just have astronauts prepare physically on their own, or do they set out like, Heres a suggested workout plan.? Or is it like, Well, its up to you.? It sounds like you just did whatever you wanted to do.

Mark Vande Hei: I did. Theres a wide variety of enthusiasm about exercise in the astronaut office, and certainly people tend to be much more on the fit side, but some people like to work out in the facilities we have here on Johnson Space Center, other people like to do it at home or in a different facility.

The nice thing is youve got a lot of resources here to help you out, so weve got some strength and conditioning and rehab specialists that are fantastic coaches. In fact, one of the things Ive been working on is snatches lately, and the strength coach that helps out, hes fantastic, so thats just a wonderful resource.

Brett McKay: Well, lets talk about exercise in space. What does that look like and how do you do that in zero-G?

Mark Vande Hei: Great question. We have three devices we use for exercise on the space station. One of them is called ARED, it means Advanced Resistive Exercise Device. Its a very large device we use for, the closest we can get to weightlifting, cause weightlifting doesnt really makes sense in space.

So the way it works, the way I like to describe it is imagine that you have a seesaw and theres a kid on the other side thats pulling up on their end of the seesaw and you wanna pull up on your end of the seesaw, and that kid always applies the same amount of force. So if you put the fulcrum right in the middle, youre gonna pull on To change the position of that seesaw youre gonna have to exert a little more force than the kid on the other side of the seesaw.

But lets say you wanna vary that, you can change the pivot point between you and that kid, and then you can make it a very small amount of force to a very large amount of force based on what mechanical advantage or disadvantage you give yourself. So hopefully that helps you visualize what Im talking about, but the way it works is we have that lever arm with a pivot point thats adjustable and allows us to change the force from 20 pounds to 600 pounds.

And that kid on the other side of the seesaw is a couple of vacuum cylinders. So when you pull up on the bar or the cable that youre pulling up on, you are forcing a couple of plates that are being pushed on by the air pressure in the space station, and thats what provides the force.

Brett McKay: What kind of things were you doing with this thing? Squats, shoulder presses?

Mark Vande Hei: You can do squats, shoulder presses, dead lifts, Romanian dead lifts. Curls, crunches, bench press.

Brett McKay: Pretty much anything.

Mark Vande Hei: Pretty much, although we tried doing things like thrusters, where you use the cable and you put the bar on your shoulders and go from a deep squat into a standing position with the bar over your head, but having that cable run across your chest and across your face makes it not quite the right position, so I actually didnt like doing that in the launcher. And then for another thing, I tried doing kettlebell swings using the cable, but you dont have momentum like you would. Thats one thing we really dont have.

So in a kettlebell swing, that momentum that you generate with your hips and your legs prevents you from, ideally prevents you from having to use your shoulders as much, but it started feeling like it was just a front raise for me when I was trying to do a kettlebell swing.

Brett McKay: So you got this resistance device. What other devices you have on there for physical fitness?

Mark Vande Hei: Weve got two devices we use for cardiovascular fitness. One is T2, its a treadmill, and thats interesting in space, because if you just ran on a treadmill, as soon youve pushed off with your foot, you would depart the treadmill. So what we have is a, what I would describe as a backpacking harness minus the backpack.

And that is a fairly comfortable harness which we attached some chains to on the side, and those chains attach to bungee cords, and you can adjust the length of the chains because in that case it changes the length of the bungee cords, and that allows you to adjust to At my height, it was about upto 130 pounds of force, so it still wasnt as much as I actually weight.

But I talked to Weve got some pretty impressive athletes in the astronaut office, and one of them mentioned to me that they actually just added a second set of bungee cords and doubled it, and I was blown away. Cause for some reason 130 pounds, it feels a lot like youre wearing 130 pounds on your back and your hips. So its not comfortable at all. It really starts to wear

In fact, there was I went for a two-hour walk one time, and by the time I finished, those hip pads had worn a hole in the skin on my hips. So its not comfortable, I was not a big fan of it. Although Ill tell you what, if I ever get to weigh only 80 pounds, I can run really, really fast.

Brett McKay: Whats the other cardio device?

Mark Vande Hei: The other cardio device is called CVIS, I dont know what every letter in the acronym means. But its an ergometer, its a bicycle. A bicycle without a seat cause you dont need it. And I love that one, thats a really challenging exercise device. You can go up to 350 watts. And yeah, I really got some brutal thigh burning workouts of that machine.

Brett McKay: And so this physical activity during space is important because when youre up in space, what happens to your body in zero-G?

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah, humans are very adaptable, so we adapt quickly to the space environment. Which means your body recognizes you dont need the skeletal structure to help you be able to stand upright on the floor, and you dont need as much musculature, so very quickly all those things would atrophy, and so its very, very important to workout.

Because of that, every single day NASA schedules an hour and a half for resistive exercise and an hour for the cardio exercise. Sometimes actually, because again I like exercising, I would try to do two hours of resistive exercise instead of an hour and a half, and I actually got up earlier in the morning just to be able to try to do that.

Brett McKay: Were gonna take quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So when you went to space, what was your job on the space station? Why were you there and what were you doing?

Mark Vande Hei: Everything every crew member is doing on the space station is to support the science mission that weve got. Theres science were doing to help with exploration, theres science were doing that actually helps people out on the ground today. Theres technology demonstrations, for example, as well.

Every crew member, I think of them as laboratory technicians, where were not the scientist per se, were not the ones who design the experiments, a lot of times we dont do any observations or gather data for the experiments, and were certainly not analyzing the data and writing papers about those experiments later, the scientists are doing all that.

Were just making sure that what theyve dedicated so much of their life to is functioning as well as possible on the space station. Well help troubleshoot, make sure they have all the resources they need, and things like that.

Brett McKay: So what did a typical work day look like for you? What time would you wake up? Thats another thing, I guess time is different up in outer space, but how long was a work day for you?

