Monthly Archives: July 2017

While some nations may be content to simply set foot on the moon, China has bigger things in mind. President Xi Jinping has said he wants his country to become a force in space exploration, and the plan is to start at the celestial body closest to Earth.

China wants to send a probe to the dark side of the moon by next year, and put astronauts on its surface by 2036, Reuters reports. But those astronauts may be staying for a bit longer than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin: As part of its Lunar Palace 365 project, China is testing a self-sustaining space station that provides inhabitants with everything a person needs to survive, which could lead to extended stays on the moon.

Related: How rocket fuel mined from the moon will get us to Mars

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On Sunday, four students atBeihang Universityin Beijing entered Lunar Palace-1, a 160-square-meterbioregenerative life-support base located in one of the city's suburbs. They replaced a group who lived inside the station for 60 days, but the latest batch of students to call Lunar Palace-1 home will not leave until they've been living self-sufficiently for 200 days."I'll get so much out of this," Liu Guanghui, a Ph.D. studentwho entered the bunker on Sunday,told Reuters. "It's truly a different life experience."

The station's specifications have been meticulously curated. "We've designed it so the oxygen [produced by plants at the station] is exactly enough to satisfy the humans, the animalsand the organisms that break down the waste materials," said Liu Hong, the project's principal architect.

While living in Lunar Palace-1, students will recycle everything from leftover plant matter to their own waste. The latter task may bring to mind the Matt Damoncharacter Mark Watney in the 2015 film The Martian, in which an astronaut was forced to jerry-rig a space station to support him after he was left on Mars. In addition to using his own waste to fertilize plants, Watney had to cope with the psychological toll of being isolated from the outside world. The same is true of the Chinese students testing Lunar Palace-1.

"They can become a bit depressed," Liu Hong said of the students. "If you spend a long time in this type of environment it can create some psychological problems."

Students are given specific daily tasks that help keep their spirits up, but it's difficult to gauge the psychological effect of living in an environment so radically different than what a person is used to. When NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned from living on the International Space Station for 340 consecutive days, he spoke of how the psychological stress was "harder to quantify and perhaps as damaging" as any physical changes he experienced.

Liu Hui, a student who participated in the initial 60-day experiment at Lunar Palace-1, said she at times"felt a bit low" at the end of the day. The students currently in the station will be there for more than three times as long as Liu Hui, so the psychological effect of a prolonged stay remains to be seen. It's a trick problem, but one that China and the rest of the world will have to negotiate if humanity ever wants to colonize anything outside of the Earth's atmosphere.

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Life on the Moon: China Is Testing a Self-Sustaining Space Station That Could Allow Long-Term Lunar Living - Newsweek

BEIJING (Reuters) - Sealed behind the steel doors of two bunkers in a Beijing suburb, university students are trying to find out how it feels to live in a space station on another planet, recycling everything from plant cuttings to urine.

They are part of a project aimed at creating a self-sustaining ecosystem that provides everything humans need to survive.

Four students from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics entered the Lunar Palace-1 on Sunday with the aim of living self-sufficiently for 200 days.

They say they are happy to act as human guinea-pigs if it means getting closer to their dream of becoming astronauts.

Ill get so much out of this, Liu Guanghui, a PhD student, who entered the bunker on Sunday, said. Its truly a different life experience.

President Xi Jinping wants China to become a global power in space exploration, with plans to send the first probe to the dark side of the moon by 2018 and to put astronauts on the moon by 2036. The Lunar Palace 365 experiment may allow them to stay there for extended periods.

STR via Getty Images

For Liu Hong, a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the projects principal architect, said everything needed for human survival had been carefully calculated.

Weve designed it so the oxygen (produced by plants at the station) is exactly enough to satisfy the humans, the animals, and the organisms that break down the waste materials, she said.

But satisfying physical needs is only one part of the experiment, Liu said. Charting the mental impact of confinement in a small space for such a long time is equally crucial.

They can become a bit depressed, Liu said. If you spend a long time in this type of environment it can create some psychological problems.

Liu Hui, a student leader who participated an initial 60-day experiment at Lunar Palace-1 that finished on Sunday, said that she sometimes felt a bit low after a days work.

The projects support team has found mapping out a specific set of daily tasks for the students is one way that helps them to remain happy.

But the 200-day group will also be tested to see how they react to living a for period of time without sunlight. The projects team declined to elaborate.

We did this experiment with animals... so we want to see how much impact it will have on people, Liu, the professor, said.

