Monthly Archives: March 2021

Even though people are actively living in space and weve colonized Mars with robots, space will always be The Final Frontier. Most of us, however, cant just hop on Booking.com and book a suborbital vacation package. Now, one company is looking to change that with the worlds first space hotel. The ambitious project is scheduled to open in 2027. Heres everything you need to know.

The original concept for Voyager Station, then called the Von Braun Station, was announced in 2019 with a tentative launch date of 2027. It was surprisingly ambitious with the promise of a luxury-hotel-esque interior featuring everything from gourmet restaurants to rock climbing walls to low-gravity basketball courts. Construction delays and the COVID pandemic set the project back. Its since been taken over by new construction company Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC). Now, the companys president, former pilot John Blincow, is motivated, educated, and optimistic that sojourning on his space station in this decade is not only possible but likely.

In an interview with CNN, OACs senior designer also assured guests that Voyager Stations aesthetic would not be reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was almost a blueprint of what not to do, said Tim Alatorre. I think the goal of Stanley Kubrick was to highlight the divide between technology and humanity and so, purposefully, he made the stations and the ships very sterile and clean and alien.

Modern space travel is indeed a cold, sterile experience. Even todays most luxurious commercial space travel involves vacationing in a cramped, zero-g laboratory environment with vacuum toilets and sleeping bags strapped to the wall. If the concepts are realized, Voyager Station will be anything but. OAC promises 125,000 square feet of habitable space, including posh hotel-style suites with mostly traditional beds, baths, and showers. The 5,300-square-foot luxury villas will sleep up to 16 people with three bathrooms and full cooking facilities. With a wheel-and-spoke design that spins around a center axis, the station will create its own artificial gravity (about that on Earth) in the living quarters and common areas, so they feel more like their terrestrial counterparts. Guests will also enjoy resort-like amenities, including sleek bars, full restaurants (complete with gourmet dining and NASA-inspired throwbacks like Tang and freeze-dried ice cream), and unique activities that take advantage of the lower-gravity environment. Oversized windows throughout will afford stunning views of Earth and our galaxy from every corner of the station.

Pricing for overnight stays aboard Voyager Station has yet to be announced. For the very first guests, its safe to assume it wont be cheap. Nightly rates aboard the International Space Station currently run more than $30,000 without the fancy five-star amenities promised at Voyager Station. Plus, theres the matter of actually getting to the station. If Virgin Galactics suborbital space rides currently priced at $250,000 per person are any indication, the roundtrip transportation wont be cheap either.

If a trip to Voyager Station doesnt fit into your travel budget, check out our favorite bucket list trips for space and astronomy nerds. For something a little more exciting, an edge-of-space hot air balloon ride is always an option.

Read more:
Inside The First-Ever Luxury Space Hotel Thats Set to Open in 2027 - The Manual

Second-in-command on Nasas first simulated Mars mission, 'HI-SEAS', Kate Greene discusses what it takes to be a modern astronaut and why todays right stuff is different from what was required on the Apollo missions of the 20th century.

Theres really nothing normal about six adults making believe they live on another planet, says Kate Greene. Shes reflecting on an experience in which she lived in a geodesic dome, only ventured outside in a fake space suit, bathed with wet wipes, breathed recycled air and never felt real sunlight on her skin for four months.

Green, who is by academic training a laser physicist, is also what she calls an almost-astronaut. The term is self-effacing, used deliberately to maintain a respectful distance between her and real space travellers who have buckled up in the command module on the launch pad. Yet Greene has played a vital role in our understanding of how human spaceflight to Mars might look one day. As an analogue crew member, she lived and worked as a scientist under simulated Martian conditions as part of a Nasa human research programme.

The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) was a Nasa-funded project that ran for five years from 2013, in six missions to provide scientific insight into astronaut response and adaptation to living on Mars, should we everget there. Greene was second-in-command of a six-member team in the projects first instalment. Its purpose was to collect physiological data on crews during long-duration simulated Mars missions, with a focus on diet and nutrition, she explains, (although there were countless other scientific observations and experiments). Her experiences are recorded in her new book Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.

Greene, who as well as being a laser physicist is a published poet, became involved in HI-SEAS by answering an open-call advertisement on a whim. Although the project required applicants to have baseline qualifications for astronaut training (which she had), she had no relevant experience, having spent most of her post-academia career as a science journalist. But it turned out the people selecting candidates to be an almost-astronaut found that to be an acceptable characteristic. Looking back on the mission, Greene feels Nasa was looking for a broader spectrum of life experiences. Possibly the reason for that, she ventures, is that while we were going to be under the microscope to a certain extent, we werent going to undergo the relentless scrutiny that most Nasa astronauts are required to go through in justifying whos the best of the best. I think what they were looking for was a diverse crew coming from a variety of backgrounds.