Mark Vande Hei: The work day officially starts with a morning planning conference, typically at 07:30 in the morning, and ends with an evening planning conference that finishes around 07:30 at night. And that sounds like a really long day. Those are only the weekdays. Ideally, Monday through Friday would be that. We have weekends off with a couple hours of house cleaning on the weekend.

But in that 12 hours on a weekday, weve got an hour for lunch, and weve got the two and a half hours I mentioned for exercise. So it ends up being about an eight and a half hour work day.

Brett McKay: So you did space walks. What was your first space walk like? And did you have any sort of spiritual or awe-inspiring experience with it?

Mark Vande Hei: Its definitely awe-inspiring. I would say the spiritual stuff that I ran into was just looking out the windows on the space station before the space walks actually happened. I would say So as far as the emotions associated with doing a space walk, you study a lot to make sure youre ready, cause its a very public eight-hour shift, or six and a half hours, seven hour shift working outside.

The first emotion I remember is the sense of the lighting changing inside of the crew lock. So imagine youre in this clunky space suit with another crewmate and youre head to toe, and the more experienced crew member or the person in charge of the space walk is the one who opens the hatch.

And so on my first space walk I was EV-2, extra vehicular crew member number two, the less experienced person, and I didnt have my face over the hatch, I had my feet over the hatch. But when Randy Bresnik, was in charge of that EVA, opened up that hatch, there was the bright light shining, reflecting off of the Earth into that space that previously just had artificial lighting, and it was clearly outdoor lighting, it was like looking through a storm door on a winter day in Minnesota. It was just very bright all of a sudden, an I had the sensation that, Whoa, thats outside, and this is real, this is really gonna happen.

Once I actually got outside, it was nighttime, which probably made it a little bit easier on me, and the neutral buoyancy lab that I mentioned earlier, does such a good job of making us familiar with the terrain of the outside of the space station that that seemed like a very familiar environment. And all I can say about Its just hard to get your head wrapped around the distances that youre looking at.

When youre holding onto a spacecraft going at 5 miles a second and its dark outside, its just, the distance between you and the Earth is hard to grasp. The distance between you and the stars, this vast openness that youre in this space suit in. Its hard to get your head wrapped around it. And honestly you got a lot of work to do so you dont wanna spend too much time trying to dwell on it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And some people dont realize this about the EVAs, this is a gruelling thing. Youre in there, like you said, for six hours.

Continue reading here:

Podcast #815: What It's Like to Spend a Year in Space - Art of Manliness

Updated 7:45 a.m. July 8 with comment from ESAs Aschbacher.

WASHINGTON NASA strongly criticized Russia for using the International Space Station to promote its invasion of Ukraine, a break from the agencys approach of emphasizing ongoing cooperation despite the war.

In a statement late July 7, NASA said it strongly rebukes Russia for political activity on the station related to Russias ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The brief statement did not specify what incident prompted the statement.

NASA strongly rebukes Russia using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine, which is fundamentally inconsistent with the stations primary function among the 15 international participating countries to advance science and develop technology for peaceful purposes, the agency said in a statement emailed to reporters.

The statement appears to be in response to images released by the Russian space agency Roscosmos July 4 that showed the three Russian cosmonauts on the station Sergey Korsakov, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev holding flags associated with the self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic and Donetsk Peoples Republic. These are regions of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces but whose independence is recognized by only Russia and Syria.

The flags were displayed to mark the Russian occupation of Lysychansk, the last city in Luhansk to fall to Russian forces. In the Roscosmos statement posted on the Telegram social media network, the agency said it and the cosmonauts on the station congratulated the Luhansk Peoples Republic government on the capture of the city.

The NASA statement stands in contrast to its past efforts to publicly minimize the effect of the war on the ISS partnership. NASA leadership had in the past noted a long-running relationship with Russia and the former Soviet Union in spaceflight that dated back to the Cold War.

On the station are Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, and they are all very professional. The relationship between the mission control in Houston and in Moscow is very professional, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said June 15 during a joint press conference with his European Space Agency counterpart, Josef Aschbacher, when asked about relations with Russia.

Despite the tragedies that are occurring in Ukraine by President Putin, the fact is that the international partnership is solid when it comes to the civilian space program, he said.

Aschbacher offered a comment similar to the NASA statement in a July 8 tweet. It is unacceptable that the ISS becomes a platform to play out the political or humanitarian crises happening on the ground, he wrote. The purpose of the ISS is to conduct research & prepare us for deeper exploration. It must remain a symbol of peace and inspiration.

Its unclear if this incident will have any lasting effect on ISS cooperation. NASA and Roscosmos have yet to finalize a seat barter agreement to allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew spacecraft and American astronauts to go on Soyuz spacecraft. In a separate Telegram post July 6, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, said he expected a final version of the agreement in one to two weeks.

A European Space Agency astronaut on the station, Samantha Cristoforetti, is scheduled to perform a spacewalk from the stations Russian segment July 21 with Artemyev. The two will work on a European robotic arm on the stations Nauka module.

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NASA criticizes Russia for using space station to promote invasion of Ukraine - SpaceNews

After eight years of science work, jet-turned-telescope SOFIA is preparing to take its final flight. But before its end of service on Sept. 30, the flying observatory is taking one last trip abroad.

Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a joint project between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and consists of a modified Boeing 747 aircraft with a special door built into its side that opens mid-flight to reveal observational instruments. Now, SOFIA is spending its final international deployment in Christchurch, New Zealand, where it has spent six previous deployments.

"We are thrilled to be returning to Christchurch to continue to study and discover the infrared universe," Naseem Rangwala, the SOFIA project scientist, said in a statement.

