The International Space Station received roughly 7,000 pounds of supplies and scientific experiment materials early Tuesday morning following the successful autonomous docking of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. According to NASA, the Dragon will remain attached to the ISS for about three weeks before returning back to Earth with research and cargo. In addition to a pair of International Space Station Roll Out Solar Arrays (IROSAs) designed to expand the microgravity complex’s energy-production ability, ISS crew members are receiving materials for a host of new and ongoing experiments.

[Related: Microgravity tomatoes, yogurt bacteria, and plastic eating microbes are headed to the ISS.]

THOR, an aptly named investigation courtesy of the European Space Agency, will observe Earth’s thunderstorms from above the atmosphere to examine and document electrical activity. Researchers plan to specifically analyze the “inception, frequency, and altitude of recently discovered blue discharges,” i.e. lightning occurring within the upper atmosphere. Scientists still know very little about such phenomena’s effects on the planet’s climate and weather, but the upcoming observations could potentially shed more light on the processes.

Meanwhile, researchers are hoping to stretch out telomeres in microgravity via Genes in Space-10, part of an ongoing national contest for students in grades 7 through 12 to develop their own biotech experiments. These genetic structures protect humans’ chromosomes, but generally shorten over time as they age. Observing telomere lengthening in ISS microgravity will give scientists a chance to determine if their size change relates to stem cell proliferation. Results could help NASA and other researchers better understand effects on astronauts’ health during long-term missions, a particularly topical subject given their hopes for upcoming excursions to the moon and Mars.

ISS will also deploy the Educational Space Science and Engineering CubeSat Experiment (ESSENCE), a tiny satellite housing a wide-angle camera capable of monitoring ice and permafrost thawing within the Canadian Arctic. This satellite comes alongside another student collaboration project called Iris, which is meant to observe geological samples’ weathering upon exposure to direct solar and background cosmic radiation.

[Related: The ISS’s latest arrivals: a 3D printer, seeds, and ovarian cow cells.]

Finally, a set of plants that germinated from seeds first produced in space and subsequently traveled to Earth are returning to the ISS as part of Plant Habitat-03. According to NASA, plantlife often adapts to the environmental stresses imposed on them via spaceflight, but it’s still unclear if these changes are genetically passed on to future generations. PH-03 will hopefully help scientists better understand these issues, which could prove critical to food generation during future space missions and exploration efforts.

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For more than 22 years, astronauts and cosmonauts have continuously inhabited the International Space Station, making the orbital laboratory the longest flying spacecraft ever. But it’s an achievement that would be impossible if not for an earlier space station, NASA’s Skylab, launched 50 years ago on May 14, 1973. 

Born out of the disappointment and leftovers over the canceled Apollo moon missions, Skylab never captured the public imagination the way the space race had during the decade prior. But the mission was crucial to all human spaceflight that came after, teaching NASA valuable lessons about how to build spacecraft safe for long-term habitation, and how to design missions around the humans that would fly them. 

“Every corner of the ISS has a lesson that’s grounded in Skylab,” says NASA’s Chief Historian Brian Odom. “Skylab is the turning point where humanity says, ‘We’re going to become a species that lives off of Earth for long periods of time.” 

Moonshots and space stations

NASA had always wanted a space station. The plan, according to Odom, was to learn to get off Earth with Project Mercury—in which Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space—then to rendezvous and dock in orbit with Gemini, and “the next stop from that would be to build a space station,” he says. That space station would be the waypoint from which humans could venture farther out to the moon, and later to Mars. 

But everything changed with President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech announcing a race against the Soviet Union to land on the moon.

“Some people talk about Apollo as leapfrogging what was expected, as the natural process or the natural progression in spaceflight,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian curator of the Apollo collection at the National Air and Space Museum. “Instead of building a space station, we went right to the moon.”

Immense amounts of money and political capital were spent so Americans got to the moon first. But public support—and congressional funding—began to wane almost immediately after the July 20, 1969, Moon landing. Apollo missions 18, 19 and 20 were canceled by 1971, and the crew of Apollo 17 would be the last humans to touch the moon for decades to come. 

The idea for Skylab originated in 1965, when NASA budgets were plump. The agency decided the program could go forward even after money tightened up, in part because the satellite would use existing Apollo infrastructure. A Saturn V rocket, originally intended to launch the Apollo 12 mission, could place Skylab in orbit. And the space station itself would be constructed out of a rocket’s third stage. 

“It was a really ingenious and practical approach to creating a space station,” Muir-Harmony says. 

[Related: A brief history of space stations before the ISS]

The architecture of Skylab wasn’t the only creative use of materials. During the May 14 launch, Skylab’s micrometeorite shield, which also functioned as a sun shade, was shorn off, leaving the newly orbital space station to roast in the direct sunlight. NASA’s “Mr. Fix It,” Jack Kinzler, officially the chief of the Technical Services Center at Johnson Space Center, used telescoping fishing rods to develop a prototype parasol-like sunshield astronauts could deploy through an airlock on Skylab. They did this in just six days, saving the space station. It was one of the first important lessons of Skylab, according to Odom. 

“It’s one of these remarkable moments that teaches us that you can respond in a crisis” Odom says. 

The lessons of Skylab 

Skylab hosted three crews from 1973 through 1974. The Skylab I crew flew for 28 days, while the Skylab II mission lasted 59 days. 

But Skylab 3, the third and final crew to fly aboard the space station, lasted 84 days, launching on November 16, 1973 and returning to Earth on February 8, 1974. 

This was a huge deal at the time. Later NASA astronauts, such as Scott Kelly and Peggy Whitson, would work for hundreds of days aboard the ISS, but in 1973, no one knew if humans could actually live in space for such a period. The Skylab III crew’s stay was longer “than all of earlier spaceflight combined,” Odom says. 

Skylab affirmatively answered the question of whether humans could endure long-term spaceflight, but it also made clear there were costs. 

“They noticed increased calcium in the urine of the astronauts, tied to bone loss,” Muir-Harmony says, which highlighted the importance of movement while in space. Exercise is now considered a key part of an ISS astronaut’s schedule. 

Skylab also identified small quality-of-life changes that could make orbit more comfortable, such as the cuisine. “The food was generally considered a bit too bland,” Muir-Harmony says. “Your ability to taste is limited by how the fluid in your body blocks your nasal cavity [in microgravity], so it’s important to have more flavorful food in space.” 

