Category Archives: Transhuman News

Astronaut Chris Hadfield plays his guitar in the International Space Station. Photograph: Nasa/Rex

The next giant leap for mankind should be back on the moon not Mars, the astronaut Chris Hadfield has said.

Famous for sporting a military moustache, tweeting spacewalk selfies and strumming David Bowie songs on board the International Space Station (his hugely popular cover of Space Oddity has recently been reposted on YouTube with Bowies consent), Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space and became the first Canadian commander of the ISS when he took the reins last year on his final space mission.

Speaking at a Guardian Live event at the Royal Geographical Society in London on Sunday, Hadfield criticised the current scramble to put an astronaut on the red planet. If we started going to Mars any time soon everybody would die, he said. We dont know what we are doing yet. We have to have a bunch of inventions between now and Mars.

He believes our level of unpreparedness is even worse than that of the 1845 expedition to chart the Northwest Passage, an attempt which ended in tragedy with the death of the entire party including its leader, Sir John Franklin, who was a founder of the Royal Geographical Society. We are previous to Franklin in our ability to go to Mars right now, said Hadfield.

Hadfields speech to a packed auditorium about his experiences in space was set against a backdrop of breathtaking images from his latest book, You are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes.

The title of the book a collection of astonishing photographs taken by Hadfield from the ISS refers to the time it takes the space station to orbit Earth.

But, while praising the engineers who built the Orion spacecraft that was launched last week in Nasas first step towards a new series of manned space missions, Hadfield stressed the next big step should be to construct a permanent lunar base.

That is a great vehicle, he said of Orion. But where we are going to go next is the moon. Thats where we are going to go because it just makes sense. It is only three days away and we can invent so many things.

Hadfields comments come just days after he denounced the privately funded Mars One mission in the online magazine Matter, claiming the ambitious project is technologically unprepared. Theres a great, I dont know, self-defeating optimism in the way that this project has been set up, he warned.

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Next giant leap for mankind should be to moon, not Mars, says Chris Hadfield

International Space station commander Chris Hadfield looks down at the Earth from orbit. Photograph: NASA/REX

Youre in Saskatchewan at the moment, but by the time Observer readers see this, youll be in London and then off to various points of the UK and Ireland. Are you looking forward to it? Im really looking forward to it. And its where my familys all originally from we only came to Canada a hundred years ago.

Youll be talking about your new book, You Are Here, a collection of your photographs from the International Space Station. Was it fun to put together? It was a delight. It was a lot of work, because there are tens of thousands of pictures that you take over the month up there, most of them in a hurry you just had a few rushed minutes at the window. It wasnt until over a year later that I actually had time to filter through them all it was like looking at pictures from your childhood or from your wedding and going, oh, look at this! I hadnt even noticed that!

The pictures are amazing from the Yorkshire moors to the deserts of Iran, the Bolivian rainforest and fishing boats in the East China Sea... So many people ask: so what does it look like? And even when I was up there, there was a huge clamouring for people to see their own home town, their own part of the world, places that theyd been. And so I felt a great compunction to do my best to take everybody on one tour around the world, as if we were floating elbow to elbow there, and I was being their tour guide to the world.

One thing the book seems to say is were all connected. Were all co-existing on this planet, and that sense of our little circle and everything else being some big, nebulous them, I think is a dangerous one for us all. Im very pleased to have seen something different for myself. This is my best effort to show everybody what the world truly looks like, and let them draw their own conclusions.

Youve done something that only a tiny number of people will ever do and it started when you saw the moon landings as a child. What was that like? It was pivotal. It was probably most like an enormous door of invitation opening. The improbability of it, but the realisation that impossible things happen, was a wonderful thing to learn at nine years old.

You resolved then to become an astronaut - even though youre frightened of heights, arent you? Well, I think everybody should be! Thats self-preservation. If youre standing on the edge of a cliff, your body ought to be screaming at you to get back, because one small gust of wind or loose pebble and youre off and done. Im not afraid if I know I cant fall, and I think thats the difference. Its not an irrational fear: its just a self-protecting fear. But its what you do with fear that really matters.

You once temporarily lost your vision on a spacewalk. Surely that must have been frightening? In order to accomplish something youre dreaming about, youre probably going to have to face some sort of fear, and the difference between fear and danger is the real key. What is the actual danger? And that applies whether youre referring to crossing a busy street, or doing a spacewalk. I stopped for a moment and thought: OK, so I cant see, but theres really not any increased danger, I can still talk and think and hold on. The guy whos out here with me can help stuff me back into the air lock, and I can sort of feel my way back in.