Related: A photo tour of NASA's SOFIA flying observatory

Because SOFIA can fly above 40,000 feet (12,000 meters) in altitude, it can make clearer infrared observations than ground-based telescopes. In particular,the telescope flies above 99% of the atmosphere's water vapor, which can interfere with infrared imaging.

Although SOFIA is usually based in Palmdale, California, at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, where it typically takes four overnight observation flights per week, it travels internationally to observe different parts of the sky. One of its most frequent destinations is Christchurch.

SOFIA's original mission lasted just five years, although its anticipated lifespan was 20 years. But based on the most recent astrophysics decadal survey-- a document published by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that suggests research priorities and crunches budgets for the next decade NASA and DLR decided to end the SOFIA program on Sept. 30. Its high operational costs, to the tune of $85 million a year, simply didn't provide enough return on the investment, the panel behind the report determined.

During its final stint in Christchurch, SOFIA will make an estimated 32 flights with two main science goals. The observatory will use its High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera Plus (HAWC+) instruments to map the Milky Way galaxy's magnetic fields; it will also use the German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies (GREAT) to study stellar feedback, or the interaction of stars with their local environment.

"We are committed to delivering a strong finish for this unique astrophysics mission, from a place of strength and pride, by giving our scientific community as much data as possible from the Southern Hemisphere," Rangwala said.

Data from SOFIA's flights in New Zealand will be made available in NASA's public archives.

Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA's flying SOFIA observatory on last New Zealand trip - Space.com

When Apollo astronauts sent back the first pictures of Earth as a disk in space, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote of it as that bright loveliness in the eternal cold. He was not far off. Deep space has a temperature of 2.7 kelvinsjust 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

If the James Webb Space Telescope is to worklooking so far out and therefore so far back in time that it can see the first galaxies forming after the big bangit will have to image objects so faint that they barely stand out from the cold around them. The world will begin finding out how well the observatory works as soon as next week, when JWST is expected to release its first trove of scientific images and spectroscopic data.

So, for arguments sake, lets assume all indications so far do in fact point to a successful kickoff of the (hopefully long and storied) scientific data-gathering phase of Webbs mission. How then did the engineers and designers of this massive telescope ever make it possible to cool the telescope down enoughall at a remove of nearly four times the distance from Earth to the moonto possibly do its job?

After more than 25 years work and technological hurdles beyond counting, the Webb team has launched and stationed its mammoth observatory in solar orbitand brought its instruments below 40 kelvins (-233 C), cold enough to see the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago. Remarkably, most of the cooling has been done passively, by shielding the telescope from the sun and letting physics take care of the rest.

Webb is not just the product of a group of people. Its not the product of some smart astronomersWebb is truly the product of our entire worlds capability, says Keith Parrish, a leader on the Webb team at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Taken as a whole, Webb is truly the result of our entire know-how of how to build complex machines.

Parrish joined the project in 1997, ultimately becoming its commissioning manager through the years of design, assembly, testing, delay and, finally, launch on 25 December 2021. He says almost everything about itits shape and location, the materials from which its madewas dictated by the need to have an observatory that would survive for years at supercold temperatures.

In this photo, the five-layered JWST sunshield is being unfurled and inspected in a clean room. The layers of coated Kapton E never touch, minimizing the transmission of heat from one layer to the next. Alex Evers/Northrop Grumman

The Webb is an infrared observatory for many reasons, not the least of which is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of light from distant objects is lengthened, causing dramatic redshift. Infrared is also good for seeing through cosmic dust and gas, and for imaging cold things such as comets, Kuiper Belt objects, and perhaps planets orbiting other stars.

But infrared radiation is often best measured as heat, which is why its important for the Webb to be so cold. If, like the Hubble Telescope, it were in low Earth orbit, and it had no shielding from the sun, most of its targets would be drowned out by the sun and ground, and by heat in the telescope itself.

If my signal is heatand infrared is heatthen what I cant have is other heat sources that are noise in the system, says Jim Flynn, the sunshield manager at Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the Webb.

So the Webb has been sent to circle a spot in space called L2, 1.5 million kilometers away, opposite the sun, one of the locations known as Lagrange points, where the gravity of Earth and the sun roughly cancel each other out. Its a good compromise: Earth is distant enough that it doesnt interfere with observations, but close enough that communication with the spacecraft can be relatively fast. And since the ship isnt flying from day to night and back on every orbit, its temperature is relatively stable. All it needs is a really, really good sunshade.

Four [layers of sunshield] would have probably done the job. Five gave us a little bit of an insurance policy. Id like to say it was way more sophisticated than that, but thats really not what it was at all.Keith Parrish, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The engineering was pushed above and beyond to meet the scientific goals, says Alexandra Lockwood, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Webb. It is specifically designed the way that it is because they wanted to do intensive infrared science.

It makes for an ungainly-looking ship in many renderings, with the telescope assembly, intentionally open to space to prevent heat buildup, attached to its silvery sunshield, about 14 meters wide and 21 meters long, with five layers of insulating film to keep the telescope in almost total darkness.

From its sunlit side the sunshield roughly resembles a kite. The elongated shape, engineers found, would be the most efficient way to keep the Webbs optics out of the sun. They considered a square or octagon, but the final version covers more area without much more mass.

Its no larger than it needs to be to meet the science field-of-view requirements, and that unique kite shape is the result, says Parrish. Any larger than it is now, it just makes everything more complex.

The shields five layers are made of Kapton E, a plastic film first developed by DuPont in the 1960s and used for spacecraft insulation and printed circuits. The layers are coated in aluminum and silicon. Each is thinner than a human hair. But engineers say they are, together, very effective in blocking the suns heat. The first layer reduces its strength by about an order of magnitude (or 90 percent), the second layer removes another order of magnitude, and so on. The layers never touch, and theyre slightly flared as one gets away from the center of the shield, so that heat will escape out the sides.

