Category Archives: Space Travel

Its no longer a question of whether were going to Mars, but when. By the time we reach a second planet probably in the 2030s well probably have a base or two on the moon as well. But will people ever live beyond Earth permanently?

Hazards abound on the red planet, a world that is colder and drier than Antarctica and without the luxury of breathable air. Andy Weir provides an excellent picture of the struggle to survive in his novel The Martian. Kim Stanley Robinson takes a deeper dive with his Mars trilogy. The series follows the first 100 settlers, a hand-picked crew of scientists and engineers who gradually transform the climate. There is plenty of engineering and biology, but Robinson broadens into philosophy when he explores how some settlers want to keep Mars pure and red, while others view the life that greens the planet as a gift from humanity. And alternative history is just around the corner when another wave of colonists arrive, dreaming of breaking away from planet Earth.

Women may require fewer calories, reducing kilograms and cost for any mission launching from Earth, but governments have proved unwilling to let them take the lead. Martha Ackmanns The Mercury 13 tells the story of the women Nasa trained as part of the Mercury programme in the 1960s, and how the US president Lyndon Johnson denied them the opportunity to fly. It wasnt until 1983 that Sally Ride became the first US female astronaut in space, and the sexist culture at Nasa is the backdrop for To Space and Back, a book for younger readers that is as informative as it is aspirational. She explains what its like to eat, sleep, bathe or use the toilet in zero gravity subjects that Mary Roach expands on in her lighthearted study of living in space, Packing for Mars. Sex, in particular, is fraught with difficulties in zero gravity, where Newtons third law can make action and reaction a messy affair.

Mars may be cold and dry, but a gravitational field 38% as strong as Earths may be enough to support growth and development in humans. Robert Zubrin provides a blueprint for settling the red planet in The Case for Mars, laying out how we can get there, establish camps and harvest energy, oxygen and food from the materials we find. He ventures further in The Case for Space, where he outlines the opportunities for mining in the asteroid belt and beyond. Gravity on the frigid moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely to be too weak to support humans. But perhaps the next century will find us using artificial gravity to live throughout the solar system. In 1977, Gerald ONeill described in The High Frontier how the massive rotating spheres this would require are surprisingly straightforward to build.

Our dreams of voyaging in space are even older than that. Jules Vernes 1865 adventure story From the Earth to the Moon is eerily prescient. More than a century before Apollo 11, Verne imagines a giant cannon built in Florida with great controversy and at great expense, which launches three men in a capsule. They fire retrorockets to land on the moon and eventually return to splash down in the Pacific Ocean. The next few centuries may see us travel to Mars and beyond, but human explorers will find that writers have already planted the flag of the imagination on all these new horizons.

Spacefarers by Christopher Wanjek is published by Harvard.

Go here to read the rest:

Let's move to Mars: the best books about our future in space - The Guardian

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) With businesses closed, events canceled and crowd restrictions in place, some Michigan venues are turning to livestream to connect with patrons.

From film festivals and musical performances to bookreadings with Santa, heres a list of what you can enjoy online:

1 p.m. | Live book reading with Santa on Facebook | Facebook live event

4 p.m. through March 29 | Ann Arbor Film Festival | Watch dozens of independent films for free via Vimeo. (Warning: All films are not rated and intended for mature audiences unless otherwise noted. Some films may contain strobing effects. Viewer discretion is advised.)

9 a.m. 9:30 a.m. | KDL Library: Yoga with Mo | Yoga, breathwork and meditation session geared toward teens and adults.

1 p.m. 1:15 p.m. | KDL Livestream Storytime | Read and sing together as a family.

2 p.m. 2:15 p.m. | KDL Livestream Teens and Tweens Book Club

10 a.m. | Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park virtual visits | Join Meijer Gardens staff for special live activities including draw-alongs, book readings and live tours of attractions, including the popular Butterflies are Blooming exhibit:

11 a.m. | BenJammin Educational Music | Live performance with Gramma Jamma

Noon 12:15 | KDL Library: Read aloud with author Peter H. Reynolds | Reynolds shares a reading from one of his best-selling books.

3 p.m. 3:15 p.m. | Home Safari with the Cincinnati Zoo | A daily weekday livestream in which the zoo profiles an animal and shares an activity you can do from home.

All Day | Grand Rapids Public Museum | Watch the museums two 10-month-old Lake Sturgeon swim around their habitat in the Grand Fish, Grand River exhibition anytime during the day: .

All Day | Monterey Bay Aquarium| From sea otters and sharks to jellyfish and penguins, watch livestreams of the creatures in each exhibit.

All Day | Pure Michigan webcams | From Sault Ste. Marie to Holland, get a live look at whats happening around the state without the drive.

Grand Rapids Public Museum | Explore the museums collection of more than 250,000 artifacts and specimens online for free and download virtual discovery kits.

The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation | Dig through the museums digital collection and discover artifacts like the bus on which Rosa Parks protested segregation laws and the first car built by Henry Ford.

