Category Archives: Space Travel

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

Since NASA ended its shuttle program back in 2011, flight enthusiasts have been looking to commercial companies to take up the mantle and make space transportation a reality for the general public. While there has been talk about colonizing Mars and supporting a space tourism industry in recent years, commercial travel is still very much in its infancy. How is it expected to advance and evolve in the 2020s?

The 2010s saw commercial space travel take a giant leap forward. Prior to 2012, the International Space Station (ISS) was solely the domain of government-operated vehicles, but that changed when Elon Musks company, SpaceX, arrived with its Dragon cargo capsule. This marked a shift from a private space industry centered on tech areas such as defense and aviation.

Secure World Foundations director of program planning Brian Weeden recently noted that the government was pretty much the sole driver of funding and activity under the old model. He added: Almost all the money would come from the government, and the government would have almost complete control over what was built.

SpaceX personifies the new age of commercial space, where a number of launch providers have tried to make travel into the unknown more accessible. These companies include Rocket Lab, founded in New Zealand, and the Washington-based Blue Origin.

The competition has been a key driver for innovation, and expert Bill Roberson believes that it has kick-started the space race after a few decades of relative stagnation. This points to an exciting decade, especially as the number of average weekly orbital launches from the US, as well as China, Russia and Japan, continues to increase.

Roberson notes: Private, commercial spaceflight. Even lunar exploration, mining, and colonization its suddenly all on the table, making the race for space today more vital than it has felt in years.

The renewed interest and competition in space has also made it a smart outlet for investment, which could spur further advances and milestones in both the burgeoning commercial sector and national security arena. Voyager Space Holdings, headed by founder and CEO Dylan Taylor, is a holding company that focuses specifically on acquiring and supporting hi-tech space companies.

Taylor believes that his philosophy centered on bringing the best capabilities of different companies under one banner will provide a platform for innovation to flourish. Being able to work at scale will also finally enable smaller companies to compete with bigger competitors, which is potentially transformative for space travel in general.

A major event on the horizon for commercialized space travel is the first-ever tourist voyage to the Moon, which is planned by SpaceX in 2023. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be the first civilian passenger to venture near the location where Neil Armstrong once uttered his One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind speech more than 50 years ago.

Maezawa, a 44-year-old fashion mogul, recently set up a planned match-making event with the view to sharing the experience with a significant other. The event is sure to garner huge publicity, both in the run-up to launch and during the trip, which will take place in the SpaceX Starship. The success of that event will surely have some impact on how commercialized space travel develops during the remainder of the decade.

Boeing also plans on shaping the industry during the coming years as it now has the capacity for space travel after receiving a contract from NASA. The aerospace giant recently unveiled its Fewest Steps to the Moon program, with the aim of building a lander on the Moon in order to shuttle humans back and forth. It wants these plans to come to fruition by 2024.

NASA recently announced that private individuals would be able to visit the ISS for the first time in 2020 in another move that appears to herald the start of space tourism in earnest. It is unlikely to be affordable for the masses in the foreseeable future though as just a single days visit to the ISS is rumored to cost around $35,000 per day.

Those high costs and uncertainty about whether commercial space can really hit the mass market mean that it will probably be hard to judge its success before the mid-2020s. Richard Branson once said that flying tourists would be commonplace by 2008, but the dates for commercial flights continue to be pushed back.

It is an exciting time for the commercial industry, especially with visionaries such as Taylor, Musk and Jeff Bezos buying into space travel, and it certainly has the potential to come on leaps and bounds during the next decade. However, the success of planned flights and other factors will be a key determining factor in how exactly everything unfolds before 2030.

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How Commercialized Space Travel is Expected to Advance During the 2020s - The Future of Things

Researchers at the University of Washington have announced early findings on a potentially revolutionary new type of rotating detonation engine which could help produce cheaper, lighter spacecraft. Theres just one small catch.