And Skylab’s supposedly water-tight microgravity shower, a cylindrical tent-like contraption, will likely be the last shower on a space station, according to Muir-Harmony. “It didn’t work all that well,” she says. “That was an important lesson to learn, that it was better to use wet wipes as opposed to trying to shower in space.” 

Another lasting lesson was that all the clever engineering in the world won’t help you if you don’t pay attention to your crew’s human needs. The Skylab III crew nearly burned out, with barely any time between tasks or to rest, forcing NASA to reassess their work schedule. “You can’t task people with just working themselves full on and then falling asleep, sleeping eight hours, waking up, and immediately going back to work,” Odom says. “They learned those lessons the hard way on Skylab by putting people to some degree through the wringer.”

[Related: 11 of NASA’s most out-of-this-world illustrations]

Skylab’s final teaching might be the most important for anyone operating in space today, particularly as the number of satellites and other spacecraft in low Earth orbit increase. Unlike the ISS, Skylab was not equipped with thrusters. It could not manage its own altitude, because it was assumed that the Space Shuttle would be operational by 1977 and could boost the station higher when necessary. But the development program dragged, and the first shuttle didn’t fly until 1981. With Skylab’s orbit degrading, NASA decided to allow the station to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on July 11, 1979, hoping the station would burn up over the Indian Ocean. Pieces of debris ended up scattered over parts of Western Australia, though no one was hurt. 

The NASA of today would consider such a reentry reckless. It’s a problem, Odom says, if you don’t know exactly where your spacecraft is going to come down. “NASA has definitely learned that lesson from 1979, in a big way.”

Skylab’s enduring legacy

Without regular rides to space, Skylab crews had only what they brought with them. Astronauts flying aboard the ISS today face fewer constraints than Skylab crews did. The ISS recycles most of its water, for instance, and regular cargo resupply missions deliver food to the astronauts there. There are now exercise facilities and more thoughtfully planned out work schedules. 

“Skylab was just a massive step forward from what anyone had experienced before,” Odom says. “Somebody’s got to be the pioneer and put the risk on. And Skylab was all about risk.”

The ISS has hosted astronauts for more than 350 days at a time—a remarkable achievement, and one that would not be possible without Skylab’s experience. 

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PLANTS ARE CRUCIAL to human survival, even when there’s no sunlight. But dealing with darkness is second nature for someone with a green thumb like Howard Levine, chief scientist for NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) Research Office. Nurturing leaves outside Earth’s atmosphere is not only important for cycling nutrients and water during future space voyages, but also helps alleviate the cooped-up feeling astronauts experience. “On the ISS, you’re up there for six months at a time. People often say it’s like being in the bathroom with six of your best friends,” says Levine, who has been growing plants in orbit for decades.  

Space might be an extreme example, but cramped, dark dwellings exist on the ground too. Keeping your houseplants alive in windowless rooms, in shadowy corners, or during short winter days can be a challenge. Luckily, there are strategies to help your flora stay lush and verdant, even when their sunny source of energy is limited. 

Mini indoor greenhouses

Darkness usually means a dip in natural heat. Colder temperatures slow our bodies down, and that’s true for plants too. The chemical reactions that control their growth decelerate and sometimes stop.  

In Iceland, horticulturist James McDaniel uses geothermal heat in his greenhouses to protect his plants from the wintry cold. Each of the structures has holes beneath that stretch deep to a pocket of steaming-hot water, he explains. “You can funnel that [steam] into the pipes through the greenhouse and use natural ventilation to keep the temperature a set range.” 

But you don’t need volcanic energy to run a mini indoor greenhouse, which can be as simple as a repurposed IKEA cabinet. A heater can add warmth, although you might want to pair it with a humidifier to keep from drying your houseplants out. For individual plants, glass dome cloches can trap heat from limited sunlight and also enclose water vapors, which protect plants from the crisp air conditioner in the summer and the prickly heater in the winter. 

Grow lights

Plant grow lights provide an easy and accessible energy boost in dim or pitch-black spaces. These specialized beams sport different features, colors, and prices. LEDs, for instance, are the cheapest and most energy-efficient option, using about a third of the electricity of old sodium lightbulbs.

While most devices stick to a warm white spectrum, plants respond differently to various illuminating hues. In Levine’s experiments on Earth, red light worked well for the slender flowering plants Arabidopsis. But in the ISS’s weightless environment, they stretched into funny shapes until he started adding blue lights. He eventually found a middle ground and doused the plants in green light at the request of astronauts who missed the familiar color.  

Bright surfaces

If electricity is a limiting factor, you can try to reflect light with mirrors or aluminum foil. Even brightening up your space with white decor, like a light-colored tablecloth, will cast a little glow onto your plants. While it’s not comparable to using a grow lamp or the sun (reflections don’t deliver as much energy), it could offer plants an extra boost. 

The makeup of your indoor garden will dictate how much brightness you need to add, Levine explains. Some flora, including lettuce and tomatoes, need more light than those like Arabidopsis; new seedlings need less light than fully grown plants. As you choose your seeds and seedlings, research their native ranges to learn how much sunshine they’d naturally get.

Plants are ultimately adaptable. They can stretch their stems toward available light sources or produce extra chlorophyll, the pigment that absorbs whatever luminescence is available. “Even though they may not be getting all the light that they would like for optimum growth, they’ll still grow,” says Levine. With only a little extra help, you and your plants can conquer the darkness. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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The suit was designed and built by Houston-based company Axiom Space, using some heritage NASA technology, plus a large glass fishbowl helmet and black outer cover with orange and blue highlights. During the livestream, an Axiom engineer walked out on the stage in the redesigned suit and demonstrated the enhanced mobility offered by new joints in the legs, arms, and gloves compared to the Apollo- and Space Shuttle-era suits, twisting, turning, and kneeling down with relative ease. The suits are also designed with modular components in a range of sizes to better fit astronauts of different body shapes and weights.

“We’re developing a spacesuit for a new generation, the Artemis generation, the generation that is going to take us back to the moon and onto Mars,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said at the reveal. “When that first woman steps down on the surface of the moon on Artemis III, she’s going to be wearing an Axiom spacesuit.”