Outdoor Discovery Center | Take education outside with ODCs Backyard Crusade activities. Each weekly focus encourages families to explore their outdoor surroundings and investigate nature.

The Menominee Range Historical Museums | Virtual tour takes visitors through three museums that feature more than 100 exhibits including Native American history, World War II gliders and the largest steam-driven pumping engine built in the U.S.

Michigan History Museum | Take a virtual tour of the museums five floors and learn about some of the earliest people to call Michigan home.

Michigan Science Center | Take a virtual tour and learn about the human body, space travel and more through the science centers galleries.

Have another livestream event or online activity you think should be on our list? Send us the link and information by emailing christa.ferguson@woodtv.com.

Link:

Living through livestream: Online activities, webcams - WOODTV.com

There are huge chances to investigate by scientists. In any case, a great deal of vitality and endeavors are required to help support the lives of space travelers in the space with the goal that they can investigate the immaculate. To coordinate the pace, a minor atomic reactor is tried by NASA that will open many shrouded insider facts and go about as an impetus in space investigation.

NASA revealed to me that it had made a noteworthy stride in settling the issues identified with space investigations and the convoluted issues, space travelers face. The little atomic reactor tried by the space office and the Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration is said to enrich a ton of vitality for the sustenance of ran missions to the external orbital world including Moon, Mars, and other related spots. The possibility of Elon Musk in reusing the pre-owned rockets to encourage space travel is now removing many expenses caused in the space investigation and its commercialization.

It took around five months for the introduction to finish. According to Jim Reuter, NASAs acting partner chairman for the Space Technology Mission Directorate, Protected, productive and abundant vitality will be the way to future automated and human investigation. Adding further he stated, I expect the Kilopower task to be a fundamental piece of lunar and Mars power structures as they develop.

Additionally, it helped them to realize that it is steady and safe at all conditions it experiences. The entire framework was put under an assortment of stress tests with the goal that a reasonable thought can be gotten concerning what will occur if a motor in a shuttle fizzled or power must be closed off for some time.

Kilopower enables us to do a lot higher force missions, and to investigate the shadowed holes of the Moon, said Gibson. Including further he stated When we begin sending space travelers for long remains on the Moon and to different planets, that will require another class of intensity that weve never required.

View original post here:

Small Atomic Reactor Examined This Will Unlock Space Research Via NASA - The Digital Wise

This blog is part of a series providing regional analysis on the effects of the coronavirus.

By Jihad Azour

The impact of COVID-19 and the oil price plunge in the Middle East and the Caucasus and Central Asia has been substantial and could intensify. With three-quarters of the countries reporting at least one confirmed case of COVID-19 and some facing a major outbreak, the coronavirus pandemic has become the largest near-term challenge to the region. Like much of the rest of the world, people in these countries were taken utterly by surprise with this development, and I would like to express my solidarity with them as they cope with this unprecedented health crisis.

This challenge will be especially daunting for the regions fragile and conflict-torn statessuch as Iraq, Sudan, and Yemenwhere the difficulty of preparing weak health systems for the outbreak could be compounded by reduced imports due to disruptions in global trade, giving rise to shortages of medical supplies and other goods and resulting in substantial price increases.

Uncertainty about the nature and duration of the shocks has complicated the policy response.

Beyond the devastating toll on human health, the pandemic is causing significant economic turmoil in the region through simultaneous shocksa drop in domestic and external demand, a reduction in trade, disruption of production, a fall in consumer confidence, and tightening of financial conditions. The regions oil exporters face the additional shock of plummeting oil prices. Travel restrictions following the public health crisis have reduced the global demand for oil, and the absence of a new production agreement among OPEC+ members has led to a glut in oil supply. As a result, oil prices have fallen by over 50 percent since the start of the public health crisis. The intertwined shocks are expected to deal a severe blow to economic activity in the region, at least in the first half of this year, with potentially lasting consequences.

Channels of economic impact

Heres what we know.

First, measures to contain the pandemics spread are hurting key job-rich sectors: tourist cancellations in Egypt have reached 80 percent, while hospitality and retail have been affected in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. Given the large numbers of people employed in the service sector, there will be wide reverberations if unemployment rises and wages and remittances fall.

Production and manufacturing are also being disrupted and investment plans put on hold. These adverse shocks are compounded by a plunge in business and consumer confidence, as we have observed in economies around the world.

In addition to the economic disruptions from COVID-19, the regions oil exporters are affected by lower commodity prices. Lower export receipts will weaken external positions and reduce revenue, putting pressures on government budgets and spilling over to the rest of the economy. Oil importers, on the other hand, will likely be affected by second-round effects, including lower remittance inflows and weaker demand for goods and services from the rest of the region.

Finally, sharp spikes in global risk aversion and the flight of capital to safe assets have led to a decline in portfolio flows to the region by near $2 billion since mid-February, with sizable outflows observed in recent weeksa risk I underscored in a recent blog. Equity prices have fallen, and bond spreads have risen. Such a tightening in financial conditions could prove to be a major challenge, given the regions estimated $35 billion in maturing external sovereign debt in 2020.