The result: Temperatures on the sunny side of the shield approach 360 K (87 C), but on the dark side theyre below that all-important 40 K (-233 C). Or, put another way: More than 200 kilowatts of solar energy fall on the first layer, but only 23 milliwatts make it all the way through the fifth.

STScI/NASA

Why five layers? There was a lot of computer modeling, but it was hard to simulate the shields thermal behavior before flight. Four would have probably done the job. Five gave us a little bit of an insurance policy, says Parrish. Id like to say it was way more sophisticated than that, but thats really not what it was at all.

The ability to cool the telescope naturally, first calculated in the 1980s to be possible, was a major advance. It meant the Webb would not have to rely on a heavy, complex cryogenic apparatus, with refrigerants that could leak and shorten the mission. Of its four main scientific instruments, only one, a midinfrared detector called MIRI, needs to be cooled to 6.7 K. Its chilled by a multistage cryocooler, which pumps cold helium gas through pulse tubes to draw heat away from the instruments sensor. It uses the Joule-Thomson effect, reducing the temperature of the helium by making it expand after its forced through a 1-millimeter valve. Pressure comes from two pistonsthe cryocooler systems only moving partsfacing opposite directions so their movements will cancel each other out and not disturb observations.

Building the telescope proved immensely complicated; it fell years behind while its budget ballooned toward US $10 billion. The sunshield needed lengthy redesign after testing, when Kapton tore and fasteners came loose.

We just bit off way more than we could chew, Parrish says now. Thats exactly what NASA should be doing. It should be pushing the envelope. The problem is that eventually Webb got too big to fail.

But its finally deployed, sending data, and surprising engineers who expected at least some failures as it began to operate. Keith Parrish, his work done, is moving on to other projects at Goddard.

I think Webb, he says, is just a great product of what it means to be an advanced civilization.

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Inside the Universe Machine: The Webb Space Telescopes Chilly Sun Shield - IEEE Spectrum

Photographer Andrew McCarthy recreated NASAs famous Pillars of Creation photograph of the Eagle Nebula using a $500 telescope.

The original iconic image, taken by the Hubble telescope, shows an active star-forming region featuring towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas in the heart of the Eagle Nebula, cataloged as M16.

It was first photographed in 1995 by NASA and has had a huge cultural impact with the image being featured on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs, reports National Geographic.

McCarthy spoke to PetaPixel about how he recreated the Pillars of Creation from his backyard in Arizona with a 12-inch Newtonian telescope and a monochrome camera using narrowband filters to create a vibrant color image.

I shoot the Pillars of Creation a couple times a year. Its a surprisingly accessible target, near the Sagittarius star cloud in the core of the Milky Way, explains McCarthy.

I used special software to remove all the stars in the image, so this unobstructed view really shows off the vast structures of gas and dust within the Eagle Nebula.

The image was shot over several hours across multiple nights, while my telescope was guided along the stars using a sophisticated tracking mount that compensated for the earths rotation.

McCarthy posted the image to Reddit where its received almost 10,000 upvotes. He believes that theres not as big of a gap between very expensive government-sponsored telescopes and amateur star-gazers shooting from their backyard.

However, McCarthy says that the biggest barrier for amateurs is the atmosphere.

The atmosphere completely blocks quite a few photons and distorts the rest. Hubble, James Webb, spitzer, etc, are all at an advantage that they are able to collect photons from targets completely unfettered by the atmosphere.

But with commercial space flight opportunities expanding, amateur-operated space telescopes could soon become a thing, he adds.

McCarthy accepts that a giant budget will still get you far more detailed images the backyard hobbyist, but believes there arent as many limits as people may think.

With smaller telescopes, you can generally just spend more time shooting a target to see deeper into space. I can see objects billions of light-years away with my telescopes. Since Im just using it to take pictures, theres not much of a need for me to go further than that.

More of McCarthys work can be seen on his website and Instagram.

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Pillars of Creation: $16B Space Telescope vs $500 Backyard Photo - PetaPixel

What a former of the U.S. Air Force and defense expert had to say on the X-15:Before the Mercury astronauts broke the threshold of outer space, before John Glenn rode Friendship VII around the globe for three orbits, and well before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set the Eagle lunar module down upon Mare Tranquillity, a question persisted within the aerospace community: which agency would take Americans into space? And within what type of vehicle would they ride?

The Air Force Made a Strong Case to Go Into Space

The U.S. Air Force advocated that they, rather than the newborn NACA (later NASA), should bear the responsibility of taking Americans into space. And the Air Force, experts of controlled flight, believed that their men should actually fly into space, rather than be launched into space aboard a rocket. To prove that Americans could indeed be flown into space, rather than shot spam-in-a-can style, the Air Force would need a unique machine. Something fast. Something high flying. The solution was indeed the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever built: the North American X-15.

The X-15 is essentially a rocket with maneuverable flight surfaces and a cockpit. Initially, the X-15 used an XLR11 rocket engine, which was also used in the Bell X-1 that Chuck Yeager used to break the sound barrier for the first time. The XLR11 only lasted eleven flights, however, before being swapped for the XLR99. Developed by Reaction Motors, the XLR99 provided a stunning 57,000 pounds of thrust. Using anhydrous ammonia and oxygen as a propellant, the jet consumed fuel voraciously; the jet could burn 15,000 pounds of propellant in just one minute and twenty seconds. In the process, the X-15 set records, for speed and altitude, that remain intact today, nearly six decades later.

The X-15 Earns its Wings and Breaks a Few Records

In October of 1967, USAF pilot William J. Pete Knight flew an X-15 to 100,000 feet and gunned the throttle. Sliding past Mach 1, sliding past Mach 2, he just kept accelerating. Knight maxed out at Mach 6, an unmatched 4,520 miles per hour; fast enough to cross the continental United States in about forty minutes. No one has ever flown faster. And no one has ever flown higher than the X-15 pilots who, on 13 separate occasions, flew above 50 miles, or 264,000 feet, past the accepted boundary of outer space.