NASA had spent years developing its own next generation of spacesuits through its Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (eXMU) program, but in June 2022, the space agency awarded contracts to both Axiom and Collins Aerospace to develop spacesuits for future missions. Unlike the getups still in use on the International Space Station, NASA will only lease the suits, according to Lara Kearney, manager for NASA’s Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program.

“Historically, NASA has owned spacesuits,” Kearney said at the event. The spacesuit contract with Axiom is more like the arrangement NASA makes with SpaceX for flying crew and cargo to the space station aboard Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft; the company owns and operates the equipment, and the agency simply pays for services.

Financial arrangements aside, the new spacesuits include an array of improvements and advancements, many derived from NASA research and others unique to Axiom. The suit consists of an inner bladder layer that holds pressurized air in, covered by a restraint layer that holds the shape of the bladder layer, according to Axiom deputy program manager for Extravehicular Activity, Russel Ralston. An outer flight insulation layer provides “cut resistance, puncture resistance, thermal insulation, and a variety of other other other features,” he explained at the event, and consists of multiple layers of material, including aluminized mylar.

The more mobile joints, which will allow astronauts to better handle tools and maneuver around the rocky, heavily shadowed lunar South Pole, were developed at Axiom, Ralston said. Other features, such as the rigid upper torso of the suit—useful for attaching the life support system and tools—and a visor placed further back on the helmet to allow for more visibility, were initially conceived by NASA.

The design also features an entirely new cooling system compared to older suits, will carry a high-definition camera mounted on the helmet, and allows astronauts to enter and exit the suit through a hatch on the back rather than coming as separate lower and upper body segments, as with the current spacesuits.

Importantly, given NASA’s commitment to seeing a female astronaut lead the way back to the moon, the new suits are designed to fit a wide range of body sizes for across sexes, according to Ralston. “We have different sizes of elements that we can swap out—a medium, large and small if you will—for different components,” he said at the press conference. “Then within each of those sizes, we also have an adjustability to where we can really tailor the suit to someone: the length of their leg or the length of their arm.”

Axiom is continuing to build on the spacesuit ahead of the Artemis III mission, including an outer insulation layer that will include pockets and other attachments for tools, and which will be made in white to reflect the harsh sunlight on the moon. The the black, orange and blue cover seen today is just a temporary protective cover to prevent damage to the suit’s inner layers while testing, and, per an Axiom press release, hides “proprietary design” elements.

Despite all the technological advances compared to the Apollo spacesuits of the 1960s and ‘70s, some core technologies are immune to improvement. Asked about whether Axiom found a better way for astronauts to use the restroom while wearing the new shells for up to eight hours on the lunar surface, Ralson didn’t sugarcoat it.

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The next private mission to the International Space Station will carry a private paying customer and three trained astronauts, with two members of Saudi Arabia’s nascent space program coming along for the ride.

Expected to launch sometime in the spring from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, the Axiom Mission 2 will carry four crew members: Former NASA’s astronaut Peggy Whitson will command the mission, civilian John Shoffner of Knoxville, Tennessee, will be the pilot, and Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni from Saudi Arabia will serve as mission specialists for a day-long stay on the ISS.  

[Related: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

Ax-2 will mark the first time in the still relatively new world of commercial space missions where government and private astronauts fly together. It’s also the first time a woman is commanding a private mission. Axiom Mission 1, which launched to the ISS in April 2022, carried Israeli and Canadian men, but as paying private customers of Axiom Space, not representatives of either nation’s space programs.

“Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission to the International Space Station cements our mission of expanding access to space worldwide,” Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini said in a prepared statement.

That may be more than a corporate platitude about democratizing outer space: Axiom could find there is a ready market of countries hoping to make their mark with astronauts of their own. “To date, fewer than a quarter of the countries of the world have sent even one representative to space,” says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analytical firm Astralytical. “Most cannot afford the expense and infrastructure to train and launch government astronauts on their own soil.”

While Axiom didn’t reveal the price paid by Shoffner to fly on the upcoming mission, each of the three Axiom-1 astronauts paid around $55 million for their time on the ISS. It’s a lot of money for most people, but not that much for a nation, and almost a bargain compared to building a space program from scratch.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, began training astronauts in September 2022 as part of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 strategic plan to diversify its economy and move away from dependence on oil production. A February 12 release by the Saudi Press Agency noted the kingdom hopes its astronauts participating in the Axiom-2 mission will “​​empower national capabilities in human spaceflight geared towards serving humanity and benefiting from the promising opportunities offered by the space industry.” Barnawi and Alqarni, a cancer researcher and fighter pilot, respectively, will become the second and third Saudi astronauts to fly in space following the flight of Sultan bin Salman Al Saud aboard the US Space Shuttle in 1985.

The decades-long gap shows that flights on existing government space programs can be hard to come by. Forcyzk notes that even among European Space Agency member states, very few ESA astronauts are selected to fly, with crewed launch vehicle seats via NASA even more precious since ESA ceased working with Roscosmos for launch services in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NASA is also “limited by the agreements that the US government has in place in terms of which countries to partner with in space and in what ways,” she says, detailed in bilateral agreements such as the Artemis Accords. “Commercial companies are not so limited.”

[Related: Ukraine was about to revive its space program. Then Russia invaded.]

That could work out well for Axiom Space, as the company is interested in more than just being an orbital outfitter and could use the expertise of trained astronauts on missions. Axiom is developing the first private station module to be added to the ISS with the intention to eventually expand that structure so it can one day be cut loose as a free flying space station. The company is one of the participants in NASA’s Commercial Destinations in Low-Earth Orbit program, in which the agency is encouraging private companies to develop private space stations that NASA can rent for certain periods of time after the planned retirement of the ISS in 2030.

In a future with multiple private space stations where NASA is just one of many tenants, there could be more opportunities for private and government trained astronauts from nations that haven’t yet had much chance to board a rocket in nearly 70 years of spaceflight. “Commercial human spaceflight has the potential to open up the doors to space globally in a way that government space agencies cannot do,” Forczyk says.

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Being stranded in space sounds like the makings of a dramatic science fiction movie, but reality is a bit less flashy. Real-life space travel involves rigorous preparation, massive teams of support staff, and backup plans for almost every imaginable scenario.