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China Launches 200-Day Test Of Self-Sustaining Space Station - HuffPost

A group of five softball-sized satellites have had quite the journey: After a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted them into space, astronauts on the International Space Station received the tiny instruments, and on July 7 they shot them into Earths orbit like cannonballs, whose epic flight is shown in the image below.

These five mini-satellites are cubes, not spheres, and they comprise a fleet of instruments called BIRDS, developed by AMSAT-UK, a private organization that designs, builds, and operates amateur satellites. Their mission, aided by the International Space Station, is to improve radio communications from satellites to the receiving stations used by regular folks down on Earth, aka amateurs.

Each of the five BIRD satellites is identical and built by an international team comprised of five disparate nations Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mongolia, Ghana, and Japan. As the little cubes zip around Earth, the radio operators will try and pass control of the satellites between different ground stations around the globe, with an added game-like component: If the ground stations can successfully send data to the satellites, Earthlings everywhere will be rewarded with space-made music.

To get the music, global researchers will upload digital music data (MIDI files) to the little cubes as they pass overhead, and the satellites themselves will transform the data into music using a vocal simulator. This processed music will then be emanated down to anyone interested in listening to these cosmic sounds. AMSAT-UK provides directions for tuning in here, and says that all one needs is a common hand-held receiver and hand-made Yagi antenna positioned to track the satellite at each given pass over the region.

The International Space Station shoots CubeSats into orbit using a Star Wars-like weapon, the double-barreled JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer, which has no malicious or defensive capabilities; it simply fires little cubes into space, sending them to their appropriate locations in Earths orbit.

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The Space Station Fires Music-Playing Satellites Into Orbit - Inverse

A Chinese DNA experiment was among the 25 NanoRacks-brokered experiments a SpaceX Dragon delivered to ISS in early June. Credit: NASA

This articleoriginally appeared in the June 19, 2017 issue of SpaceNews magazine.

Collaboration between China and the United States in space is difficult. Federal law prohibits NASA from bilateral cooperation with China unless the agency first receives congressional approval. Export control restrictions prevent U.S. companies from selling hardware to Chinese companies, or launching satellites on Chinese rockets.

One initiative, though, could open the door for greater cooperation between the two space powers, eventually. One of the payloads delivered to the International Space Station on a Dragon cargo spacecraft in early June was an experiment developed by Deng Yulin, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology in China. The experiment will test the effects of the space radiation environment on DNA.

The experiment was one of more than 25 brought to the station by NanoRacks, the Houston-based company whose services include delivering and operating experiments on the ISS. What made the experiment stand out was not so much its science or technology but that it was the first Chinese-built experiment to go to the station.

Jeffrey Manber, chief executive of NanoRacks, said the decision to fly the payload was based on business, not politics. Why are we working with China? Because theyre in space, he said during an event in New York June 5, the same day the Dragon berthed to the station.

The experiment flew once before on a Chinese mission, Manber said, with an abnormality detected in the DNA. We dont know yet if its due to the microgravity or the radiation, he said, hence the desire by Deng to fly it again, this time on the ISS.

The experiment was able to navigate a narrow path to overcome legal obstacles to U.S.-China space cooperation. Because the agreement is with NanoRacks, and not NASA, it does not violate existing limitations on bilateral cooperation between NASA and China. Moreover, since the experiment is imported to the United States, it does not run afoul of export control restrictions.

The company, in a June 5 statement, emphasized that the experiment will remain installed on a NanoRacks platform inside the station, with no access to NASA or other ISS systems. There is, NanoRacks added, no transfer of technology between NASA and China. NanoRacks also worked with NASA to ensure there were no issues flying the experiment.

For us, its not about a political statement, but that we now have another unique international customer, Manber said in that statement.

While the flight of that experiment may not have had geopolitical motivations, it might yet have geopolitical implications. In the U.S., the experiment got very little attention until after its launch. However, in China, it was major news, where it was seen as a milestone. This is a new model of cooperation that we can follow in the future, Deng told the state-run Xinhua news agency.

If a Chinese experiment can fly on the ISS, how else could the United States and China cooperate in space? For now, there are no signs of major changes in current U.S. policy, but its clear the issue cannot be ignored, especially as Chinas spaceflight capabilities grow.

Theyre very active, NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said at a June 8 hearing of the House Science Committee, when asked about Chinese space capabilities. For us, we have to decide at some point whats going to be our interaction with them.

Manber has his own ideas of how he would like to work with the Chinese in the future. They have a space station as well, he said, and Im going to work as hard as I can to make it international.

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One small step for US-China space cooperation - SpaceNews