In doing so, these 13 flights qualified as space flights, confirming the USAFs belief that man could be flown into space, rather than shot into space. The pilots who crossed the 50-mile outer space boundary were given astronaut wings, just like NASA darlings Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, and Schmitt. The still-standing record for altitude belongs to Joseph A. Walker, who guided his X-15 to 67 miles above the Earth on August 22nd, 1963.

The X-15 did not use a runway like most planes. Rather, the X-15 was ferried into the air attached to the hardpoint of a B-52 Stratofortress. The eight-engine B-52, the biggest bomber in the USAFs inventory, was so powerful it had no problem hefting the X-15. Once aloft, the B-52 would release the X-15, which would light the candle and fly away under its own power. Before NASAs Mercury capsule was formally chosen as the vehicle to take Americans into space, the Air Force considered launching an X-15 into orbit aboard the SM-64 Navaho missile. The X-15-Navajo configuration forebode the Space Shuttle configuration that would dominate space flight in the 1980s and 90s.

The X-15 was never launched into orbit, and the space race moved on, favoring capsules to planes. However, the X-15 program gleaned information that aided space exploration. Retired in 1968, only three X-15s were ever built. The X-15 is featured prominently in First Man, where Neil Armstrong, depicted by Ryan Gosling, pilots the jet, the fastest ever.

Harrison Kass is the Senior Defense Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison has degrees from Lake Forest College, the University of Oregon, and New York University. He lives in Oregon and listens to Dokken. Follow him on Twitter @harrison_kass.

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X-15: The Mach 6 Space Plane That Broke All the Rules - 19FortyFive

Since Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first human to go into space in 1961, more than 500 people have traveled into the great beyond. Some estimates, including those from the United States Air Force, put the total at 628.

Over the 61-year span, the human pathways into the so-called final frontier have been marked by triumph, milestones, discovery, wonder, and tragedy. And people continue to push the boundaries of human endeavor into space.

To determine the number of individuals who went into space every year since 1961, 24/7 Tempo, referred to data from Worldspaceflight.com, Spacefacts, Space.com, NASA, encyclopedic sources, and various media websites to compile this list. We tallied only those who had gone into space for the first time in a particular year for this list.

The first decade of space travel involved competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, as the two superpowers took their Cold War confrontation beyond the confines of Earth. The first space travelers from both countries were affiliated with the military. Gradually the two programs began including scientists and those from other fields in space travel.

The Soviet Union exploited its early advantage after the launch of the first satellite Sputnik in 1957 with some notable space firsts. Besides Gagarins initial space journey, other Soviet Union triumphs included the first woman in space in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, and the first person to walk in space, Alexei Leonov, in 1965.

The U.S. was playing catch-up and there were tragedies along the way. A major setback occurred in 1967 when Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee died during a routine ground test of the capsule. It would not be the last disaster for the U.S. space program. (These are the most important events in NASAs history.)

The Apollo program vaulted the United States into the technological lead, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. Though other nations have landed space probes on the lunar surface, only the U.S. has actually landed people there. (These are the 12 people who have walked on the moon.)

Click here to see the number of space travelers every year since space travel began

Competition gave way to cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union in the 1970s as the two former space adversaries carried out joint missions starting in July 1975.

Space travel became more or less routine in the 1980s with the start of the space-shuttle program and the launch of the international space station, which became truly international as other nations began providing space travelers for the ISS.

Dennis Zito became the first paying space tourist in 2001, and private companies, led by maverick mogul Elon Musk, are leaping into the realm.

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The Number of Space Travelers Every Year Since Space Travel Began - 24/7 Wall St.

Space exploration is feeling the shockwaves from the historic decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to revoke Roe vs. Wade on Friday (June 24).

The decision overturns a constitutional right to abortion in America first established in 1973, and counteracts a United Nations assertion in 2018 (opens in new tab) that abortion should be considered a human right. The loss of Roe v. Wade is so profound that the New York Times termed it (opens in new tab) a "political and social earthquake" on Sunday (June 26).

Space figures are now also weighing in on the verdict.

A former astronaut now serving in the U.S. Senate promised to never back down from fighting for abortion rights, for example.

"This is a giant step back for our country and an all hands on deck moment," wrote Mark Kelly (D-Ariz) on Twitter (opens in new tab). Kelly flew four times in space on space shuttle missions and is married to a former Democratic senator from Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords.

Related: Texas abortion ban could take an unexpected toll on the space industry

Several individuals with connections to space talked about how abortion impacted their careers, or how the lack of it will hurt others.

Kellie Gerardi, a science communicator and researcher expected to launch into space on a future Virgin Galactic flight, wrote on Twitter (opens in new tab) that she "wouldnt have the family or career I've built without access to abortion."

"I wouldn't be able to fly to space, participate in the workforce or reach my full potential without reproductive healthcare. I need every person or company who calls me a role model to remember that," she said Saturday (June 25).

"Of equal consequence, my husband wouldnt have the family and career he's built without this access either," she added, noting in a separate tweet (opens in new tab) that "reproductive healthcare" (for her, meaning egg freezing and birth control) allowed her to be a candidate for a research spaceflight.

"My public vulnerability is for those who can't be," Gerardi said.

Implications for the ruling are vast for women, non-binary genders, transgender individuals and anyone with a uterus; in addition, the decision may ripple out to other issues revolving around privacy.One justice in the majority decision, Clarence Thomas, said in his assenting decision that the court should "overturn protections on access to contraception, same-sex relations and same-sex marriage," the Times added.

Abortions are now regulated at the state level; more than 20 states (out of 50) are set to ban all abortions, including those required to save a pregnant person's life, the Times reported. The ruling will disproportionately affect lower-income individuals and Black and Hispanic individuals, who statistically are less likely to be able to afford out-of-state transportation or other measures to seek safe abortion access, according to the Times.