This intense planning is exactly why the recent coolant leak on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft isn’t as dire as it originally seemed. 

In December 2022,  a micrometeorite damaged the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked on the ISS, which affected the capsule’s cooling systems that keep astronauts at safe temperatures on their descent back to Earth. Engineers determined that the craft wasn’t fit for return, except in case of an emergency. The crew originally carried up on the Soyuz was stranded. 

But they were stranded aboard the safest place in space: the International Space Station. “We have the ISS as a safe haven,” says former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, who flew aboard the space shuttle in 2002 and 2009 to service the Hubble Space Telescope. “If you get stuck up there, you just hang out there for a while until someone comes and gets you.”

The ISS is about the size of an American football field, and made up of almost 40 different modules, as diverse as solar panels to docking ports to pressurized, habitable living areas. Construction on this orbital behemoth began in 1998, and it has been occupied by at least one astronaut since the turn of the century.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

Its modular design is not only a quirk of its assembly, but a conscious design choice. In the event of an emergency—the top three are fire, depressurization, and toxic air—the crew exits the damaged area, sealing off modules as they go to isolate the leak or other issue. Even if something were to happen aboard the ISS while the crew from Soyuz MS-22 were stuck, “the chances are you’re going to be able to isolate [the problem] until you figure out how to get other folks home,” according to Massimino.

The astronauts are also trained for risky situations. They prepare on the ground before their voyages and aboard the space station. Plus, the American astronauts have to be familiar with the Russian tech on board (and vice versa) and even learn to speak Russian so that they are able to effectively work with their international counterparts.

Yet, among the many different emergencies astronauts prepare for, a damaged return capsule doesn’t feature prominently. The mission teams are more focused on ensuring the ISS remains safe and habitable, and aren’t as concerned about the ferries between space and the ground. “The spacecraft on which astronauts and cosmonauts fly to the space station are the intended spacecraft for their return to Earth,” says NASA media representative Joshua Finch.

[Related: The ISS gets an extension to 2030 to wrap up unfinished business]

In the late 1990s to early 2000s, NASA considered a dedicated “lifeboat” for the ISS, known as the X-38. It would have been a glider, similar to the space shuttle, with the sole purpose of returning astronauts to Earth in emergency situations. Although prototypes were successfully tested, the program was canceled in 2002 due to budget constraints. Instead, astronauts learned to rely on the ever-expanding ISS.

“When we had the shuttle flights after the [Space Shuttle Columbia] accident, there was a real possibility that you might not be able to come back because of your return vehicle,” Massimino recalls. “And we weren’t worried about that because if you inspected the vehicle and you couldn’t repair it, you would just stay on the space station.” Given that people have lived aboard the ISS for as much as a year at a time, a brief layover there while waiting for your connecting spaceflight doesn’t seem so bad.

American and Russian mission support teams also immediately began coordinating their next steps after the recent leak, putting their rigorous training into action while astronauts waited onboard. Numerous plans were considered, from fitting more astronauts into the SpaceX capsule also docked on the ISS to sending up new vehicles to bring them home. “Engineers at each space agency work together to provide safe return options in the event of an emergency situation,” Finch explains, “as NASA and Roscosmos have done while creating the Soyuz 68S crew return plan.”

In early January, NASA and Roscosmos decided the best course of action was to move up the date of the next Soyuz launch, sending up an uncrewed capsule to give the astronauts a ride home. The launch will send up the Soyuz MS-23 on February 20—and until then, the astronauts will continue with business as usual and ride out their stay on the ISS, humanity’s only oasis in space beyond our home planet.

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The past few years have been a space launch boom: Late 2021 saw the long-awaited arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and in 2022 NASA finally launched its massive new Space Launch System Moon rocket. This year will continue that trend, as several scientific and commercial craft zoom off our world to orbit and beyond.

This year’s historic flights include missions to Jupiter and the asteroid belt, robotic moon landings, and the maiden flight of a new spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the aging International Space Station (ISS). Here are some of the major launches to look forward to in 2023.

Asteroids and icy moons

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have big plans for studying celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Mars that kick off in 2023.

ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE mission, will study the icy Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Of the three moons, Europa has so far garnered the lion’s share of scientific interest due to the global liquid water ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust, an environment that could host alien life. But evidence now suggests Callisto and Ganymede may also host subsurface liquid water oceans. JUICE, which is scheduled to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana sometime in April and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, will fly by each of the three moons to compare the three icy worlds.

[Related: Jupiter’s moons are about to get JUICE’d for signs of life]

The JUICE spacecraft will enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034, the first time a spacecraft has circled a moon other than Earth’s, where it will spend roughly a year studying the satellite in greater detail. Ganymede, in addition to its potential subsurface ocean and potential habitability, is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. JUICE will study how this field interacts with Jupiter’s even  larger one.

NASA’s Psyche mission, meanwhile, will blast off no earlier than October 10 on a mission to rendezvous with its namesake asteroid, when it arrives in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in August 2029. The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022, but was delayed due to problems developing mission-critical software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid 16 Psyche is a largely metallic space rock that scientists believe could be the exposed core of a protoplanet that formed in the early solar system. If that theory bears out, the Psyche spacecraft could end up traveling millions of miles to give scientists a better understanding of the Earth’s iron core far beneath their feet.

India returns to the moon

The Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO, is going back to the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is scheduled to launch over the summer. The space agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission carried an orbiter and lander to the moon in 2019, but a software glitch caused the lander to crash on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-3 mission is ditching the orbiter in favor of a redesigned lander and rover intended for the lunar South Pole. Carrying a seismometer and spectrographs, among other instruments, the lander and rover will study the chemical composition and geology of the polar region. 

[Related: 10 incredible lunar missions that paved the way for Artemis]

The hunt for dark matter

Astrophysicists believe dark matter and dark energy shape the structures of entire universes—and drive the accelerated expansion of ours. But experts don’t understand much about these enigmatic phenomena. ESA’s Euclid space telescope, scheduled to launch sometime in 2023, will measure the effects of these dark forces on the cosmos over time to try and discern their properties.

