CNN correspondent opens up about faith

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Story highlights Kyra Phillips became a born-again Christian as a teen She attended a Christian college, but left after her sophomore year Phillips says she now considers herself a seeker of spiritual enlightenment

I was a bit of a rebellious child. My mom might tell you differently, but I never saw that as a bad trait. I felt that if I questioned authority, fought for the underdog, battled for the things that people told me were impossible, I would be different. Change the world maybe. That same rebellious spirit also led to things that definitely were not good for me, like hanging with the wrong crowd and getting into the type of trouble that I would rather not put in print.

Kyra Phillips

That's when I "found God."

I became a "born-again" Christian when I attended a Young Life camp in high school. My home life wasn't exactly going swimmingly, and this group really embraced me. I loved the Christian notion of community, giving back, praying for others and making friends that cared more about doing good than getting drunk, smoking pot and having sex. I opened my arms to Jesus and fully embraced Christian morals and principles. I decided that I was going to be "that good girl" and go on to do great things.

Kyra Phillips, third from right, would attend beachside Bible studies as a college student.

I started off at Westmont, a beautiful Christian college nestled in the heart of Santa Barbara, California. What a safe place that was. It was also extremely nurturing. The professors dedicated bountiful amounts of time to our individual spiritual development, and regularly prayed with us. My peer group was all about what ministry you signed up for, not what sorority you were rushing. We lifted each other up, had intimate sunrise Bible studies on the beach and spent hours hanging out with friends, talking about how to lead a godly life.

As glorious and fulfilling as all that appeared, two years into college, the world became much larger to me. More complex, diverse, intellectually and spiritually challenging. It became the world of church, religion and faith versus the world of ideas, cultures, and philosophies. I found myself more drawn to Carl Jung than the book of Corinthians. A good friend gave me a book, The Myth of Certainty. It posed these questions:

"Do you ever feel somewhat schizophrenic about the relationship of your faith to the rest of your life? Do you find yourself compartmentalizing different aspects so that tensions between them are minimized?"

The answer to all of these for me was: yes.

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CNN correspondent opens up about faith

What to Pack for Year in Space? A 'Superhero Utility Belt'

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What's one thing astronaut Scott Kelly can't do without when he moves into space this week for a year? A belt.

Kelly went beltless during his five-month mission at the International Space Station a few years back, and he hated how his shirttails kept floating out of his pants. So this time, the 51-year-old retired Navy captain packed "a military, tactical-style thing" that can hold a tool pouch.

Actually, scratch pouch. He prefers "superhero utility belt."

Kelly's partner on the yearlong stay at the space station Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko can't do without his vitamins. When their Soyuz rocket blasts off from Kazakhstan on Saturday (Friday afternoon in the U.S.), three bottles of over-age-50 vitamins will be on board.

After more than two years of training, Kelly and Kornienko are eager to get going. It will be the longest space mission ever for NASA, and the longest in almost two decades for the Russian Space Agency, which holds the record at 14 months.

Medicine and technology have made huge leaps since then, and the world's space agencies need to know how the body adapts to an entire year of weightlessness before committing to even longer Mars expeditions. More yearlong missions are planned, with an ultimate goal of 12 test subjects. The typical station stint is six months.

"We know a lot about six months. But we know almost nothing about what happens between six and 12 months in space," said NASA's space station program scientist, Julie Robinson.

Among the more common space afflictions: weakened bones and muscles, and impaired vision and immune system. Then there is the psychological toll.

Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, a frequent flier who will accompany Kelly and Kornienko into orbit, predicts it will be the psychological not physical effects that will be toughest on the one-year crew.

"Being far away from Earth, being sort of crammed, having few people to interact with," Padalka said. He'll break the record for most time spent in space during his six-month stay, closing in on a grand total of 900 days by the time he returns to Earth in September.

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What to Pack for Year in Space? A 'Superhero Utility Belt'

US astronaut flying 'superhero utility belt' on 1-year mission; Russian packing megavitamins

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. What's one thing astronaut Scott Kelly can't do without when he moves into space this week for a year? A belt.

Kelly went beltless during his five-month mission at the International Space Station a few years back, and he hated how his shirttails kept floating out of his pants. So this time, the 51-year-old retired Navy captain packed "a military, tactical-style thing" that can hold a tool pouch.

Actually, scratch "pouch." He prefers "superhero utility belt."