While the research is only in its infancy, the fuel-efficient rocket would, theoretically at least, be easier and cheaper to build than current space-faring rockets, paving the way for more space travel at a lower cost to the environment. For instance, it currently takes about 3.5 million pounds of fuel to send NASAs space shuttles into space.

A conventional rocket engine burns propellant and forces it out the back using a vast array of machinery and control nozzles to create thrust and launch the rocket skyward, without any unforeseen detours.

In the rotating detonation engine, however, the shockwave does all the work, without the need for complicated machinery in the engine to direct the thrust, after which a number of secondary combustion pulses follow to launch the beast skyward. At least thats the theory.

The problem is, for the time being anyway, the engine is too unpredictable to use.

Its made of concentric cylinders. Propellant flows in the gap between the cylinders, and, after ignition, the rapid heat release forms a shock wave, a strong pulse of gas with significantly higher pressure and temperature that is moving faster than the speed of sound, said lead author James Koch, a UW doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics.

The downside of that is that these detonations have a mind of their own. Once you detonate something, it just goes. Its so violent.

Koch and his team conducted a series of 0.5-second experiments captured using high-speed cameras at 240,000 frames per second to show exactly what happens when such engines fire, so they could then begin crunching the numbers and figure out how to replicate the power and efficiency minus the chaos.

The researchers have since developed a mathematical model which they are poring over to begin the process of developing a functioning prototype engine which wouldn't plaster a crew against the rear of the spaceship.

Now I can take what Ive done here and make it quantitative. From there we can talk about how to make a better engine, Koch concludes.

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Its so violent: Scientists propose revolutionary new kind of engine for space travel, theres just one small catch (VIDEOS) - RT

Visiting the Audio Foundation and the Michael Lett Gallery, both just off Aucklands K Road, Tulia Thompson finds herself considering the galaxy and what it means to be human.

You have to imagine you are viewing these on a stifling hot February afternoon. There is a cacophony of men and machines, orange road cones and iron mesh-wire. Karangahape Rd is being dug up for the new transport hub.

I head through St Kevins Arcade, down the wide steps to the green lip of Myers Park, and around the corner. The Audio Foundation is an interesting find, both a leading space for experimental music and a gallery. You descend into the space down a long flight of concrete stairs with paint peeling from the metal railing, concrete walls painted in cream, mint and red. It feels properly abandoned. Theres no one at the reception, so when I slip into the first room, into near darkness, it feels like I could lie on the cool, concrete floor to observe the piece if I wanted to.

Sarah Callesens show Drawing, Synopsis and Song is a quiet exploration of our relationship with space, making visible the contribution of 17th century astronomer and mathematician Maria Cunitz. She was considered the most learned woman in astronomy since Hypatia of Alexandria.

Sarah Callesen Retrograde

Retrograde consists of three rotating thin wooden rods lit by a single stage-light on the floor; they remind me of meter rulers. Rotating slowly counter-clockwise; windmills come to mind as they make slow, whirring circles. Callesen intended them to turn retrograde, like Venus, but the low-fi AC motors freestyle. So this is the rotation of planets, in honour of a bright queen.

At times the outside enters again, a rhythmic pounding of bass, and the high-pitched screeching of machines as Karangahape Road is torn up and reordered.

In the next room, a projector close to the wall projects the Moon. A small black spot with a blur of red and green travels across it in a straight line. It reaches the end, the image shudders, disappears, blinks and begins again. The dots travel marks the Transit of Venus.

From Sarah Callesens Drawing, Synopsis and Song

A large black rectangle of card on the floor has names and distances written diagonally across it in white: Polina 21.6 Km. Pasha 7.2 Km. Qulzhan 7.9 Km. If you stand back and let your eyes blur it makes a pattern of uneven fretwork. I discover this because I kneel down by it and then stand up too quickly. I panic that I cant find a way in. I cant find supporting material to orient me. This piece is the sort of thing that makes some people hate artists their obscure provocations can feel exclusionary. But then I remind myself that I am, after all, an eccentric person who puts obscure references in her own writing. Im probably invoking a curse from the female gods, possibly Venus.