After launch, Euclid will make its way to the same operational location as JWST, entering an orbit around Lagrangian Point 2, about 1 million miles behind Earth. From there, Euclid will use its nearly 4-foot diameter mirror, visible light imaging system, and near-infrared spectrometer to survey a third of the sky out to a distance of about 15 billion light years. That will give a view  some 10 billion years into the past. By studying how galaxies and galaxy clusters change over eons and across much of the sky, Euclid scientists hope to grasp how dark matter and dark energy shape galactic formation and the evolution of the entire universe.

Boeing catches up to SpaceX

Boeing will finally launch a crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft sometime in April 2023. Boeing developed the Starliner, a capsule that holds up to seven people, as a competitor to the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Like Dragon, Starliner will ferry astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

But while Crew Dragon began flying astronauts to the ISS in November 2020, the Starliner ran into many delay-causing problems, beginning with a software glitch that kept the spacecraft from rendezvousing with the ISS during an uncrewed test flight in December 2020. Boeing kept at it, however, and completed a second attempt at an uncrewed rendezvous with the ISS in May 2022, paving the way for the coming crewed test flight.

If all goes well, NASA will integrate Starliner flights alongside Crew Dragon launches within the Commercial Crew program, providing the space agency some redundancy in case of problems with either type of spacecraft.

The (private) enterprise

As NASA becomes more and more reliant on Boeing, SpaceX, and other contractors for flights to the ISS, private space operators have big plans of their own for 2023.

Axiom Space plans to send a crew of private citizens for a two-week stay on the ISS in the  summer, following the company’s first mission in April 2022 when four private astronauts spent more than two weeks aboard the space station. Axiom Space plans to build a new habitat—first connected to the ISS, then separated to create a free-flying space station when NASA retires the ISS in 2031.

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the first ever all-private orbital space flight in September 2021 with the Inspiration 4 mission, will also be back at it in 2023. The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch no sooner than March and will once again see Isaacman fly aboard a chartered SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft along with three crewmates. Unlike Inspiration 4, at least two of the Polaris Dawn crew plan to conduct the first-ever private astronaut spacewalks outside a spacecraft.

The Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin, meanwhile, will attempt to launch the first test flight of its orbital rocket, known as New Glenn, sometime in 2023. While the company has flown celebrities such as Bezos and William Shatner to the edge of space aboard its suborbital New Shepard rocket, the company has yet to make an orbital flight. This year, it’s aiming higher.

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Until now, virtually everything the human race has ever built—from rudimentary tools to one-story houses to the tallest skyscrapers—has had one key restriction: Earth’s gravity. Yet, if some scientists have their way, that could soon change.

Aboard the International Space Station (ISS) right now is a metal box, the size of a desktop PC tower. Inside, a nozzle is helping build little test parts that aren’t possible to make on Earth. If engineers tried to make these structures on Earth, they’d fail under Earth’s gravity. 

“These are going to be our first results for a really novel process in microgravity,” says Ariel Ekblaw, a space architect who founded MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative and one of the researchers (on Earth) behind the project.

The MIT group’s process involves taking a flexible silicone skin, shaped like the part it will eventually create, and filling it with a liquid resin. “You can think of them as balloons,” says Martin Nisser, an engineer at MIT, and another of the researchers behind the project. “Instead of injecting them with air, inject them with resin.” Both the skin and the resin are commercially available, off-the-shelf products.

The resin is sensitive to ultraviolet light. When the balloons experience an ultraviolet flash, the light percolates through the skin and washes over the resin. It cures and stiffens, hardening into a solid structure. Once it’s cured, astronauts can cut away the skin and reveal the part inside.

All of this happens inside the box that launched on November 23 and is scheduled to spend 45 days aboard the ISS. If everything is successful, the ISS will ship some experimental parts back to Earth for the MIT researchers to test. The MIT researchers have to ensure that the parts they’ve made are structurally sound. After that, more tests. “The second step would be, probably, to repeat the experiment inside the International Space Station,” says Ekblaw, “and maybe to try slightly more complicated shapes, or a tuning of a resin formulation.” After that, they’d want to try making parts outside, in the vacuum of space itself. 

The benefit of building parts like this in orbit is that Earth’s single most fundamental stressor—the planet’s gravity—is no longer a limiting factor. Say you tried to make particularly long beams with this method. “Gravity would make them sag,” says Ekblaw.

[Related: The ISS gets an extension to 2030 to wrap up unfinished business]

In the microgravity of the ISS? Not so much. If the experiment is successful, their box would be able to produce test parts that are too long to make on Earth.

The researchers imagine a near future where, if an astronaut needed to replace a mass-produced part—say, a nut or a bolt—they wouldn’t need to consign one from Earth. Instead, they could just fit a nut- or a bolt-shaped skin into a box like this and fill it up with resin.

But the researchers are also thinking long-term. If they can make very long parts in space, they think, those pieces could  speed up large construction projects, such as the structures of space habitats. They might also be used to form the structural frames for solar panels that power a habitat or radiators that keep the habitat from getting too warm.

Building stuff in space has a few key advantages, too. If you’ve ever seen a rocket in person, you’ll know that—as impressive as they are—they aren’t particularly wide. It’s one reason that large structures such as the ISS or China’s Tiangong go up piecemeal, assembled one module at a time over years.

Mission planners today often have to spend a great deal of effort trying to squeeze telescopes and other craft into that small cargo space. The James Webb Space Telescope, for instance, has a sprawling tennis-court-sized sunshield. To fit it into its rocket, engineers had to delicately fold it up and plan an elaborate unfurling process once JWST reached its destination. Every solar panel you can assemble in Earth orbit is one less solar panel you have to stuff into a rocket. 

[Related: Have we been measuring gravity wrong this whole time?]

Another key advantage is cost. The cost of space launches, adjusted for inflation, has fallen more than 20-fold since the first Space Shuttle went up in 1981, but every pound of cargo can still cost over $1,000 to put into space. Space is now within reach of small companies and modest academic research groups, but every last ounce makes a significant price difference.

When it comes to other worlds like the moon and Mars, thinkers and planners have long thought about using the material that’s already there: lunar regolith or Martian soil, not to mention the water that’s found frozen on both worlds. In Earth’s orbit, that’s not quite as straightforward. (Architects can’t exactly turn the Van Allen radiation belts into building material.)