Former NASA astronaut Terry Virts tweeted that the decision is "the latest and most egregious example of minority rule, and that needs to be fixed to save our democracy."

He outlined several ways to address the situation: "Electoral college, term limits, filibuster, primary system, gerrymandering, etc. We need to fix these folks," he wrote (opens in new tab) Saturday (June 25).

A media report suggests current NASA administrator Bill Nelson (a former astronaut and former Democratic Florida senator) opposes the decision, too.

"I strongly believe this ruling directly and detrimentally impacts the NASA workforce as it delegates an intensely personal decision to lawmakers in states where NASA employees live and work," Nelson wrote in a note to agency employees, according to Reuters reporter Joey Roulette on Twitter (opens in new tab).

The fall of Roe v. Wade will see broader effects similar to those experienced in Texas after a new anti-abortion law went into effect in September 2021.

NASA's Johnson Space Center, the hub for astronaut training, is located in Houston, and the state at large is home to numerous sectors of the space industry. Roughly 144,000 people (opens in new tab)are employed in Texas in aerospace, the state reported in 2020, including big companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and smaller ones like Intuitive Machines and Axiom.

The Texas legislation banned any abortions more than six weeks into a pregnancy, which is before many people are aware they are pregnant. The decision came under criticism from Biden at that time, as well as from people in the space industry.

"I've had a handful of women *just today* seeking advice in my DMs [direct messages] because they have anxiety either deciding to take a space job in Texas or already having accepted a space job in Texas," science communicator Emily Calandrelli, who hosts the Emmy award-winning science series "Emily's Wonder Lab" on Netflix,tweeted (opens in new tab)on Sept. 2, the day after the law took effect. "Space leaders in Texas, please pay attention to this. You're going to lose talent."

And Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, who was the first female engineer to work at NASA's Mission Control during the Apollo program and is now a Texas attorney who fights for access to reproductive healthcare, has also been weighing in on Twitter.

She shared a photo (opens in new tab) of what she said had been the fourth largest abortion provider in the U.S. with a new sign saying it could no longer offer abortions. She also encouraged (opens in new tab) those who oppose the decision to reach out to their elected representatives, among other comments.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow uson Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.

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Former astronauts and space industry leaders weigh in on fall of Roe v. Wade and abortion access - Space.com

A solar-sailing mission is now marking three years of spaceflight, but is unlikely to celebrate a fourth anniversary.

The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 is a crowdfunded solar sail that launched June 25, 2019. It was expected to last a year in an assessment of how well a spacecraft could perform using only the power of the sun.

Now tripling that expectation, the spacecraft continues to work well but is in a fight with atmospheric drag. Molecules of the Earth's atmosphere are slowly pulling the spacecraft back to our planet, with re-entry expected in perhaps a few months, according to a Planetary Society update (opens in new tab).

"We have continued to work to learn more and sail more efficiently as part of itsextended missionincluding itssecond yearin orbit as well as this last year, its third year," Bruce Betts, the mission's project manager, wrote Friday (June 24) on the Planetary Society's website.

Related: LightSail 2 captures stunning photos of Earth from space

Like any long-running mission, the spacecraft has met a few challenges. Last summer, engineers recalibrated the gyroscopes on the spacecraft to account for drift, but the gyros "began returning data that measured incorrect spin rates," Betts wrote.

"We developed techniques to calibrate the gyros on orbit, and updated the onboard flight software to enable corrections to the gyro bias parameters. The update improved our sail control, thus improving our solar sailing."

The change allowed the altitude to rise by 328 feet (100 meters) per day for a few months, but as of today the average altitude is about 390 miles (627 kilometers). That's compared with 446 miles (718 km) at mission start.

The altitude fell for a few reasons, Betts explained, including communications trouble with the spacecraft due to ground station components breaking (and requiring replacement), ongoing atmospheric drag, and increased activity in the 11-year solar cycle puffing up Earth's atmosphere and moving more molecules higher.

That said, the Mylar sail material remains in good condition and the spacecraft has no major component failures, which Betts said is "an amazing testament to the many tens of people over the years whove worked on it."

He added the team plans to "make the most out of the next several months" before LightSail 2's eventual re-entry, but the data collected will remain useful essentially forever after the mission. The team plans numerous mission analyses, paper publications and conference publications for LightSail, as well as continuing their connections with other space missions planning on using solar sails themselves.

In the meantime, the LightSail team continues to publish updates through technical publications (opens in new tab) and, while the mission is active, you can view key parameters through the mission control dashboard (opens in new tab).

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow uson Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.

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LightSail 2 marks 3rd anniversary as end of mission approaches - Space.com

June 27, 2022

Researchers at Arizona State University have earned 19 National Science Foundation early faculty career awards dating back to June 2021. The new awards total $12 million in funding for ASU researchers in grants that will be used over the next five years.

The work covers subjects that explore a wide variety of science and technology, from advancing AI-based data processing to measuring the cosmological signatures of stars and galaxies to understanding infants development of curiosity to enhancing 3D-printing precision.

The NSFs Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program identifies the nations most promising young faculty members and provides them with funding to pursue outstanding research, excellence in teaching and the integration of education and research. Often, these awards spur the creativity of the faculty member and help set them on an innovative career path. To date, more than 200 ASU faculty members have earned NSF CAREER awards.

The 19 ASU NSF CAREER award recipients exemplify the best of our ASU faculty, said Nancy Gonzales, executive vice president and university provost. Each scholar is committed to research that improves our world, while demonstrating equal dedication to their teaching, guiding and mentoring students to achieve their highest potential.

I am proud that these honorees come from a range of academic disciplines at ASU, including engineering, psychology and the sciences. On behalf of the Academic Enterprise, I congratulate you on this well-deserved award.