The backgrounds of Greenes five crewmates were in space systems research, engineering, materials science, geology and education outreach. I put it to Greene that this is significantly different from the traditional hero image of space explorers of the 1960s, when astronauts on the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programmes tended to be all-American, 30-something white men with engineering or military test pilot backgrounds. You can see why, says Greene. Back then, Apollos mission was to get to the Moon, so astronauts were part of the process, part of the engineering. You only had to survive for a few days, so it was all about efficiency. But going to Mars is different. With the round trips potentially taking years, simply tolerating conditions while getting the job done needs to make way for quality of life for the astronauts. Youre going to be away from home for a long time and so youve got to think about things like your mental wellbeing and what youre going to eat.

Four months isolated in a geodesic dome high on the slopes of Hawaiis Mauna Loa volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean might sound (to some at least) like a holiday in paradise. Yet for Greene, this was a far cry from a regular vacation. She recalls arriving a week in advance of the start of the project, following a short practice run at a desert research station in Utah, where we got to know each other a little better as a crew and to figure out what our experiments might be.

During that first week, the crew had team-building conversations about what psychological pressure points were on them in the simulation, or analogue (the preferred astronaut term). They discussed under what sort of circumstances individuals might leave the simulation, clearly one of the major differences between living in the analogue and the real thing. In space, you know the physics of how youre going to die, says Greene, referring to the strict protocols for throwing a fellow astronaut overboard in mission-critical scenarios, with its inevitable fatal outcome.

At this point she reminds me of the second-ever American spacewalk that nearly ended in disaster when in 1965 on the GeminiIV mission Nasa astronaut Gene Cernan experienced difficulties returning to the craft, opening up the possibility of his crewmate Tom Stafford having to close the hatch and return to Earth without him. This episode was to lead to immediate adoption of underwater astronaut training back on Earth, with Cernan being somewhat understandably one of the first to sign up after his botched EVA (extra-vehicular activity).

These first rudimentary pre-mission simulations were to evolve into analogues that would let engineers test equipment and play out scenarios that might arise on expeditions in deep space. But increasingly, these faux space missions are used to probe astronaut psychology and sociology the most unpredictable element in any human expedition to study coping strategies potentially useful on a long journey far away from Earth.

I at no point embraced the fantasy fully. I embraced the restrictions.

Back on Hawaii, the pre-mission fortnight was also spent fiddling with our space suits and getting last minute supplies. Also, since this was the first HI-SEAS mission, there were technical teething problems to overcome, such as finalising electrical systems in the astronaut habitat dome, creating a one-day delay. But once everything was in place, we arrived at night, just as you would on Mars, the idea being that we would go to sleep and when we woke up, wed be on another planet. We arrived by van and entered the dome that smelled a bit like a new car, or maybe a new spaceship smell is more accurate (its the off-gassing of the vinyl technically). A brief discussion with architects and the crew were left to their own devices: We explored our own rooms that we were very excited about, and then went to bed. When we woke up, we spent the first few days organising our food supplies.

When you look at four months food supplies for six people, says Greene, you are confronted with a sight that looks like something youve never seen before. There was just so much of it. After the food was organised, it was simply a question of setting up the mission experiments and running them.

It quickly became a very domestic experience, living communally, eating, cleaning up after yourself and doing your work. The work itself included a lot of food experiments, monitoring how your sense of smell changes with time, or your nasal patency (how much oxygen youre taking in through your nose). Such was the intensity and volume of scientific work during the analogue that at any given point Greene was behind in filling out survey documentation put in place to monitor anything and everything from her reaction to having foot swabs as part of a microbial sample test, to her inner thoughts on what deep space travel meant to her personally. There were so many little tasks to do all the time to keep those science projects running. If you talk to any of the guys on the Space Station, theyll tell you that theyre busy all the time. Everything was about data, says Greene.

However, for all the surface resemblance to a space mission, the HI-SEAS analogue was just that, says Greene a simulation in which she always knew there were never going to be the sort of life-or-death scenarios that could face astronauts at least 30 million miles from home (the exact distance between Earth and Mars varies wildly with time, as they are on different orbits around the Sun). She never found it particularly difficult to accept the idea that she was an almost-astronaut on Mars, where things got pretty normal quite fast, while on the other hand, she admits she never completely bought into the illusion. I always knew I was going back to Earth, she says, a Freudian slip perhaps betraying that the illusion had become more established in her mind than she might initially admit.