That’s where Ekblaw, Nisser, and their colleagues hope their resin-squirting approach might excel. It won’t create intricate components or complex circuitry in space, but every little part is one less that astronauts have to take up themselves.

“Ultimately, the purpose of this is to make this manufacturing process available and accessible to other researchers,” says Nisser.

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The International Space Station is generally a pretty busy place, and this week sounds like no exception. Arriving this week aboard SpaceX’s 26th commercial resupply mission (CRM) is a host of supplies for upcoming experiments, including microbes capable of devouring plastic, developing shelf stable yogurt-like concoctions, and a crop of space tomatoes.

[Related: The ISS’s latest arrivals: a 3D printer, seeds, and ovarian cow cells.]

First up is Pseudomonas putida, the plastic-craving microorganism. Organized by SeedLabs in a collaboration with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Harvard Medical School, the upcoming experiments will test out the microbes’ capabilities in space, potentially providing important advancements for both pollution reduction on Earth as well as uses for astronauts during future lunar and Martian explorations. As Fast Company explained earlier today, Pseudomonas putida is not only capable of breaking down PET, an extremely common plastic often used in bottling and packaging, but also turning those broken down compounds into β-ketoadipic acid, “a nylon monomer that can be made into fabric or used in existing manufacturing processes.”

Researchers are hopeful that the microbes’ development in a zero-gravity, high UV radiation-environment might actually strengthen the organisms, which would be a boon both for future space missions as well as humans’ attempts to rein in pollution here on Earth. “Studying how the bacteria fare in space also generally helps glean more information about the microbes’ biological makeup, and if they could withstand changing environmental conditions on Earth,” Fast Company adds.

Pseudomonas putida isn’t the only microscopic arrivals aboard the ISS this week. As Tech Crunch notes, astronauts are receiving additional microbes as part of “the second phase of an attempt to create a shelf-stable pre-yogurt mix that, when hydrated, results in the bacteria naturally producing a target nutrient” like glucose and other complex molecules for medications. Gaining a better understanding of how these processes develop in space could also help future explorations’ achieve greater self-sufficiency in producing meals and necessary drugs.

[Related: NASA astronaut Victor J. Glover on the cosmic ‘relay race’ of the new lunar missions.]

Speaking of meals: ISS denizens have a batch of cosmic tomatoes to enjoy. These “Red Dwarf” miniature tomatoes are part ongoing experiments aimed at growing healthy food in micro- and zero-gravity environments using only artificial lighting. While recent work focused on leafy greens like spinach, the Veg-05 project is concerned with larger products like the red fruit—yes, fruit, remember? After a 104-day growth period from seed to finished food, astronauts will reportedly get a chance to conduct their own taste test. No word on whether space-bound bacon and lettuce will be available on the ISS by then, unfortunately.

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A four-ton payload of materials and equipment including both a 3D printer and ovarian cow cells is currently en route to the International Space Station (ISS). Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus NG-18 cargo ship launched on the company’s Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, at 5:32 a.m. EST this morning. It is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Wednesday once astronauts use a robotic arm to capture the cargo ship, named the SS Sally Ride in honor of the first female astronaut who died in 2012.

[Related: What’s next for NASA’s Artemis 1.]

The 8,265 pounds of supplies includes a host of equipment and material for upcoming microgravity experiments, alongside the first satellites ever launched by both Uganda and Zimbabwe. Most notably, a 3D printer that first arrived aboard the ISS in 2019 is making its return to the station after heading back down to Earth for upgrades courtesy of its developers at Redwire Space. “We brought [the printer] back to our lab in Indiana … to add a few new capabilities, such as the ability to finely control the temperature of each printhead, and now we’re excited to see it launch,” Rich Boling, vice president of corporate advancement for in-space manufacturing and operations at Redwire, said during an October 25 press conference livestream.

Once reinstalled, the device will aid in 3D printing knee cartilage tissue using bioink and cells for possible future human patient transplants. Blood vessels and other cardiac tissues will also be created alongside “organoids,” or miniature versions of organs that are useful for drug efficacy tests. Other experiment materials include mixtures of water, air, and sand for research into global mudslides made more powerful and frequent through climate change, as well as space-borne seeds returning for study of multigenerational plant adaptations.

[Related: Mars may have been home to ill-fated methogens.]

And then, the cow cells. According to Space.com‘s writeup, ovarian cells taken from cows are also aboard the SS Sally Ride. These cells will be vital for not only researching fertility treatments here on Earth, but paving the way for studies regarding human reproduction on lunar and Martian settlements. With NASA aiming for humans’ return to the moon ahead of establishing a permanent base within the next decade, the capacity to healthily sustain multigenerational settlements in these uncharted territories is a major hurdle to overcome. Cow cells, as odd as it may sound, will potentially enable a major step forward for our journeys.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

Space poses some massive dangers for humans, from black holes to the heat death of the universe. But as humanity considers long-haul space travel, there are other, smaller potential hazards that some researchers say may deserve more attention: microbes from Earth.

Astronauts face numerous known health problems in space, including a loss in bone density, muscle atrophy, and psychological issues. And on Earth, researchers are increasingly discovering how the various bacteria and other microorganisms that live inside and outside of people — the human microbiome — affects physical and mental health.

Space, of course, is an entirely different environment from Earth, with high radiation levels and microgravity. Although the science is far from certain, these vast differences may cause unexpected changes in the microbiome of astronauts. In turn, this could result in a range of health problems, which may be more pronounced on long-haul stints in space, like traveling to another planet.

Still, the implications of a disrupted microbiome are poorly understood, even on Earth, said David Pearce, a bioscience researcher at Northumbria University and author of a 2022 paper exploring how a trip to Mars might affect microbes in the gut — which makes the range of related illnesses and diseases in space difficult to predict. And direct research is limited because only around 600 people have ever been to space. Those who have taken the trip don’t typically stay long, as the average length of a trip to the International Space Station is about six months. And some researchers aren’t yet convinced there’s enough evidence suggesting the human microbiome will change much in space at all.

All the same, many researchers, including Pearce, are trying to figure out whether or not astronauts will enter a state in which their microbiome changes in adverse ways, called dysbiosis. “Because they’re going to be away for a long time, will that dysbiosis become a significant problem,” he said, “or lead to them having health impacts that impair their ability to function?”