I chat to a lovely chap, Sam, who explains that these names and diameters are craters on Venus. Those with diameters greater than 20km are named after women who make outstanding contributions to their fields, under 20km are given female first names. All of these craters are named for women, by men. Fascinating! One of the craters is called Cunitz, and I wonder whether she would be delighted, or pissed off that she didnt do the naming. There is an iPad plugged into the wall showing images of the craters next to biographic information about the women they are named after. These pairings are strange and effective.

New Zealand poet Helen Rickersbys recent, brilliant poetry collection How to Live has a poem about philosopher Hipparchia in which Rickersby writes: Silence isnt always not speaking. Silence is sometimes an erasure. We dont know much about her, but we know she spoke. The erasure of women, both through institutional sexism and the retellings of history, still feels pervasive. We are back observing bodies colliding with uninhabitable spaces. Theres something potent about observing the silencing of women extended into space.

From Sarah Callesens Drawing, Synopsis and Song

There is an almost mechanical noise in this room; a sound recording taken in 1982 on Venus by Russian spacecraft Venera 14, looped with the sound recording from an earlier version of Retrograde. How strange that celestial bodies make sound. Not angelic chiming, but disorienting noises like wind and fierce waterfalls. The sounds are abrasive like an industrial site or furnace. At times I cant decipher the audio loop from the street sounds.

Callesens art is often visually stunning; beautiful, strange images sometimes paired with sound. So, I would have liked more aesthetically from her engagement with Maria Cunitz. I got the sense she was searching for her uncovering the imprints of her data, dusting it off from the invisibility accorded to it by men. But I didnt feel like she had found her; Maria herself remains fractal and diffuse. Maybe that is the point.

How disturbing that humankind has even extended its sexist ideas into space. What stayed with me was an impression that our mappings of space, and consideration of other bodies, are a partial, emotive picture of our own limited humanness.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Cleave Study (ii), 2019, anatomical human tongue cross-section, Xenophora shell

Up the road at Michael Lett Gallery is Zac Langdon-Poles Interbeing. The cool of the gallery is a welcome contrast to the pressing heat outside. The airy room has pristine white walls and warm wooden floors. On the left-hand wall, in Cleave Study (ii), a plastic, anatomical human-tongue meets a seashell. The shell has other small shells and bits of rock attached. Xenophora sea snails glue foreign objects to their shells for camouflage. My first thought are the tacky shell ornaments my grandmother had in the 70s.

Cleave Study (ii) also reminds me of that famous line from theorists Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus:an electron crashes into a language. Deleuze and Guattari were interested in how assemblages of disparate objects confound our imposed, rigid meanings. In contrast to the view language was our inescapable lens, Deleuze and Guattari argued that the materiality of the physical world was also creative and could disrupt language. So, the Xenophora shell is not just a metaphor for human art; Xenophora shells are their own art machines.

On the one hand, a human tongue here is cleaved to a pearlescent surface, but on the other its still plastic. There is something disturbing about plastic being made human meeting shell. I cant not think of ghostly plastic bags and sea-turtles. The tongue is a visceral metaphor for language, but tongues are also true to shell (the tongue of the oyster, say, or the tongue-like muscular foot of the Xenophora).

Langdon-Poles strength is the exquisite poetry he creates through assemblage quietly placing found objects together in a way that is both resonant and jarring. To cleave is both to join and sever. Cleave Study (ii) sets up the tension between human and nonhuman that pervades this collection.

Standing in the centre of the room, the first impression is that Majuro Atoll, Te Whanganui-A-Hei/ Cooks Beach, and Treptower Park, Berlin present stars in night-sky. I think of camping up north over Christmas, looking up to the glitter of the Milky Way. The expanse of it reorders your own perception of freedom. Yet as you adjust your eyes, you realise these images are not stars, that the spaces between are not star-like. Indeed, the images are enlarged prints of sand photograms, named for the beach that the sand has come from.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Te Whanganui-A-Hei / Cooks Beach 12.06.2019, 2019, sand photogram (1000% enlarged), made with sand from Te Whananui-A-Hei / Cooks Beach, Aotearoa New Zealand, archival hahnemhle fine art print.