When pushed on the issue of whether she actually believed she was no longer on Earth, she says: Controversially, no. I at no point embraced the fantasy fully. I embraced the restrictions. And I felt them. I felt the frustrations of the communication delay and the inability to have a real-time conversation with anyone outside of the simulation. Stripped of electronic devices and social media, our sole regular contact with Earth was through email. Since Mars is extremely far away, and photons can only fly so fast, ouremail transmissions were delayed by 20minutes each way to mimic the actual communication lag to be experienced by Martian explorers.

The closest she got to an off-world experience was in the preparatory mission in Utah, where I let myself relax. I was outside at the time looking at the rocky horizon and I tried to let myself imagine what it must be like to be an astronaut on Mars. The moment I felt most on Mars I was in Utah. But in the same moment, I was right back on Earth. Its a common experience for astronauts to dream of home.

Meanwhile, the repetitive nature of the Martian simulation created the effect of time becoming meaningless: Youd ask yourself if its Wednesday or October. There seemed to be no difference between a day and a month, and I experienced a lot of elasticity of time. I suggest to her that this would have been good mental preparation for the series of Covid-related lockdowns shes experienced in her small apartment in New York. You would think so, she says, but its not the case. Although it might seem oddly prescient to have written a book about the experience of living on Mars that it so outwardly similar to life during the pandemic, it is different. Life in the dome on Hawaii was easier, she says, not least because there was always a detailed action plan. All this, she says waving her hand vaguely at the Big Apple, is kind of mushy. It doesnt make any sense.

Although Greene was occupied in conducting reams of endless scientific data-gathering experiments, the inescapable conclusion is that it was the crew that was the experiment. She is happy to accept that you could see it as being a case that she and her five crewmates were the lab rats under the microscope, with data analysts back on Earth working out what the 21st-

century version of the right stuff would be in terms of long-duration excursions into deep space rather than flag-planting weekend trips to the Moon. I think its important to state that I really did think that I was contributing something to the future of space flight, and potentially this data canbe a part of human space exploration history.

Greene says that because of analogues such as the HI-SEAS programme, the science and engineering community is able to amass plenty of data to design a safer, better mission beyond low-Earth orbit. While she is happy to have played her part in that process, she admits the push to go further into space has left me wondering what assumptions get built into space systems and mission designs, leading her to wonder further what it is that makes us want to go in the first place. What is it exactly that propels us up and out?

She takes a few moments to make the point that much early exploration of our home planet, though often dressed up in the guise of the pursuit of knowledge or scientific discovery, was, as we are now becoming increasingly more aware, rooted in colonialism and subjugation. What kind of remnant legacies and unexamined assumptions thread through todays discussions to colonise Mars? And if there ever is a human mission to Mars, who gets to go? Who decides? Yet she also sees deep space exploration as bringing with it the opportunity to inspire new ways of sustainability for both our lives and our ecosystems back on Earth. What kind of wisdom might launch inside those spaceships? What kind of wisdom might we grow here at home?

One Upon a Time I Lived on Mars is published by Icon Books, 14.99

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Originally posted here:
'In space, you know the physics of how you're going to die': Kate Greene - E&T Magazine

A Univeristy of New South Wales professor believes that humans will colonise Mars by 2050, but not to the extent that Elon Musk predicts.

Professor Serkan Saydam from UNSW Sydney is of the belief that the minute autonomous mining processes quickly become more commercially viable, there will be humans on Mars well before the end of the 21st century.

With NASAs Perseverance Rover touching down on the red planet in recent times, there is increased interest in humankinds ability to put itself onto Mars, with many anticipating it will come sooner rather than later.

Saydam says that is certainly achievable, but there are many hoops to jump through before we may touch down on the distant planet.

Everything is all about water. You use water as a life support, plus also being able to separate out the hydrogen to use as an energy source, he says in an interview with the university's media arm.

The process for having humans on Mars will be to set up operations, go there and produce water with robots first, and then be able to extract the hydrogen to make the energy ready before people arrive.

Innovation in robotics and autonomous systems are clearly important so that we have the water ready and the hydrogen separated and ready for when human beings land.

At the moment, we dont have the ability to do it. There are significant research efforts, specifically here at UNSW under ACSER (Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research), about the best way to do it, but there is no consensus yet. It also depends on how many people we expect to be living on Mars. Is it five, or 5000, or 50,000, or even more?

Saydam disagrees with the idea that there will be a city on Mars of up to 1 million people within 30 years, which has been coined by entrepreneur Elon Musk, who says he will easily fly over 1000 SpaceX rockets with people, infrastructure and cargo to the red planet.