Against this challenging backdrop, the region is likely to see a big drop in growth this year.

Policy priorities

The immediate policy priority for the region is to protect the population from the coronavirus. Efforts should focus on mitigation and containment measures to protect public health. Governments should spare no expense to ensure that health systems and social safety nets are adequately prepared to meet the needs of their populations, even in countries where budgets are already squeezed. Governments in the Caucasus and Central Asia, for example, are increasing health spending and considering broader measures to support to the vulnerable and shore up demand. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the coronavirus outbreak has been particularly severe, the government is ramping up health spending, providing additional funding to its Ministry of Health.

Beyond that overarching imperative, economic policy responses should be directed at preventing the pandemica temporary health crisisfrom developing into a protracted economic recession with lasting welfare losses to the society through increased unemployment and bankruptcies. However, the uncertainty about the nature and duration of the shocks has complicated the policy response. Where policy space is available, governments can achieve this goal using a mix of timely and targeted policies on hard-hit sectors and populations, including temporary tax relief and cash transfers.

Temporary fiscal support should consist of measures that provide well-targeted support to affected households and businesses. This support should aim to help workers and firms weather the significant, but hopefully temporary, stop in economic activity that the health measures being implemented to control the spread of the coronavirus will entail. This support will have to take account of the fiscal space that is available, and where policy space is limited be accommodated by reprioritizing revenue and spending objectives within existing fiscal envelopes. Where liquidity shortages are a major concern, central banks should stand ready to provide ample liquidity to banks, particularly those lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, while regulators could support prudent restructuring of distressed loans without compromising loan classification and provisioning rules.

When the immediate crisis from the coronavirus has begun to dissipate, consideration could be given to more conventional fiscal measures to support the economy, such as restarting infrastructure spending, although fiscal space has been significantly eroded over the last decade. Given the nature of the current slowdown, trying to stimulate the economy at this time is unlikely to be successful and would risk eliminating the limited fiscal space that is still available.

Many countries are already introducing targeted measures. For example, several countriesKazakhstan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, to name a fewhave announced large financial packages to support the private sector. These packages include targeted measures to defer taxes and government fees, defer loan payments, and increase concessional financing for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Other countries, particularly the regions oil importers, have more limited policy space. Lower revenues resulting from lower importson top of additional pandemic mitigation spendingare expected to widen fiscal deficits in these economies. And while well-targeted health spending should not be sacrificed, very high debt in many of these oil-importing countries means that they will lack the resources to respond adequately to the broader economic slowdown. As such, these countries should try to strike a balance between easing credit conditions and avoiding vulnerability to capital outflows, and, where possible, allow the exchange rate to cushion some of the shocks. Sizeable financing needs are likely to arise in some countries.

Support from the IMF

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, we have been in continuous interaction with the authorities in our region to offer advice and assistance, especially those in urgent need of financing to withstand the shocks. The Fund has several tools at its disposal to help its members surmount this crisis and limit its human and economic cost, and a dozen countries from the region have already approached the Fund for financial support. Work is ongoing to expedite approval of such requestslater this week, our Executive Board will consider a request from the Kyrgyz Republic for emergency financing, likely the first such disbursement since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. A few other requests will be considered by the Executive Board in the coming days. Now, more than ever, international cooperation is vital if we hope to prevent lasting economic scars.

The IMF and COVID-19

Read more:

COVID-19 Pandemic and the Middle East and Central Asia: Region Facing Dual Shock - International Monetary Fund

During the 1950s, New Yorks Museum of Modern Art organized a famous photo exhibition called The Family of Man. In the wake of a world war, the show, chockablock with pictures of people, celebrated humanitys cacophony, resilience and common bond.

Today a different global calamity has made scarcity the necessary condition of humanitys survival. Cafes along the Navigli in Milan hunker behind shutters along with the Milanese who used to sip aperos beside the canal. Times Square is a ghost town, as are the City of London and the Place de la Concorde in Paris during what used to be the morning rush.

The photographs here all tell a similar story: a temple in Indonesia; Haneda Airport in Tokyo; the Americana Diner in New Jersey. Emptiness proliferates like the virus.

The Times recently sent dozens of photographers out to capture images of once-bustling public plazas, beaches, fairgrounds, restaurants, movie theaters, tourist meccas and train stations. Public spaces, as we think of them today, trace their origins back at least to the agoras of ancient Greece. Hard to translate, the word agora in Homer suggested gathering. Eventually it came to imply the square or open space at the center of a town or city, the place without which Greeks did not really regard a town or city as a town or city at all, but only as an assortment of houses and shrines.

Thousands of years later, public squares and other spaces remain bellwethers and magnets, places to which we gravitate for pleasure and solace, to take our collective temperature, celebrate, protest. Following the uprisings in Tiananmen Square, Tahrir Square, Taksim Square and elsewhere, Yellow Vest protesters in France demonstrated their discontent last year not by starting a GoFundMe page but by occupying public sites like the Place de la Rpublique and the Place de lOpra in Paris.