Kelly's partner on the yearlong stay at the space station Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko can't do without his vitamins. When their Soyuz rocket blasts off from Kazakhstan on Saturday (Friday afternoon in the U.S.), three bottles of over-age-50 vitamins will be on board.

After more than two years of training, Kelly and Kornienko are eager to get going. It will be the longest space mission ever for NASA, and the longest in almost two decades for the Russian Space Agency, which holds the record at 14 months.

Medicine and technology have made huge leaps since then, and the world's space agencies need to know how the body adapts to an entire year of weightlessness before committing to even longer Mars expeditions. More yearlong missions are planned, with an ultimate goal of 12 test subjects. The typical station stint is six months.

"We know a lot about six months. But we know almost nothing about what happens between six and 12 months in space," said NASA's space station program scientist, Julie Robinson.

Among the more common space afflictions: weakened bones and muscles, and impaired vision and immune system. Then there is the psychological toll.

Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, a frequent flier who will accompany Kelly and Kornienko into orbit, predicts it will be the psychological not physical effects that will be toughest on the one-year crew.

"Being far away from Earth, being sort of crammed, having few people to interact with," Padalka said. He'll break the record for most time spent in space during his six-month stay, closing in on a grand total of 900 days by the time he returns to Earth in September.

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US astronaut flying 'superhero utility belt' on 1-year mission; Russian packing megavitamins

Gemini 3 50th anniversary: The first American space flight with two astronauts. March 23, 1965 – Video

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Gemini 3 50th anniversary: The first American space flight with two astronauts. March 23, 1965
From British/Path Reel News: America Makes `double Space History #39; AKA U S Double Space Success 1965. NASA INFO: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1965-024A John ...

By: Dan Beaumont Space Museum

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Gemini 3 50th anniversary: The first American space flight with two astronauts. March 23, 1965 - Video

Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship

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TIME Science space Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship Philip Scott Andrews for TIME Members of the press and officials from NASA and Roscosmos talk with Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, alongside NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, after a training session at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, March 23, 2015. The official handover of a brand new Soyuz is a milestone for any space flight from Baikonur

No one kept a secret like the old Soviet space program kept a secret. Back in the early days of the space race, Sergei Korolev, the Soviets chief designer, was known only as, well, the Chief Designer, the better to prevent any assassination attempts that officials from Roscosmosthe Russian NASAconvinced themselves the Americans were cooking up. Baikonur, the Russian Cape Canaveral, hidden away in the Kazakh steppes, stole its name from a mining town 200 miles north, the better to confuse enemies who might come looking for it.

But the secrecy of Baikonur was partly just geography. If you want to get to space you need launch pads that aim away from populated areas and that are located as close to the equator as possible, giving your rockets a boost in speed thanks to the physics of Earths rotation. In the U.S. that meant Florida, with millions of people to the west and north but no one at all in the ocean to the east. In Russia, that meant Baikonur.

The Baikonur launch facilitywhere cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka and astronaut Scott Kelly will lift off for the International Space Station on March 28, with Kelly and Kornienko slated to stay a full yearis a half hour drive into the desert outside of Baikonur proper, which is itself is at least three hours away from pretty much anything at all. The old spaceport, when you finally arrive, looks exactly like you would have expected it to look if you grew up during the cold war when everything Soviet was synonymous with scary.

MORE Meet the Twins Unlocking the Secrets of Space

There are the cement blockhouses and the skeletal gantries and the security fences everywhere, all growing out of the surrounding scrub without so much as a single sapling or tuft of grass to add a little green. You could photograph the place in color, but why bother?

But inside Baikonur, none of that matters. Here, the sense of placeor placelessness, reallyfalls away, replaced by the same kind of closed-world, finely focused, center-of-the-universe bustle that accompanies any launch facility anywhere on the planet.

On Monday, at T-minus five days, the three members of the prime crew and the three members of the backup crew were scheduled to run their final ingress drills, climbing into their Soyuz spacecraft, for the first timeor at least the first official time. That, according to more than half a century of custom, required an equally official handoff, in which the people who built the spacecraft would, in effect, turn the keys over to the people who would drive it.

The ceremony took place in a large meeting room divided by a glass partition. Representatives from NASA, Roscosmos and the media crowded on one side of the glass and waited until officials from both Roscosmos and Energiya, the state-owned contractor that built the rocket and the spacecraft, entered and sat at a conference table facing the partition. The cosmonauts and astronauts, now in preflight medical quarantine, entered through a door on the other side, and sat at a matching conference table facing the officials.