Researchers try to understand the possible effects of space on the microbiome in two places: terrestrial settings that are similar in some way to those experienced in space, or in space itself. In an example of the former, Norberto González-Juarbe, a principal investigator with the astronaut microbiome research group at J. Craig Venter Institute’s Infectious Diseases and Genomic Medicine Group, is looking at the microbiomes of researchers who work in the Concordia and Neumayer stations in Antarctica. He said that these locations mimic, in part, what astronauts experience in space, particularly the darkness, confinement, and limited human contact.

The team plans to analyze samples from the researchers at these stations to see how the microbial composition of their gastrointestinal tracts change, and how their immune systems react to the space station-like conditions. According to González-Juarbe, early results show shifts in gut microbes, and the team is currently looking at the immunological data. He expects to publish the results by the end of this year.

As for studies conducted in space, there are a few. One 2019 study, for instance, compared the microbiomes of astronaut Scott Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, after the former went to the ISS for nearly a year starting in 2015. The study posited that Scott Kelly’s microbiome did indeed change in space. For him, this included a reduction in bacteria called Bacteroidetes, the dysregulation of which has been linked to neurological, immune system, and metabolic issues, as well as increase in Firmicutes, a type of bacteria that can help break down certain starches and fibers.

In 2019, another study from the J. Craig Venter Institute looked at nine astronauts who spent between 6 and 12 months on the ISS. The astronauts collected samples from various patches of their skin, noses, and tongues. The astronauts also collected stool, blood, and saliva, along with samples from various surfaces on the station and its water reservoir.

Back on Earth, the study authors extracted and sequenced the DNA from the samples to see how the astronauts’ microbiomes changed over time. The study found that various skin microbes, including types of Gammaproteobacteria, decreased in number, which the authors theorize could contribute to the common phenomenon of rashes and skin hypersensitivity among astronauts in space. The findings also suggested that the astronaut’s gastrointestinal microbiome changed, and that two types of bacteria — Akkermansia and Ruminococcus, which seem to play important roles in maintaining mucus integrity in the digestive tract and in breaking down carbohydrates — saw a five-fold decrease.

Gut microbiome changes can impact the metabolism of food, bone health, and even cognition, said González-Juarbe, who was not part of the 2019 study. Longer stints in space — like the 18 months to Mars and back — would likely compound these issues. “The saying, ‘You are what you eat,’ is kind of true,” he said. “Changes in the overall microbiome will have effects on your overall brain health, and your cognitive health.”

Not everyone is convinced that the human microbiome changes in space, however. Existing studies have too few subjects to draw any conclusions, according to Jack Gilbert, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Diego and biology section head for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “With so few people up there,” he added, “doing any studies with any statistical rigor is so hard.”

Gilbert is also skeptical of the Kelly twin study: “We have lots of twin studies we compared over time on Earth, and they all show significant deviations from each other.”

Potentially more concerning for human health in space are microbes that could escape the body and become more dangerous, Gilbert said. A 2019 study by Gilbert and his colleagues suggests this might be the case. In March 2016, astronauts in the ISS collected samples from the station’s dining room table. Six days later, the samples were brought back to Earth. Gilbert and his team then isolated the microbes in the sample, selected two strains of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum, and sequenced their genes.

The team then compared the isolated fungi samples to 62 other strains and found that the genetics from the ISS samples differed from those of their terrestrial counterparts. The team also subjected small worms called nematodes to both samples. They found that some of the microbes that had come from the ISS killed more of these worms.

Gilbert said that it’s possible fungus becomes more pathogenic in response to the harshness of space, although his team is working on a new study to help clarify that connection. Microbes prefer warm, moist areas, like the environment inside the human body. So, microbes that escape from that habitat onto the cold, dry surfaces — also subject to radiation and a lack of gravity — can pick up new survival skills over generations, he said. “Unfortunately,” he added, “some of those survival strategies are associated with things like antibiotic resistance or enhanced virulence against humans.”

Gilbert noted that astronauts chosen to go to space are often incredibly healthy, so the chances of them getting sick from one of these rogue microbes is small. However, if someone on a long trip to Mars has a weakened immune system from food poisoning or exhaustion, he added, they could be infected by “these hardcore, Mad Max survivors.”

The existing research on the human microbiome in space leaves plenty of unknowns, according to all of the researchers who spoke to Undark. For instance, Nicole Buckley, team leader with the European Space Agency’s SciSpacE — or science of space environment — program noted that it’s difficult to say if any ailments in space, like loss of sleep, are caused by microbial disruptions, or if the microbes are just contributing or reacting to other ailments.

Also unclear, so far, is how researchers can restabilize a person’s microbiome in space, should it be thrown out of whack to the point of illness, Pearce said. For example, fecal transplant — which involves transplanting beneficial bacteria from the stool of a healthy donor into someone who is ill — can help restore immune functions for people with certain diseases. But because microbiomes are so complex, “it’s not like administering a drug that has an outcome,” he said. “You’re administering an organism that may become established and have a desirable outcome, or it may not become established and not have the outcome you’re hoping for.”

Some of the researchers noted, however, that fairly simple changes could make a difference for astronauts. González-Juarbe said that providing fresh fruits and vegetables and high-fiber foods can foster microbes that produce short-chain fatty acids in the stomach, which helps support the immune system. Buckley noted that pre- and probiotic foods could also help in this area.

Astronauts in space do have access to freeze-dried foods, according to an email from Grace Douglas from NASA’s Advanced Food Technology Project, which have “normal levels of food-relevant microorganisms,” but are processed to avoid containing any pathogens. Astronauts also receive small amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables via resupply missions. Still, according to Buckley, a healthy microbiome requires limiting processed foods and even more fresh fruits and vegetables and high-fiber foods.

The ESA is currently working on a study in which they provide compounds found in human breast milk called oligosaccharides, a linked group of carbohydrates, to the diets of researchers staying at the Concordia research station in the Antarctic for more than a year. These compounds are believed to be important in creating healthy microbiomes in babies. The study will test the oligosaccharides’ impact on the researchers’ microbiomes, immune systems, and mood.

There are still other fields that need to be explored that could further science’s understanding of space’s effect on the human microbiome. For instance, there’s a need for more information about individual astronauts and their microbial equilibriums, what causes their microbiomes to become stable or unstable, Pearce said.