Both of those squares were built during the 19th century as part of a master plan by a French official, Baron Georges-Eugne Haussmann, who remade vast swaths of Paris after the city passed new health regulations in 1850 to combat disease. Beset by viruses and other natural disasters, cities around the world have time and again devised new infrastructure and rewritten zoning regulations to ensure more light and air, and produced public spaces, buildings and other sites, including some of the ones in these photographs, that promised to improve civic welfare and that represented new frontiers of civic aspiration.

Their present emptiness, a public health necessity, can conjure up dystopia, not progress, but, promisingly, it also suggests that, by heeding the experts and staying apart, we have not yet lost the capacity to come together for the common good. Covid-19 doesnt vote along party lines, after all. These images are haunted and haunting, like stills from movies about plagues and the apocalypse, but in some ways they are hopeful.

They also remind us that beauty requires human interaction.

I dont mean that buildings and fairgrounds and railway stations and temples cant look eerily beautiful empty. Some of these sites, like many of these photographs, are works of art. I mean that empty buildings, squares and beaches are what art history textbooks, boutique hotel advertisements and glossy shelter and travel magazines tend to traffic in. Their emptiness trumpets an existence mostly divorced from human habitation and the messy thrum of daily life. They imagine an experience more akin to the wonder of bygone explorers coming upon the remains of a lost civilization.

They evoke the romance of ruins.

Beauty entails something else. It is something we bestow.

It will be the moment we return.

London This is what rush hour looks like now in a major metropolis.Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Munich A subway without commuters.Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Moscow The seats were empty at rehearsal, and remained so for the online performance.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Beijing A lone diner in a neighborhood known for its nightlife.Gilles Sabri for The New York Times

Caracas Day 2 of Venezuelas nationwide quarantine.Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Los Angeles An unchanging ocean, a barely recognizable beach in Santa Monica.Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Barcelona Pigeons had Las Ramblas to themselves.Maria Contreras Coll for The New York Times

New Jersey The Americana Diner in West Orange was open but only for takeout.Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

Srinagar, India In a tourist season without tourists, boats without passengers.Atul Loke for The New York Times

Bangkok Streets of fear in a city popular with Chinese visitors from Wuhan.Amanda Mustard for The New York Times

Berlin Keep your distance: That is the plea from the German government.Emile Ducke for The New York Times

New Delhi A day at the fair in Red Fort.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times

Rome The view from the Spanish Steps.Alessandro Penso for The New York Times

Washington Even cherry blossom season did not draw visitors to the Lincoln Memorial.Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Tokyo When the world stops traveling.Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Seoul South Koreas outbreak was, for weeks, the worst outside China.Woohae Cho for The New York Times

Seattle A hot dog was as unlikely as a visit to the Space Needle.Grant Hindsley for The New York Times

Milan The Navigli, where the Milanese often gather at the end of the day.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

San Francisco California residents have been ordered to stay home.Rozette Rago for The New York Times

Rawalpindi, Pakistan No standees, and few seat takers.Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times

New York A major transit hub, the Oculus, in a city no longer on the move.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Yangon, Myanmar Nothing to see here: Tourists used to come for the panoramic view.Minzayar Oo for The New York Times

So Paulo The last picture show, or one of them, before theaters were shut.Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

Siem Reap, Cambodia No visits to Angkor Wat, and no Pub Street toasts afterward.Adam Dean for The New York Times

Sydney, Australia Sunset is normally prime photo-taking time at the Opera House.Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Hong Kong A popular viewing point, but few takers.Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Yogyakarta, Indonesia Only the buildings needed guarding at a temple complex.Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times

Paris The view is still there, the viewers far less so.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

Bogot, Colombia An empty cloverleaf tells the story of a city on lockdown.Federico Rios for The New York Times

Tehran Happy New Year: The Persian New Year comes to Iran.Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

See the rest here:

The Great Empty - The New York Times

As the NBA season has been suspended until further notice, it leaves plenty of time for Kyrie Irving to recover, and while the athlete does that in the comfort of quarantine, his eponymous line of signature Nike silhouettes is still expanding in his honor. From clean black and white colorways to a trophy-clad inspiration for All-Star Weekend, this years run of the Kyrie 6 has been relatively removed of out-there schemes that, however, is changing with the introduction of this latest, whose existence has been unveiled by way of independent sellers. Infused with themes of space travel, the pair irons on motifs across both the lateral and medial: the latter gives way to the astros as it likens basketballs to planets while the former prefers to sprawl with text as it spells out There is no coming back. Obviously foreboding, the embroidered detail sits atop a dripping volt green swoosh whose suede base arrives in a grey thats as neutral as the white coloring seen on the toe and tooling. Elsewhere, black heel counters add prominent color blocking, bits of orange streak across the forefoot, and the right sides tongue emblem swaps the Kyrie insignia for more celestial nods. Grab a detailed look here and find them available via eBay ahead of a likely upcoming Nike.com release.