The most impressive is Te Whanganui-A-Hei/ Cooks Beach where, enlarged 1000%, the light flares of the sand particles show shadowed depths and have a painterly quality.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Assimilation Study (detail), 2020, painted wooden shape-sorter blocks, hand carved Campo del Cielo meteorite, artist designed display case, acrylic, mdf, paint.

In Assimilation Study wooden sorting blocks, including a green star, are scattered in a display cabinet. One piece is slightly larger, a metallic triangle that is actually a hand-carved meteorite. It looks as if God has a toddler. If Langdon-Poles intention is that the meteorite is juxtaposed with the mundane, it looks too pristine to achieve it. But it is visually arresting. Im thinking about galaxies again.

I walk down white-painted concrete stairs into the narrower, cellar space of the building. Three prints show sand photograms at a one-to-one scale, making you wonder about the production of these images. They are made from putting sand on top of photograph paper. The place names as titles seem almost idiosyncratic, but then I think about Langdon-Pole travelling between these places. Did he go around collecting buckets of sand? Apparently, curator Andrew Thomas tells me, he gathered small handfuls from each place. Thomas notes previous works stemmed from the flightpath of migratory birds.

Sand is ground rock or shell. A quick look at the NIWA website tells me that the density and grain size is determined by the source. The process of becoming sand takes hundreds of thousands of years. So sand is already in motion, moved by tide across expanse. It is a journey that is immense, already glittering and star-like. And these images trace an alternate journey, via Zac Langdon-Poles pockets and transposed through exposure to light, that make me rethink our part in it; the grand scale of time and space confounds us.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Orbits (Cast Dandelion, Rainbow Obsidian), 2019, anatomical orbital human eye models; resin-embalmed dandelion paperweight; rainbow obsidian sphere; screws.

In Orbits, a dandelion paperweight is fixed into the socket of a plastic, anatomical model of an eye. Other versions use rainbow obsidian or petrified sequoia-wood, which creates an inky iris, an almost anime look. They are both grotesque and beautiful.

Langdon-Poles work manages to have a trueness to the ideas he explores while also being beautiful. I dont think art should have to be aesthetically pleasing, but there is a real joy in this marriage of substance and form.

Thinking of the materiality of space data in Callesens work and the travels of materiality in Zac Langdon-Poles, I would say that both displace humanness the way we think we are the centre of everything. But theres a strange doubling back of what it means to be human through examining our limitations. A meteor becomes a childs block, the ancient journey of sand is reordered into human memory, and planetary data is transformed into art object

But still, this universe, writhing alongside us. Theres a poem called My God, Its Full of Stars! by Tracy K. Smith from her stunning Pulitzer-winning collection Life of Mars where she grapples with her fathers work building the Hubble telescope.

We saw to the edge of all there is

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Sarah Callesens Drawing, Synopsis and Songand Zac Langdon-Poles Interbeingare both on until Saturday February 29.

The Spinoff Weekly compiles the best stories of the week an essential guide to modern life in New Zealand, emailed out on Monday evenings.

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My God, Its Full of Stars! Two Auckland art shows on bodies colliding with space - The Spinoff

But it gets more interesting. Alcor has two options. The first is a whole-body process that preserves the entire body in a cryo-protectant. The second is the brain and brain stem only.

Why would someone only want their brain and brain stem preserved? Presumably, if we have the technology to bring someone back by repairing the damage from whatever killed them, by that time we might also have the technology to clone a new body using the deceased persons DNA.

Again, weve already made tremendous advances in cloning. While therapeutic cloning is still in its infancy, there is no theoretical reason why we couldnt create a new body without a brain and simply implant the new brain into the cloned body. And with advances with CRISPR, its conceivable the body could come with some sophisticated upgrades.