I believe a colony on Mars is going to happen, but between 2040 and 2050 is more feasible. This could be shortened depending on the technological advances that can reduce the costs or from stronger motivation.

What I think will happen is that first of all we will do these activities on the moon and have a colony there. Then we can use the moon as a petrol station to get to Mars and beyond.

He goes on to say that there must be a monetary benefit involved for companies to invest in products that will fuel the colonisation of Mars.

One issue is that demand is not there. For companies to get involved in developing products (for Mars missions), they need to be able to produce minerals or something that can be used for manufacturing goods and then sell it.

At the moment, everything is just a cost and there is no revenue for companies.

Despite Saydams sentiments, Musk and SpaceX look to push on, with the company looking to fly the first humans to Mars in 2022, with NASA aiming for a launch in 2024.

Although, there is no word yet on how many architects will be needed in order to terraform the Martian landscape.

Image: Wikipedia Commons

Read more here:
Humans on Mars by 2050? We Might Have Liftoff - Architecture and Design

Science fiction epic The Expanse has always been good, but during its fifth and latest season, which aired on Amazon Prime this winter, more people seemed to notice just how good it is. The seriess penultimate season is rated 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics commending the actors strong performances and the showrunners attempt to accurately portray a not-so-distant future in which humans have colonized the Solar System. Based on novels of the same name by James S.A. Corey, the joint pseudonym of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, The Expanse is singular among recent sci-fi TV for its realism. From the ecological collapse that will push people off of Earth, to space travel (warp drive is a bunch of hooey), to the political dynamics of an interplanetary human society, The Expanse tries to get the details right. And more often than not, it succeeds.

But the shows commitment to accuracy isnt limited to its scientific elements, like its realistic depiction of peoples movements in zero-g, and the series has garnered acclaim for more than just its nuanced representation of our hypothetical sociopolitical future. In season five, The Expanse heavily explores themes of trauma, abuse, and intimate partner violence, and more so than many prestige dramas grappling with these topics, the sci-fi series does them justice.

Season five of The Expanse picks up where season four left offwith asteroids hurtling toward an unsuspecting Earth. Sent by Belter freedom-fighter Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander), three rocks impact the planet, killing millions of people and injuring and displacing millions more. While the governments of Earth, Mars, and the Belt scramble to deal with the fallout from this terrorist attack, smaller-scale dramas unfold across the Solar System. The Rocinante is docked for long-term repairs, and the crew are free to pursue personal missions. Among them are Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) and Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), who, in parallel journeys, revisit their past trauma.

Everybody there is carrying the weight of their history, and some of those histories are terrible.

While viewers are offered glimpses of the two characters backstories in previous seasons of the show, the most recent episodes hold nothing back. In flashback scenes on Earth, the audience meets young Amos, whos taken in by a flawed, but good-intentioned woman after living on the street. Its implied that, in addition to joining a gang to survive, he was forced into sex work as a child, illuminating reasons for Amoss violent tendencies and emotional detachment.

Across the Solar System in the Belt, Naomi searches for Filip (Jasai Chase Owens), the son she was forced to leave, only to be kidnapped by him and reunited with his fatherher abuserMarco and her old comrades. Viewers learn that she was captivated by Marcos charisma and persuaded to join the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), a radical movement for Belters liberation, when she was young. After giving birth to Filip and growing wary of the OPAs violent tactics, she attempted to leave. In a ploy to keep her from escaping, Marco hid Filip from Naomi, nearly driving her to suicide. Instead, she left, starting life anew. Held captive aboard Marcos ship in the present day, Naomi is once again forced to make the harrowing choice to leave Filip, who has been poisoned against his mother by his father, victimized himself by Marcos emotional abuse.

Sex and culture critic Ella Dawson praises these plotlines in a tweet: Can we talk about #TheExpanse having more than one survivor of sexual violence and abuse as a main character?? In a phone conversation, Abraham and Franck explain that they drew from their personal experienceswith trauma and therapywhen crafting these stories.

I have certainly been in relationships that were not physically, but emotionally abusive, Abraham says. And I spent a lot of time kind of unspooling that, and that informs what I do now.

Franck connects the themes in season five to his childhood in a fundamentalist, conservative religious group, in which isolation and control played large roles. Abraham notes that it was important to them to make clear in The Expanse that while abuse survivors are impacted by the trauma theyve endured, they arent lessened by it. Everybody there is carrying the weight of their history, and some of those histories are terrible.