In other news, there may be more Off-White Air Jordan 5s on the way.

Nike Kyrie 6 There Is No Coming BackAvailable$160Color: Photon Dust/Green StrikeStyle Code: BQ4631-005

Make sure to follow @kicksfinder for live tweets during the release date.

Where to Buy

See the original post here:

Nike Kyrie 6 Heads To Space With There Is No Coming Back - Sneaker News

Picture your ideal vacation destination.

If youre imagining the dark and cold vacuum of space, then Elon Musks SpaceX tourism is just for you!

Ah yes, Elon Musk, the guy known for laughing at a deer at the bottom of a swimming pool and for making a meme of his Tesla Cybertruck reveal when a demonstrator accidentally broke the trucks unbreakable windows.

Oh, and he founded his own NASA.

Jokes aside, Musks space exploration company, SpaceX, could be the saving grace for astronomy during a quiet time of NASA launches. SpaceX recently signed a deal with Space Adventures to make the stars above us the newest tourist hot spot; it plans to send four people in a spaceship as early as the end of next year.

Late 2021 may sound like an optimistic timeline, but it is actually a realistic one. Space Adventures has already run eight tourism trips to the International Space Station, and Musk started what CNN called the new Space Age when he flew a Tesla Roadster near Mars in the worlds most powerful rocket in 2018.

NASA apparently recognized SpaceXs potential as well, having given $2.6 billion in 2014 for the development of the Crew Dragon, the spacecraft that will be used to propel tourists into space.

Although tourism is only an afterthought next to SpaceXs endgame of Mars colonization, the commercialization of space travel could be what scientists need to spur the next Space Race. Space travel is expensive and time-intensive, and it can seem frivolous to invest in when there are more immediate concerns closer to home here on Earth.

Science needs a push to put stakes in space exploration. After all, a push is what put a man on the moon.

The U.S. government believed it was impractical to grant the $152 billion that was spent on the moon landing until Russias launch of the Sputnik satellite upped the pressure.

SpaceX changes the game by opening up possibilities for space travel that are not solely reliant on the government; its founded by a car company CEO and is recruiting non-astronaut civilians. Just as the U.S. broke grounds in research in the face of competition from Russia, commercialized space travel could prompt competition, resulting in reduced costs, increased efficiency, faster timelines and groundbreaking expeditions.

Space tourism will probably remain exclusive to the wealthy, but it could reignite global interest in astronomy and motivate trailblazing research into space exploration.

If you're interested in submitting a Letter to the Editor, click here.

Continued here:

Space tourism could spur the next Space Race | Opinion - The Daily Collegian Online

Hordinsky was the flight surgeon (primary doctor) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and his patients were American astronauts. He was with NASA from 1972 to 1981, the whole time that Skylab, the U.S. space station, was operational.

Skylab allowed the astronauts to be in space for prolonged periods of time, and this extended time living in a weightless environment affected their bodies in many ways. It altered the functioning of all the bodys organs, especially the heart, stomach and intestines, eyes and brain.

On Earth, gravity pulls bodily fluids toward the lower parts of the body, but in microgravity, fluids move from the lower parts toward the upper body, and this redistribution of fluids causes the heart to become enlarged, which affects the amount of oxygen that reaches the brain. This redistribution of fluids also takes place in the eyes, affecting vision.

In microgravity, there is also a noticeable amount of bone and muscle wasting. These were some of the new issues that Hordinsky needed to carefully monitor while the astronauts were in outer space.

Jerry Roman Hordinsky was born Aug. 3, 1942, to Bohdan and Irene (Tysowsky) Hordinsky, in Kalush, a small city in western Ukraine. Bohdan Hordinsky was a well-respected doctor in the Soviet-controlled republic of Ukraine and was reportedly Josef Stalins personal physician for a while.

Shortly before Jerrys birth, Kalush fell to the Nazi German Army and was occupied by the Third Reich, which systematically attempted to kill all of the Jews in the town. Since Hordinsky had many Jews as patients, and had continued to treat them after German occupation, he knew that he and his family were at risk and decided to flee the country.

The Hordinsky family fled to Vienna, Austria, and ended up settling in a small city in the Austrian Alps. When the war ended, they moved to Salzburg, Austria, where Hordinsky headed a United Nations hospital.

On Dec. 14, 1947, the family boarded a vessel headed to the U.S. and arrived in New York City on Christmas Day. Hordinsky practiced medicine at St. James Hospital in Newark, N.J., and, in 1949, moved to Bottineau, N.D., where he spent a year as an intern at the hospital. In 1951, the family relocated to Drake and Dr. Hordinsky established his practice there.

ARCHIVE: "Did You Know That" columns

At an early age, it became very evident that Jerry Hordinsky was gifted intellectually, and he was sent to St. Paul to attend the prestigious St. Thomas Military Academy for junior high and high school. After graduating, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he focused on an engineering and pre-medicine curriculum and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in applied mathematics.