Those upgrades would come in handy if we plan on going to a new planet like the one in Avatar 2. Imagine having the ability to create a fully customizable body using yourDNAto meet the requirements of any planet you visit. Its the ultimate in life extension.

While there are still technological hurdles to overcome like repairing the aging brain, imagine being able to grow your customizable avatar in transit while your current body is in suspended animation headed towards a different planet a hundred light years away.

I must say, the futures looking bright.

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'Freezing' our bodies is the key to long-distance space travel but can we do it? - The Next Web

Will mankind, who is attempting to travel between systems in the universe, find a precaution to prevent the passengers from traveling on the ship from getting old? Lets discuss a little bit about this issue.

One of humanitys biggest dreams is to travel between star systems in the depths of space. But, as you know, star systems are very far apart, and when compared to the life span of a person, the duration of this journey can make a huge difference.

Thanks to the time dilation when high speeds are reached, someone who goes fast is getting slower than others. Still, even if a spaceship with humans reaches 90% of the speed of light, human life still looks like a grain of sand compared to the duration of that journey.

Is the solution to this situation to put people to sleep?Today, it is not possible to reach the speed of light with its technologies. So scientists have to find a solution to prevent the aging of those who travel on the spaceship. This solution is none other than the sleep solution that we often see in science fiction movies.

There is enough technology available today to create a solution that passivates the human body and prevents aging. A technique called bio-vitrification has been used in organ transplantation for some time. This technology, which has been used for decades, has the opportunity to facilitate space travel in the future.

Biovirtification reduces the aging of human tissue to a minimum by using a liquid that protects it from freezing effect, to almost 0. The liquid used serves to prevent the formation of ice crystals that cause cells to break down.

Although this technique is used in organ transplantation, it has not been tested in humans yet. But some companies, such as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, offer services that protect the human body so that one day it can bring back dead people. Although these companies have not yet brought back any people, they have returned several simple organisms from death.

Protecting the brain or protecting the body?Some hospitals can also take patients to cool down to extend the time required in emergencies. Although this process is not the same as bioventilation, it is almost similar. As a result, if all known are combined one day, healthy and long-lived individuals may emerge.

So would you like to sail to even more interesting points? The company Alcor, which we just mentioned, offers people two options: First, to cover the whole body with a liquid that protects it from freezing and to protect the whole body; secondly, only protect the brain and brain stem.

So why does a person only want to protect his brain and brain stem? Because if one day manages to fix a harm that ends their life, a new clone body can be created with the use of DNA of a person who died until then. Of course, there is a very long way to go until humanity reaches this point. Although the cloning technology we are talking about is being developed today, humanity may not yet be ready for cloning a human body. By the way, we strongly recommend the 1997 movie Abre Los Ojos

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Will It Be Possible to Sleep People in Space Travel? - Somag News

I know that Elon Musk does many questionable and sometimes outrageous things, but remember that one time when he launched a Tesla Roadster into space using SpaceXs Falcon Heavy rocket?

Yep, that outrageous thing. The launch was a year ago, on 6 February 2019. That Roadster with his its lone occupant a spacesuit-wearing mannequin named Starman is probably still out there.

According to the experts, the sporty red car is still cruising through our solar system. And theres a simple way for you to keep track of the Roadster and Starman too.

Simply head over to Where is Roadster, a website created by programmer Ben Pearson to keep track of the vehicles location. According to the site, the vehicle is currently near Mars.

That means its roughly 298m kilometres from Earth, travelling at a speed of approximately 2985 kilometres per hour.

Starman is on a trajectory to pass through the Red Planets orbit, but it will never actually reach the Red Planet or enter its atmosphere, as intended.

The Tesla and its driver is expected to continue orbiting the sun as part experiment and part art project. There may even be a Musk Museum of Crazy Things by then.

Two years in space wouldnt have been kind to the Tesla Roadster, because well, the car was designed for Earths atmosphere, and the vast expanse of space.

The vehicle was initially launched by SpaceX to demonstrate the Falcon Heavy rockets capabilities. The Tesla Roadster launch was its maiden voyage.