Speaking to their decision to center abuse survivors in both the novels and on the show, Abraham and Franck also emphasize that, unfortunately, abuse is common. (So common, that allegations of sexual harassment and assault against castmember Cas Anvar necessitated writing the death of his character, Alex Kamal, into the shows season five finale.) According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, in the US, one in four women and one in nine men experience severe intimate partner physical violence. National Childrens Alliance estimates that roughly 700,000 children are abused in America each year. Amos, a white man from Earth, grew up impoverished in Baltimore. Naomi, a Black woman from the Belt, was a successful engineer before meeting Marco. Their backgrounds could not be more different, but as the writers illustrate in this season of The Expanse, trauma is universal.

Yet the show is groundbreaking not simply because it represents trauma, but because that representation is diverse and empathetic. (Abraham and Franck praise the casts performance, noting that much of the stories nuance is owed to them.) Particularly in Naomis case, the showrunners make clear that they understand how isolation and power play roles in abuse.

In an email, Tipper explains she did a lot of research into radicalization to prepare for her portrayal of Naomi in season five. As the leader of an extremist faction of Belters fighting by any means necessary for independence, Marco is what she calls a revolutionary narcissist, and like so many abusers, he is smart and charismaticcapable of winning thousands to his cause. But his nobility and righteousness are what Abraham calls a cloak for his abuse. Throughout season five, the audience sees Filip wrestle with the messages Marco has fed him about Naomi: that shes a bad mother, a deserter, someone whos weak-willed and unable to make hard choices to fight for her people or her family. His manipulation and gaslighting work.

Abraham paraphrases a tweet that likens Marco to men who learn the language of feminism and social justice only to use it to control others and increase their own power. He asserts that just because Marco is the underdog, doesnt mean hes the good guy. He is perfectly capable of taking an absolutely legitimate cause, an absolutely genuine injustice, and riding that in the direction that he wants for greater aggrandizement.

In a devastating scene indicative of the influence Marco wields, he tells Naomi about his plan to lure her chosen family, the crew of the Rocinante, to their deaths using her as bait. She pleads with her former comrade and friend Cyn (Brent Sexton), who failed to stop Marcos abuse in the past and continues to enable him in the present. She hopes to reason with Filip, whom shes tried, but failed to release from his fathers grasp. Her son slaps her. As shes dragged away by guards, she screams at Marco, sobbing, I fucking hate you! I hate you. This is the impetus for her second escape.

Tipper reveals this line was improvised. Naomi really thought she was making some breakthroughs with Filip and Cyn, and it was so brutally snatched away by Marco in that moment, she writes. He had orchestrated this grand spectacle of just how much she had failed and just how much she is not in control. Tipper remembers reading somewhere that your son can be your abuser. The pivotal moment, she writes, is, I think unfortunately, once Filip strikes her, that rings devastatingly true for Naomi, and she knows its time to go.

Viewers first learn Naomi has a son in season two of The Expanse. In a conversation with her crewmate Prax (Terry Chen) who is searching the Solar System for his daughter, she reveals her history and explains it took her a very long time to understand abandoning Filip wasnt her fault. This powerful sentiment is one the show reaffirms over and over again: The choices that survivors make in order to cope are, in Francks words, legitimate.

As viewers see, leaving ones abuser, especially when children are involved, is so much more complicated than simply walking out the door; an abusers pull is powerful.

In both my conversation with Abraham and Franck and my email exchange with Tipper, we discuss the discourse surrounding the question abuse survivors are most often asked: If the situation is so bad, why dont you just leave? In The Expanse, both Naomi and Amos eventually escape their abuse, but as viewers see, leaving ones abuser, especially when children are involved, is so much more complicated than simply walking out the door; an abusers pull is powerful.

I think we always need to remember that often in abusive relationships its not all bad, Tipper asserts. Also there are so many reasons why someone may not leave, whether it be economical or situational or threat of violence/death, and sometimes staying can be the lesser evil. Speaking from his own experience leaving a cult, Franck comments, Its easy from the outside to go, Well, you should just leave. From the inside, youre looking at abandoning what you consider to be the entirety of your life Theres no one way out. Just surviving, no matter what path you choose, is an accomplishment. Thats a victory.

Abraham hopes that The Expanse successfully communicates that in the aftermath of these experiences, however genuinely terrible, there is still the potential for joy. There is still the potential for meaningful work and meaningful friendships and meaningful connections. It doesat the end of season five, both Amos and Naomi are surrounded by the people who love them, buoyed by community.

Historically, hard science fiction has used futuristic settings as backdrops over which to tell human storiesin all their pain and complexity. The Expanse is no exception, and its most recent season is proof that everyones favorite space opera is also one of the best shows about abuse on TV.

The Expanse is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

See the article here:
The Expanse Team Unpacks Its Abuse Storylines in Season 5 - Observer