On Sept. 16, 1963, Hordinsky began medical school at the University of North Dakota, which at that time was only a two-year program. For his final two years, he attended Northwestern University in Chicago, receiving his medical degree in 1967. Hordinsky interned in Chicagos Cook County Hospital, earning his license to practice medicine.

On Sept. 20, 1968, Hordinsky enlisted in the U.S. Army as a flight surgeon, with the anticipated opportunity to eventually work for NASA. He was sent to Boston where he earned a masters degree in industrial health from Harvard University in 1972, and then went to the University of Oklahoma where he became certified in both occupational and aerospace medicine.

Since Hordinsky was no longer obligated to serve in the Army due to being discharged on March 19, 1971, he was hired by NASA to be a flight surgeon. At the time Hordinsky was hired, NASA was nearing completion of the Apollo phase of its space program, and plans were well underway for launching a space station into orbit in the spring of 1973. On Dec. 11, 1972, the last Apollo flight took place, and on May 14, 1973, the rocket carrying the Skylab space station was launched into orbit.

Skylab was a 169,950-pound space station that contained a workshop and solar observatory for three crew members. On May 25, the first manned flight to the Skylab space station was launched with astronauts Charles Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joseph Kerwin aboard.

Besides the effects on the body already mentioned earlier, there were also other concerns. With a reduction of oxygen to the brain, the control of emotions was reduced, and because the three astronauts would be living and working in very cramped quarters, the chances of emotional flare-ups increased.

Another great concern was nausea in space. Space sickness, or space adaptation syndrome, is nausea experienced by as many as half of all space travelers during their adaptation to weightlessness once in orbit. Since a number of space walks were scheduled for the astronauts in Skylab, it could be fatal for them to vomit while in a space suit. The vomit could smear the inside of the helmet, blinding the astronaut, and because the helmet could not be removed, the vomit could be inhaled or clog the oxygen circulation system.

Hordinsky carefully examined all of the astronauts medical data transmitted from Skylab to the monitors at his medical facility, noting anything that veered from normal. Each night, he would hold a radio conference with the astronauts to elicit any of their concerns or anxieties and then make recommendations to address their concerns and correct the medical abnormalities.

The first manned Skylab (called Skylab 2) mission lasted 28 days, and the crew returned to Earth on June 22, 1973. Skylab 3 was launched on July 28, and the astronauts remained in space for 59.5 days. Skylab 4 was launched on Nov. 11, and the astronauts returned to Earth on Feb. 8, 1973, having been in space for 84 days.

Astronaut Owen K. Garriott, Skylab 3's science pilot, performs an extravehicular activity at the Apollo Telescope Mount of Skylab in 1973. Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons / Special to The Forum

Much of Hordinskys work occurred after the astronauts returned to Earth. He ran extensive tests for three days on each of the men, with a heavy emphasis on making certain that their minds and bodies were adapting properly to the gravitational environment back on Earth.

Because NASA realized that the more effective Space Shuttle program was moving forward, the scheduled launching of Skylab 5 was canceled. The mid-1970s was a period of dtente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and both countries agreed to do a joint space venture called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). On July 15, 1975, both the U.S. and Soviet Union launched separate spacecrafts that docked/joined together on July 17, and the teams did joint space ventures and experiments.

After 44 hours together, the spacecrafts separated and the teams returned to Earth. Upon splashdown, the U.S. crew was exposed to toxic fumes that were accidentally vented into the cabin of the aircraft, and the astronauts were hospitalized for two weeks. This was the only major health issue that Hordinsky was not able to avert during his time as flight surgeon, and it was totally out of his control.

With no more space flights scheduled until 1981, Hordinsky went to Germany and served as deputy flight surgeon for the European Space Agency. From 1982 to 1999, he worked for the Federal Aviation Administration as its clinical and research medical officer and then as manager of their Aeromedical Research Division. Much of his work involved writing reports about health and safety issues he observed and encountered while he was the primary flight surgeon for the astronauts involved in space travel.

Dr. Jerry Hordinsky died on Oct. 20, 2000.

Did You Know That is written by Curt Eriksmoen and edited by Jan Eriksmoen of Fargo. Send your comments, corrections, or suggestions for columns to the Eriksmoens at cjeriksmoen@cableone.net.

Curt Eriksmoen, Did You Know That? columnist

Go here to see the original:

Eriksmoen: Doctor who grew up in ND kept orbiting astronauts healthy - Grand Forks Herald

BROWNSVILLE, Texas The effort continues to name Brownsville the next space city. Currently two cities in the U.S. have that title, Houston and Cape Canaveral. Now Brownsville wants in. It is a title that exists only by name, but with SpaceX getting ready a for launch in 2020, the community excitement and interest are expected to grow.

The South Texas Astronomical Society hosting a panel to begin discussions on what it means to have a space program in our back yards.