Musk wanted to prove that the rocket could propel something in space which would be capable of reaching Mars. Well done, Super Heavy, mission accomplished.

If all is going according to plan if space hasnt destroyed it yet, or Starman wasnt abducted by aliens that sporty red car is still out there and will continue orbiting the Sun.

Probably. Researchers calculated that the Roadster will have a fairly close encounter with Earth in 2091. If Starman is ever to set foot on Earth again, that would be the perfect time to send out a recovery craft.

According to Pearsons data, the Roadster has clocked more than 1.6 billion kilometres of space travel and is well into its second orbit around our Sun.

Back in 2019, anorbit modelling study predicted a 6% chance of the Roadster crashing into Earth in the next 1m years. The same study found that theres a 2.5% chance the car will crash into Venus.

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Elon Musks Roadster is probably still cruising through space, two years on - The South African

Dr. Jayan Nagendran, co-founder and chief medical officer of Tevosol, at the Mazankowski Heart Institute with an organ perfusion machine prototype on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2020.Shaughn Butts / Postmedia

Two Edmonton-based tech companies are hoping to prove their inventions are out of this world and ready for lift-off into space with NASA.

Local startups Tevosol and ez enRoute were shortlisted by the space technology giant in an international search to find the next great innovation to make life easier in space. They will pitch their ideas at NASA iTechs Ignite the Night event on Feb. 11, the only two Canadian companies selected, for a shot at advancing to a final round of competition in May.

Neither Edmonton-made company started with a quest to travel outside Earth. Rather, both were founded off issues and needs that kept appearing in day-to-day life.

For Dr. Jayan Nagendran, the surgical director of lung transplantation at the University of Alberta Hospital, Tevosol was formed in an effort to increase the number of successful organ donations by providing a lifelike machine to store the organs in an environment as if they were still inside a human, as they are being transported for transplantation.

More than three-quarters of organs that get offered arent being utilized for transplantation despite having large waitlists, said Nagendran, co-founder and chief medical officer of Tevosol. The goal was to develop medical devices to replicate a normal environment for the organ, like a robot chest for the organ.

The company was formed in 2015 out of a garage before finding a home with TEC Edmonton.

Starting with lungs and then finding solutions for hearts, livers, kidneys and limbs, Tevosol has created a portable warm perfusion machine about the size of an ice cooler that has completed a successful clinical trial with plans to pilot commercially in Canada toward the end of 2020.

But its not an organ shortage in outer space prompting Tevosol to pitch its device to NASA. Areas of their research, such as on hibernation and radiation, can be of use in space, Nagendran said.

Space scientists are studying the idea of hibernation for astronauts during deep space travel and Tevosols research for long-term hibernation of organs could be a way forward. Astronauts are also exposed to high levels of radiation and the technology can be used to store limbs or live tissue.

This opportunity for a company like us being based out of Edmonton is significant, said Nagendran, with Tevosol also now having opened an office in Houston, Texas. The exposure itself is really the victory at this point.

Similar to Tevosol, ez enRoute was created by Edmontonian Amit Anand trying to solve an issue he noticed around safety. Using his technology background, he began developing an autonomous security platform that can track movement or incidents such as falling without GPS or Internet.

The International Space Station is growing massively with tons of equipment. This can help access equipment faster and all asset monitoring in outer space, he said.

Anand said they were supported by Edmonton company Aris MD in pitching their idea to NASA and hope to experience the same success Aris MD won the top overall prize last year.

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Two Edmonton-based startups selected by NASA to showcase their space-ready innovations - Edmonton Journal

SERGEI SUPINSKYGetty Images

Scientists have discovered that a longtime fungal resident of the Chernobyl complex could actually eat radiation. In an upcoming paper, scientists will share the results of growing the fungus on the International Space Station.

Scientists have known about this fungus, and similar extremophile organisms that can thrive on radiation, since at least 2007. The variety found in Chernobyl can decompose radioactive material such as the hot graphite in the remains of the Chernobyl reactor, Nature said in 2007. The fungus grows toward the hottest and most radioactive places, like phototropism but for deadly toxins.