So you conquered the fear and carried on... And the counterpoint to being blind during that spacewalk was the 10 orbits of the world that I did where I could see fine. The view is revelationary; it is stupefyingly beautiful. Youre not on the world looking up, youre in the universe, its all around you, and youre looking at the world as a separate form. Its turning so relentlessly, and it looks nothing like a globe, its not smooth and shiny, where all the countries are different colours, its this big, complex, textured, multicoloured living thing next to you, and the blackness of everything else is just on the other side. And if I had justallowed fear to dominate my life, I would never have seen any of that.

Now that youve retired from going into space, how much do you miss it? Its not over for me at all. It wasnt a singular event, it was part of the 21years that I served as an astronaut. Its not like I was sitting about twiddling my thumbs and then I was doing a spacewalk, and that was the peak and everything else was some sort of ditch or valley. It just wasnt that way. I see it as just a richness, a great experience that I count on in order to be who I am now. Just because youve eaten ambrosia or truffles or Black Forest cake once doesnt mean that youll never eat again, or that no other food is good.

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Chris Hadfield: Celebrity is not that big a deal for me

Jason Dunn and Aaron Kemmer's story begins in Florida. They hope it ends in outer space.

The Tampa Bay natives want to expand the boundaries of human existence by revolutionizing interstellar exploration.

They are starting with a printer. Someday they would like to send themselves to the solar system.

Last week, Dunn and Kemmer helped produce the first three-dimensional printed object in space. They made a plastic casing for a part of a 3D printer they developed for NASA and dispatched to the International Space Station earlier this year.

The casing is just a little thing with the logo of Kemmer and Dunn's company, Made In Space, on the front. The big deal is how it was made. Technicians and engineers on Earth sent an email to the printer in space, essentially instructing it to print the part.

"It's important to humanity in a way," Dunn said. "Because this is the first time we've ever manufactured anything off of planet Earth, anything useful at least."

Manufacturing is one step toward an eventuality that Kemmer and Dunn, both 29, believe they can help make happen in their lifetime: human life on other planets. One of the biggest hurdles, according to Kemmer, is that "space has a supply chain problem."

Up until now, astronauts have had to pack and haul supplies a costly, cumbersome and time-consuming process. To live in space, Kemmer said, humans must make what they need out there, in the black.

"When you look at history," he said, "we move to places where we can live off the ground."

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Tampa Bay natives behind the first 3D printing in space

BEIJING: A leading Chinese space scientist said today that the country could land a rover on Mars by 2020, build a manned space station by 2022 and test a heavy carrier rocket by 2030, as Beijing expands its space programme in a race with India to explore the red planet.

A feasibility study on China's first Mars mission is completed and the goal is now to send an orbiter and rover to Mars, Lei Fanpei, chairman of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told state-run Xinhua news agency.

There has been no official announcement about a Mars probe yet, but Lei expects a Long March-5 carrier, still at the development stage, to take the orbiter into a Martian orbit by 2020 from a new launch site on south China's Hainan province.

The communist giant made an unsuccessful attempt to reach Mars in 2011 aboard a Russian rocket, but failed to complete the mission because of an accident during orbital transfer, Xinhua report said.

China unveiled its Mars rover, being developed to scurry the floor of the red planet for signs of water and life, at an air show last month.

It plans to test the new machine in the rugged terrain of Tibet as India's Mars Orbiter Mission Mangalyaan is orbiting Mars since 24 September after being launched on 5 November last year by the Indian Space Research Organisation. New US spacecraft Orion, which tested successfully, plans to carry astronauts beyond earth's orbit perhaps to Mars and return.

China plans to deploy a robot similar to the one it sent to Moon and reportedly plans to test in Tibet.

Lei said China's manned space station program is progressing steadily. Various modules, vehicles and ground facilities are nearing readiness.

The lab hopes to replace Mir, the Russian space station which was expected to retire by that time.

Development and manufacture of major space products are at key stages, including the second space lab Tiangong-2, the Tianzhou-1 cargo ship, Long March-7 rockets and Shenzhou-11 spacecraft.

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China plans to put rover on Mars by 2020: Space scientist