Here is a look at the current ASU NSF CAREER award recipients:

Abhinav Acharya, assistant professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Acharya works at the interface of the immune system and engineering. His efforts include the isolation and identification of disease biomarkers and natural therapeutics, as well as biomaterials synthesis and translational technology development. The results of his NSF research could enable the development of vaccines to treat diseases such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. Read more

Kumar Ankit, assistant professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Ankit is leading the first integration of computational, experimental and characterization techniques to better understand how processing methods affect steel microstructures and their properties, such as strength and hardness. This project will add new knowledge to the field and help optimize the future of steel manufacturing. Read more

Christina Birkel, assistant professor, School of Molecular Sciences

Birkel is working to create new materials that can be used for renewable energy, catalysts and permanent magnets. Materials are all around us and are the driving force for new and innovative solid-state technologies centered on batteries, sensors and magnets. Birkels projects focus on solid compounds that contain different metals and either carbon, nitrogen or both, called carbides, nitrides or carbonitrides, respectively. Read more

Katelyn Cooper assistant professor, School of Life Science

Cooper is a biology education researcher whose work seeks to understand the relationship between biology learning environments and undergraduate and graduate student mental health. Her research aims to identify factors of student research experiences that positively and negatively impact mental health, and to develop tools and resources to support students throughout their research experiences. Read more

Deliang Fan, assistant professor, School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering

Fan is conducting electrical and computer engineering research to validate the performance of a new hybrid in-memory computing system. The concept behind his work is to leverage memory device and circuit properties in ways that will advance AI-based big data processing fields such as computer vision, autonomous driving and robotics. Read more

Emma Frow, assistant professor, School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering and School for the Future of Innovation in Society

Frow studies the role of care in responsible innovation for bioengineering. Her work will document the growth and development of a new type of facility for high-throughput design and genetic engineering called "biofoundries. Her research aims to design interventions or tools that can help attune practitioners to the politics of care and responsibility, and shape the governance of these foundries. Read more

Gillian Gile, associate professor, School of Life Sciences

Gile studies the diversity and evolution of microbial eukaryotes, otherwise known as protists. Despite their microscopic size, protists are more closely related to plants and animals than to bacteria, and they play important roles in ecosystems such as soil and marine plankton. Her research examines protists that live in termite hindguts and digest wood to understand the origin and evolutionary dynamics of the termite microbiome.

Christian Hoover, assistant professor, School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment

Hoovers research focuses on further understanding the synergistic effects of composition, porosity and structural rigidity on the mechanics of glassy metal-organic frameworks. These porous materials have the ability to be used for several applications, especially in carbon dioxide capture, separation and storage. Read more

Daniel Jacobs, assistant professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration

Jacobs is an interdisciplinary scientist across the areas of astrophysics, cosmology, experimental physics and aerospace engineering. His primary research focus is measuring cosmological signatures of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe with custom radio arrays. The award will be used for observation with existing radio arrays, to improve radio arrays and to develop new technology to support future experiments. Read more

Kelsey Lucca, assistant professor, Department of Psychology

Luccas research investigates cognitive development during infancy and early childhood, with a focus on the development of curiosity, social cognition, communication and problem-solving. The award will help her explore the psychological processes involved in curiosity starting in infancy.

Yuval Mazor, assistant professor, School of Molecular Sciences

Mazor's research focus is the structural biology of the membrane complexes involved in oxygenic photosynthesis. His research explores new approaches in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) that are revolutionizing the abilities to understand the role of structure for different functions carried out by essential protein supercomplexes. Read more

Troy McDaniel, assistant professor, Polytechnic School

McDaniel is exploring how intelligent wearable technology can enable older adults with memory challenges to live independently. Using visual recognition, this novel hardware, placed strategically on the wrist, deciphers hand movements and identifies objects in the environment through a camera lens, providing insight to a users behaviors to aid cognitive decline. Read more

Anamitra Pal, assistant professor, School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering

Pal conducts fundamental and applied research in the power and energy systems domain. His project employs robust statistics and machine learning to real-time data for better monitoring and control of our national electric power infrastructure, helping to ensure the reliable and resilient operation of the electric power grid. Read more

Kenan Song, assistant professor, Polytechnic School

Song is developing a new additive manufacturing method called Multiphase Direct Ink Writing to enhance 3D printing precision of ordered patterns at nanoscales. This method can be used for rapid prototyping of sensors and for applications in supercapacitors, batteries and regenerative medicine. Read more

Beckett Sterner, assistant professor, School of Life Sciences

Sterner examines issues in the philosophy of biology and medicine. His research studies how and why pluralism advancing multiple approaches to an issue makes a difference to current and historical practices of computational science. He is applying these insights to develop novel, collaborative approaches to making data and models relevant to global societal challenges such as biodiversity.

Xiaojun Tian, assistant professor, School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering

Tian employs quantitative experiments and mathematical modeling to expand the understanding of fundamental problems in systems and synthetic biology. His exploration of molecular and cellular mechanisms could enable the synthesis of new therapeutics, the expansion of sustainable agriculture and the production of renewable resources. Read more

Arul Mozhy Varman, assistant professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Varman is developing advanced metabolic engineering computational tools and strategies to harness the capabilities of microbial cell factories for the sustainable production of chemicals, fuels and pharmaceuticals. His work to optimize genetic and metabolic processes can have an impact on the production of bulk chemicals, fuels and pharmaceuticals. Read more

Ruoyu Fish Wang, assistant professor, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Wang is working on research to mitigate the effects of malware and computer viruses by making the vulnerabilities in software easily understandable. His research may enable analysts and researchers to uncover source code in a manner that identifies vulnerabilities to protect them from malware. Read more

Jia Zou, assistant professor, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Zou is designing a new database that seamlessly supports and optimizes the deployment, storage and serving of both traditional machine learning models and deep neural network models. This work significantly decreases latency in databases that rely on real-time results, such as credit card fraud detection and emergency services response.Read more

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Thunderbird School prepares global leaders with an out-of-this-world education - ASU News Now

Space tourism could be a big industry in the future -- some analysts think it could grow to an estimated $1.5 billion by 2027, and easily get far bigger over the coming decades.