How can this fungus process radiation in this way? Because it has tons of very dark melanin pigment that absorbs radiation and processes it in a harmless way to produce energy. Scientists believe this mechanism could be used to make biomimicking substances that both block radiation from penetrating and turn it into a renewable energy source.

Chernobyl is a special case where extreme ambient radiation is a huge danger to anyone who enters, and having a radiation blocker to treat protective suits or even the entire inside of the plant to reduce ambient radiation could be a huge boon. Besides reducing danger, though, the world is filled with machinery and devices that safely use radiation, from medicine to manufacturing. Even low levels of contained radiation could be used to make energy that could reduce the energy burden of those devices.

Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a NASA biotechnologists with over 40 years of research experience, has helmed NASAs research on the radiation extremophile fungus. His publications from over the years include dozens of papers about organisms aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and thats where he plans to take the radiation-eating fungus next.

The ambient radiation aboard the space station is low compared to other parts of space, but its high compared to the Earths surface. Growing the fungus there could reveal new sides of its nature, and may confirm that the fungus can still absorb and process radiation in the much more immersed environment of space. This has great potential for future space travel, where deadly amounts of cosmic radiation are one of the big obstacles scientists must navigate in order to safely send people into outer space.

Its not just fungus that eats radiation in this way. The overall family of extremophiles that live on or despite radiation includes both fungi and bacteria, and different species have different mechanisms for absorbing or tolerating radiation. The NIH explains, [S]ome populations of microorganisms thrive under different types of radiation due to defensive mechanisms provided by primary and secondary metabolic products, i.e., extremolytes and extremozymes.

Each different metabolic product has potential uses in medicine, safety, and manufacturing. Indeed, the general ability of these organisms to thrive in conditions where most organisms break down, mutate, or develop cancers warrants further study across a variety of disciplines.

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You Should Know About This Chernobyl Fungus That Eats Radiation - Popular Mechanics

As the remote workforce becomes the norm, workers are now able to travel and work from virtually wherever they want as long as there is internet access. Now, much of the workforce is choosing to take business trips, without a client visit or meeting.

Remote workers are able to continue working while traveling, meaning they can stay at their destination longer than expected. Extended stays have led travel agents like AirBnB and Expedia to take notice of remote workers and cater to their demands.

This also means that retirement age is extending because workers are able to enjoy traveling to new destinations and continue working.

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Furthermore, some nomadic travel programs will pay for workers to go on trips in order to prevent burnout and provide access to virtual skill training. Its a win-win situation for both employers and employees because offerings like this boost workers retention rates as well as productivity.

Additionally, traveling as a group can not only combat isolation, it can provide professionals the opportunity to build culture and collaborate in new ways. For example, lifestyle brand Unsettled recently acquired digital nomad platform Wanderbrief in order to combine corporate offsite experiences with remote working.

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Remote Working's Impact On The Travel Industry - Allwork.Space

Thanks to NASAs quest to explore Mars, your car has better radials. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company worked with NASA to develop a special fibrous material which was used on parachute shrouds to soft-land Viking space probes on the surface of Mars. The fibre contains a chain-like molecular structure which makes it five times stronger than steel without added weight. Goodyear realized that the increased strength and durability of this material would have useful applications on the road, and, in 1976, developed a new radial which lasted 10,000 miles longer than others. Viking was not the only collaboration between Goodyear and NASA.

In 2009, a dedicated team of Goodyear engineers and NASA researchers at the NASA John H. Glenn Research Center collaborated on the development of a new airless Spring Tire which uses 800 load bearing springs which provides improved traction on rocky surfaces and can bear weight in extreme temperatures without deflating, as pneumatic tires might. While originally developed to fit the needs of NASAs Lunar Electric rover, Goodyear also saw applications for off-road vehicles here on Earth.

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From Cordless Vacuums to In-flight WiFi, These Innovations From NASA Changed Life on Earth - Travel+Leisure