Richard Camuccio, Cristina V. Torres Memorial Observatory, Assistant Director, Theres this interest that is there that needs to be tapped. I see it that it will happen. Its an inevitability. Its not if but when.

Its not the first time the idea has been floated around. In 2019 staff from NASA spoke about Brownsvilles potential to become a space city. Referring to the creations of new industry jobs, both directly and assisting with space travel. Academic focus on the sciences and engineering.

Right now SpaceX makes up a major bulk of space exploration in South Texas, but the goal is to have a regional effort in schools, the general public, and local business.

Victor De Los Santos, South Texas Astronomical Society, When we do become the space city, its the culture and its the people and were all a part of it. its not just big corporations coming in and doing all the work.

Marija Jette, South Texas Astronomical Society, Getting all these forces together and multiplying the effect. Really making a name for Brownsville as the place to do research and create new exciting business and technologies.

One of the many big space projects for SpaceX in the future involves travel to Mars.

Read the original here:

Brownsville aiming to become Space City by 2030 - KVEO-TV

Both photons and gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light through the vacuum of empty... [+] space itself. Despite the fact that it isn't intuitive, there's no evidence that there's a physical medium, or aether, required for these entities to travel through.

All throughout the Universe, different types of signals propagate. Some of them, like sound waves, require a medium to travel through. Others, like light or gravitational waves, are perfectly content to traverse the vacuum of space, seemingly defying the need for a medium altogether. Irrespective of how they do it, all of these signals can be detected from the effects they induce when they eventually arrive at their destination. But is it really possible for waves to travel through the vacuum of space itself, without any medium at all to propagate through? That's what Wade Campbell wants to know, asking:

Back in the late 1800s, an "aether" was proposed as the medium that light travels through. We now don't believe that is the case. What is the evidence and/or proof that no aether exists?

It's an easy assumption to make, but a difficult assertion to disprove. Here's the story.

Whether through a medium, like mechanical waves, or in vacuum, like electromagnetic and... [+] gravitational waves, every ripple that propagates has a propagation speed. In no cases is the propagation speed infinite, and in theory, the speed at which gravitational ripples propagate should be the same as the maximum speed in the Universe: the speed of light.

Back in the earliest days of science before Newton, going back hundreds or even thousands of years we only had large-scale, macroscopic phenomena to investigate. The waves we observed came in many different varieties, including:

In the case of all of these waves, matter is involved. That matter provides a medium for these waves to travel through, and as the medium either compresses-and-rarifies in the direction of propagation (a longitudinal wave) or oscillates perpendicular to the direction of propagation (a transverse wave), the signal is transported from one location to another.

This diagram, dating back to Thomas Young's work in the early 1800s, is one of the oldest pictures... [+] that demonstrate both constructive and destructive interference as arising from wave sources originating at two points: A and B. This is a physically identical setup to a double slit experiment, even though it applies just as well to water waves propagated through a tank.

As we began to investigate waves more carefully, a third type began to emerge. In addition to longitudinal and transverse waves, a type of wave where each of the particles involved underwent motion in a circular path a surface wave was discovered. The rippling characteristics of water, which were previously thought to be either longitudinal or transverse waves exclusively, were shown to also contain this surface wave component.

All three of these types of wave are examples of mechanical waves, which is where some type of energy is transported from one location to another through a material, matter-based medium. A wave that travels through a spring, a slinky, water, the Earth, a string, or even the air, all require an impetus for creating some initial displacement from equilibrium, and then the wave carries that energy through a medium towards its destination.

A series of particles moving along circular paths can appear to create a macroscopic illusion of... [+] waves. Similarly, individual water molecules that move in a particular pattern can produce macroscopic water waves, and the gravitational waves we see are likely made out of individual quantum particles that compose them: gravitons.

It makes sense, then, that as we discovered new types of waves, we'd assume they had similar properties to the classes of waves we already knew about. Even before Newton, the aether was the name given to the void of space, where the planets and other celestial objects resided. Tycho Brahe's famous 1588 work,De Mundi Aetherei Recentioribus Phaenomenis, literally translates as "On Recent Phenomena in the Aethereal World."

The aether, it was assumed, was the medium inherent to space that all objects, from comets to planets to starlight itself, traveled through. Whether light was a wave or a corpuscle, though, was a point of contention for many centuries. Newton claimed it was a corpuscle, which Christiaan Huygens, his contemporary, claimed it was a wave. The issue wasn't decided until the 19th century, where experiments with light unambiguously revealed its wave-like nature. (With modern quantum physics, we now know it behaves like a particle also, but its wave-like nature cannot be denied.)

The results of an experiment, showcased using laser light around a spherical object, with the actual... [+] optical data. Note the extraordinary validation of Fresnel's theory's prediction: that a bright, central spot would appear in the shadow cast by the sphere, verifying the absurd prediction of the wave theory of light.

This was further borne out as we began to understand the nature of electricity and magnetism. Experiments that accelerated charged particles not only showed that they were affected by magnetic fields, but that when you bent a charged particle with a magnetic field, it radiated light. Theoretical developments showed that light itself was an electromagnetic wave that propagated at a finite, large, but calculable velocity, today known asc, the speed of light in a vacuum.