Virgin Galactic Holdings (SPCE -5.27%) is one of the companies vying to carve out its market share in the sector. It's developing spacecraft for taking civilians on suborbital flights. The business is exciting, and a successful spaceflight program could have enormous long-term potential. However, several red flags make Virgin Galactic a risky investment in today's bear market. Here is what investors should know.

Virgin Galactic made headlines last summer when it successfully conducted a crewed test flight on its flagship spacecraft Unity that included the company's founder, Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic is gearing up for commercial flights, but supply chain problems caused it to push these trips back to next year.

Meanwhile, there is another spacecraft in development, Imagine, which currently has a target-ready date of mid-2023 for commercial use -- but it hasn't yet gone to space, so there is still more testing needed.

A lot of money and work go into preparing these spacecraft for commercial use, and the repeated delays could impact the company's cash burn, a risk in this current market. Meanwhile, rival companies are pushing forward.

Virgin Galactic had $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments as of the company's 2022 Q1, likely alleviating any immediate financial needs. However, investors should consider how the company accumulated some of these funds. It took out a loan for just $425 million in early 2022. Debt is rarely ideal for a young and growing company, especially when the business model is not yet operational.

The chart below shows Virgin Galactic's negative free cash flow, meaning the business loses cash. It's burning between $50 million and $90 million per quarter, totaling about $253 million over the past year. Management guided for a cash burn of up to $90 million for 2022 Q2.

SPCE Free Cash Flow data by YCharts

It's easy to do the math and figure out that there's enough cash to last many quarters, but Virgin Galactic presents unique risks that investors should consider. Commercial flights keep getting delayed, which is discouraging because the commercial flights will take time to ramp up -- the company's Unity spacecraft will conduct just one flight per month to start.

The Unity spacecraft holds just eight people, including two pilots, which means that actual paying passengers will number just six per trip. $450,000 per ticket is about $3 million in monthly revenue. In other words, the company is still far from running commercial trips frequently enough to bring in meaningful revenue.

And what happens if there is a problem? Could a technical failure cause months of lost revenue from the resulting testing and repairs? Could the company face pricing pressure if there's trouble stirring up demand at such lofty ticket prices? Virgin Galactic's cash pile needs to be enormous, because it will likely take a while to start turning a profit, and a lot could go wrong along the way.

This makes the current market all the more treacherous for investors. Interest rates are rising to combat inflation, making debt more expensive.

The current bear market has crushed share prices of stocks across Wall Street, and Virgin Galactic is no different, down almost 90% from its peak. It's hard to issue stock to raise money when prices are low because you can't raise a significant amount without dilution -- adding tons of new shares decreases the value of existing shares.

Virgin Galactic will hopefully see its share price recover before it needs to raise money again; debt isn't healthy for a company with hardly any revenue. The company could be in a tricky spot if the stock languishes until more cash is needed.

This dilemma makes the stock riskier for investors. There isn't a clear path to near-term profitability, and the long-term financials of the company are questionable at best. However, patient investors could benefit -- the stock is worth just $1.6 billion today, leaving room for investors to capture long-term upside once the business proves itself a bit more.

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Why You Should Avoid This Space Pioneer for Now - The Motley Fool

By Emily Burleigh

American Press

An experiment designed by three students at F.K. White Middle School has been chosen as the winner of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Educations Student Spaceflight Experiments Program.

The team is made up of Edith Evey, Cynthia Caron Chulo and Priscilla Moncada and their experiment, Sunflower Microgravity Growth, seeks to analyze whether or not sunflower seeds exhibit a difference in growth with microgravity exposure.

Sunflower microgravity growth is very simple in its nature, yet the impact of what is to be learned from it could have far-reaching effects, said their teacher, Dana Istre. The project that the girls will execute is to send a few dozen organic sunflower seeds on board the International Space Station for several weeks.

Upon return to Earth the students will plant the seeds that were exposed to microgravity along with a control group of seeds that were not exposed in an effort to learn how or if the microgravity will affect growth.

The experiment, part of Mission 16 for the SSEP, is projected to launch this fall.

The winning experiments are being loaded onto rockets and being transported to the International Space Station as it is in orbit, Istre explained. Therefore, projects may contain no more than three volumes that are no greater than 10 ml altogether.

Istre said the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program website will be frequently updated with countdowns, dates and live links of mission launches.

The students will be notified with details of the launch while coordinating with teacher facilitators and the flight operations manager for the program, Istre said.

After the experiment is conducted, the students will present their findings at the annual SSEP National Conference at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

They will be considered official microgravity researchers, Istre said.

There were 1,234 submissions nationwide, and these students were selected to be a part of the final 21, Istre said. Two other projects were submitted from, F.K. White, including one on the growth of Bacillus Coagulns in microgravity and another on yeast fermentation in microgravity.

Istre said she and colleague Sandra Hayes were honored to guide the students through this process.

To be able to participate in a project that can have such meaningful results in the real world outside of the classroom I believe was eye-opening for the students as they saw that they can be valuable assets to their community, even at such a young age, Istre said. I feel confident that this project could have a lifelong impact for the winning group.

Istre said the three students, two of whom are Spanish-speaking, show that girls in STEM are capable and passionate and will change the world.

It was exciting to see the learning happening as the students did research and mini-experiments and worked so hard to complete their projects, but it was most exciting just to be able to bring an opportunity like this to our students.

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FK White trio wins ultimate STEM prize, Experiment chosen to go up to International Space Station - American Press | American Press - American Press