The spacecraft is now ready for you, one of the government men said to the crew in Russian. It is ready or flight.

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Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship

VIDEO: Orion's heat shield arrives at MSFC

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March 23, 2015

Things are looking up for NASA's journey to Mars. (Credit: Reeves Smith Creative)

Christopher Pilny for redOrbit.com @NotRealChainsaw

Last week, redOrbit was afforded the (insane) opportunity to tour NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center. So, understanding you dont get many opportunities like this, we brought along our videographer who captured the entire thing. Well be rolling out the footage over the next few weeks.

One of the coolest aspects of the tourand really we were very fortunate to see it, thanks to a snow-induced-reschedulingwas the heat shield from Orions Exploration Flight Test-1. Launched on December 5th, 2014, it returned to Earth a few hours later after reaching an altitude of 3,600 miles and orbiting the planet twice. On its re-entry it reached temperatures of 4,000 degrees F, which is a lot, but is really thrown into light when you consider lava sits comfortably around 2,000 degrees F.

Re-entry is balmy, to say the least.

But enough from us: Check out the video to get all the Orion heat shield facts. And what the test flight meant for our #JourneyToMars moving forward.

And stay tuned for more from our visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Follow redOrbit onTwitter,Facebook,Google+, Instagram andPinterest.

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VIDEO: Orion's heat shield arrives at MSFC

Ipswich students launch selfie-taking teddy bear Benjamin into space

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10:04 23 March 2015

Benjamin Bear in the upper atmosphere

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A teddy bear has been launched into space, going further than any of its kind before.

Members of Ipswich High School for Girls science club joined the Cambridge University space flight society to send Benjamin the bear up to 90,000ft using a helium weather balloon, as part of national science week.

The balloon, carrying Benjamin, a digital camera, GPS tracker and parachute, burst in the upper atmosphere, and its contents were picked up in Rutland. Head of Physics Marcus Gibbs said: We were thrilled the flight was a huge success. The girls were excited to be involved in the space mission, and over the moon that Benjamin took such a superb space selfie!

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Ipswich students launch selfie-taking teddy bear Benjamin into space

'Mad Men' stars dazzle on red carpet for final season

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It was mixed feelings for the cast of Mad Men on Sunday night as the handsome bunch came out to celebrate the screening of their final season. January Jones, John Slattery, Jon Hamm , Elisabeth Moss and Christina Hendricks all looked stunning as they excitedly posed for photos together at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, although it sadly marked one of their final appearances as a group.

Christina Hendricks turned heads as always, showing off her curves in a shimmering red sequined off-the-shoulder dress reminiscent of cartoon character Jessica Rabbit. She paired the outfit with patent leather heels and a blue clutch. The 39-year-old debuted a new look showing off her strawberry blonde locks instead of her typical deep red hue. The actress arrived with actor husband Geoffrey Arend, who wore a dark grey suit and patterned light blue tie.

Christina was not the only star from the hit AMC drama to dazzle on the red carpet. January Jones rocked a navy strapless midi-dress with orange floral detailing and paired it with orange heels. The 37-year-old kept her blonde hair slicked back into a chic ponytail and added another pop of color with bright red lipstick.

Meanwhile, Elisabeth Moss chose a classic black and white ensemble a low-cut dress and red suede pumps. And although she's not part of the cast, model Coco Rochacame out to the event wearing a tight black sleeveless dress that showed off her best accessory: her baby bump! The 26-year-old showed off her imitation of main character Don Draper to her over 900,000 followers on Instagram.

One leading lady that was missing from the event was Jessica Par, who welcomed her first child with husband John Kastner on March 21. The Canadian actress announced the arrival via her Instagram account.

But it wasn't just the women who dazzled on the red carpet. Jon Hamm looked handsome in a black suit with matching patent leather shoes, a crisp white shirt and dark blue tie. His bearded look was a certainly the opposite of how his character Don Draper would have shown up to an event. John Slattery, on the other hand, looked like a modern day version of his character Roger Sterling wearing a black suit, grey shirt and patent leather dress shoes.

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'Mad Men' stars dazzle on red carpet for final season

Rover Searches California Desert for Water to Simulate Future Lunar Missions – Video

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Rover Searches California Desert for Water to Simulate Future Lunar Missions
Water is critical for human existence, whether on our planet or distant destinations. In support of future space exploration, researchers from NASA #39;s Ames Research Center are searching for...

By: NASA Ames Research Center

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Rover Searches California Desert for Water to Simulate Future Lunar Missions - Video