If light was an electromagnetic wave, and all waves required a medium to travel through, and as all the heavenly bodies traveled through the medium of space then surely that medium itself, the aether, was the medium that light traveled through. The biggest question remaining, then, was to determine what properties the aether itself possessed.

In Descartes' vision of gravity, there was an aether permeating space, and only the displacement of... [+] matter through it could explain gravitation. This did not lead to an accurate formulation of gravity that matched with observations.

One of the most important points about what the aethercouldn't be was figured out by Maxwell himself, who was the first to derive the electromagnetic nature of light waves. In an 1874 letter to Lewis Campbell, he wrote:

It may also be worth knowing that the aether cannot be molecular. If it were, it would be a gas, and a pint of it would have the same properties as regards heat, etc., as a pint of air, except that it would not be so heavy.

In other words, whatever the aether was or more accurately, whatever it was that electromagnetic waves propagated through it could not have many of the traditional properties that other, matter-based media possessed. It could not be composed of individual particles. It could not contain heat. It could not transfer energy through it. In fact, just about the only thing left that the aether was allowed to do was serve as a background medium through which things like light were permitted to travel.

If you split light into two perpendicular components and bring them back together, they will produce... [+] an interference pattern. If there's a medium that light is traveling through, the interference pattern should depend on how your apparatus is oriented relative to that motion.

All of this led to the most important experiment for detecting the aether: the Michelson-Morley experiment. If aether really were a medium for light to travel through, then the Earth should be passing through the aether as it rotated on its axis and revolved around the Sun. Even though we only revolve at a speed of around 30 km/s, that's a substantial fraction (about 0.01%) of the speed of light.

With a sensitive enough interferometer, if light were a wave traveling through this medium, we should detect a shift in light's interference pattern dependent on the angle the interferometer made with our direction of motion. Michelson alone tried to measure this effect in 1881, but his results were inconclusive. 6 years later, with Morley, they reached sensitivities that were just 1/40th the magnitude of the expected signal. Their experiment, however, yielded a null result; there was no evidence for the aether at all.

The Michelson interferometer (top) showed a negligible shift in light patterns (bottom, solid) as... [+] compared with what was expected if Galilean relativity were true (bottom, dotted). The speed of light was the same no matter which direction the interferometer was oriented, including with, perpendicular to, or against the Earth's motion through space.

Aether enthusiasts contorted themselves in knots attempting to explain this null result.

All of these possibilities, despite their arbitrary constants and parameters, were seriously considered right up until Einstein's relativity came along. Once the realization came about that the laws of physics should be, and in fact were, the same for all observers in all frames of reference, the idea of an "absolute frame of reference," which the aether absolutely was, was no longer necessary or tenable.

If you allow light to come from outside your environment to inside, you can gain information about... [+] the relative velocities and accelerations of the two reference frames. The fact that the laws of physics, the speed of light, and every other observable is independent of your reference frame is strong evidence against the need for an aether.

What all of this means is that the laws of physics don't require the existence of an aether; they work just fine without one. Today, with our modern understanding of not just Special Relativity but also General Relativity which incorporates gravitation we recognize that both electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves don't require any sort of medium to travel through at all. The vacuum of space, devoid of any material entity, is enough all on its own.

This doesn't mean, however, that we've disproven the existence of the aether. All we've proven, and indeed all we're capable of proving, is that if there is an aether, it has no properties that are detectable by any experiment we're capable of performing. It doesn't affect the motion of light or gravitational waves through it, not under any physical circumstances, which is equivalent to stating that everything we observe is consistent with it's non-existence.

Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum.... [+] (Specifically, for the strong interactions.) Even in empty space, this vacuum energy is non-zero, and what appears to be the 'ground state' in one region of curved space will look different from the perspective of an observer where the spatial curvature differs. As long as quantum fields are present, this vacuum energy (or a cosmological constant) must be present, too.

If something has no observable, measurable effects on our Universe in any way, shape or form, even in principle, we consider that "thing" to be physically non-existent. But the fact that there's nothing pointing to the existence of the aether doesn't mean we fully understand what empty space, or the quantum vacuum, actually is. In fact, there are a whole slew of unanswered, open questions about exactly that topic plaguing the field today.

Why does empty space still have a non-zero amount of energy dark energy, or a cosmological constant intrinsic to it? If space is discrete at some level, does that imply a preferred frame of reference, where that discrete "size" is maximized under the rules of relativity? Can light or gravitational waves exist without space to travel through, and does that mean there is some type of propagation medium, after all?

As Carl Sagan famously said, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." We have no proof that the aether exists, but can never prove the negative: that no aether exists. All we can demonstrate, and have demonstrated, is that if the aether exists, it has no properties that affect the matter and radiation that we do observe.

Visit link:

Ask Ethan: Does The Aether Exist? - Forbes