Pearce added that astronauts may encounter familiar opportunistic pathogens — microbes that are usually benign, but can become dangerous when a person’s immune system weakens, among other factors — like those responsible for MRSA, which is found in 2 percent of people. But there could be “unknown unknowns” in this area, he said: microbes that humans will carry into space that have the undiscovered potential to become pathogenic.

Right now, there’s also no telling how the human microbiome would change on a long trip to Mars, compared to a relatively short stay on the ISS, Pearce said. But considering the timescale of spaceflight to the red planet — which NASA plans for the late 2030s or early 2040s — scientists have plenty of time to better understand the role the microbiome may play for astronauts’ health, he added. Until then, Pearce said that researchers should continue using the means available to them, whether they’re terrestrial studies that mimic space, studies in space itself, or simply tests that aim to better understand the microbiome of humans that are safely on the ground. “There’s no one way we’re going to get an answer for this,” he said.

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NASA astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann made history last week, becoming not only the first Native American woman in space, but also the first woman to command a Crew Dragon capsule. SpaceX’s Dragon Endurance spacecraft dropped off Mann and the crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission. Mann is the mission commander, with NASA’s Josh Cassada serving as the pilot. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina will serve as mission specialists for their expedition.

Mann is enrolled in Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in northern California and is a colonel in the US Marine Corps. She served as a test pilot in the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet and was deployed twice aboard aircraft carriers in support of combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Related: Meet the next generation of American spaceflight]

In June 2013, she was selected as one of eight members of the 21st NASA astronaut class. To prepare for her time in space, Mann completed intensive instruction in International Space Station systems, spacewalks, Russian language training, robotics, physiological training, T-38 flight training, and water and wilderness survival training, according to NASA. Mann’s training was complete in July 2015 and she has since served as the T-38 safety and training officer and as the assistant to the chief astronaut for exploration. She led the astronaut corps in the development of the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System, and Exploration Ground Systems for missions to the Moon.

In an interview with Indian Country Today in August, Mann said, “it’s very exciting,” referring to being the first Native woman in space. “I think it’s important that we communicate this to our community, so that other Native kids, if they thought maybe that this was not a possibility or to realize that some of those barriers that used to be there are really starting to get broken down.”

[Related: SpaceX and NASA are studying how to bump Hubble into higher orbit]

Crew-5 will be aboard the ISS conducting more than 200 science experiments aimed to help prepare for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, such as cardiovascular health, bioprinting, and fluid behavior in microgravity. “One of the ones that I’m looking most forward to is called the biofabrication facility. And it is literally 3D printing human cells, which to me sounds so futuristic, right?” she enthusiastically told ICT.

The six month mission is the latest stage in commercial and public space exploration.

“Missions like Crew-5 are proof we are living through a golden era of commercial space exploration. It’s a new era powered by the spirit of partnership, fueled by scientific ingenuity, and inspired by the quest for new discoveries,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, in a press release.

John Herrington is the only other Indigenous American to have entered orbit. Herrington (Chickasaw) flew on a 2002 space shuttle mission and logged over 330 hours in space and has flown 30 different spacecraft before retiring from NASA in 2005.

“I feel very proud,” Mann told Reuters before lift-off. “It’s important that we celebrate our diversity and really communicate that specifically to the younger generation.” When referring to the excitement that her trip has generated among some Native American communities, she said, “that’s really, I think, an audience that we don’t get an opportunity to reach out to very often.”

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At the height of the Cold War, large-scale investigations beyond our planet served as the dramatic stage for the post-nuclear era power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. This anxious tension fueled the early days of the space race—catapulting new technologies, forming space agencies, and laying the foundation for future advancements in nearly every mechanical aspect of our society. 

Between the US and what is now Russia, the two nations have long been titans in the space industry, but today’s space race has a new challenger. Later this year, China will put the finishing touches on the Tiangong space station, (which translates to Heavenly Palace) the country’s first space outpost. The Chinese National Space Administration launched the first phase of the multi-module station more than a decade ago, and now the station’s construction will end with the addition of the laboratory cabin Mengtian, the third and final module needed to complete the compact T-shaped structure. Tiangong station will be China’s “most adventurous space endeavor,” the agency states.

Unlike the International Space Station (ISS) which exists thanks to a conglomerate of many other countries and their space agencies, Tiangong will be the only independent space station once in operation, a feat that in all likelihood will heighten geopolitical tensions. The ability to create and support such a fixture in orbit is often a reflection of a nation’s total global power and influence. Yet, China’s résumé of successful space enterprises, while certainly not robust, has been surprisingly packed in the decades leading up to Tiangong—at the near-end of the 20th century, it had been the fifth country in the world to successfully launch a satellite in space. The newest fire fueling their fierce determination lies in how space science has become intertwined with development, including China’s national security, economic progress, and their public science and education initiatives. 

“It hasn’t always been unquestioned. It hasn’t always been perfectly consistent,” says Alanna Krolikowski, a political scientist at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who specializes in science and technology policy. “But China’s leaders have been eyeing space activities for a very long time.”

Much of the nation’s initial push to invest time and resources into the space scene in part stemmed from both international foresight and isolation from many early cooperative space programs. Particularly, in the 80s and 90s, the country faced many domestic and economic challenges (such as the overturning of fiscal and cultural policies that had choked off growth and global commerce), but China quickly realized the space sector would become a very important domain in the years to come, says Krolikowski. Such avid commitment and self-sufficiency towards more advanced space exploration is one of the reasons why China’s achievements (and at times, their failures) have so often been in the limelight.

In recent years, China’s frenzied push to increase the scope of their space activities has resulted in a satellite navigation network (strong enough to rival the US-supported GPS system), an unmanned probe to Mars, and the first craft to explore the far side of the moon, Chang-e 4. The discoveries the robotic probe’s companion, the semi-autonomous Yutu-2 rover, made also could help pave the way for future robotic treks of the southern pole of Earth’s satellite. 

[Related: Take a closer look at Tiangong 3]

Simultaneously, the nation’s commercial space industry is beginning to bloom, as many private ventures are beginning to launch new vehicles like cargo-carrying spacecraft and other satellites. A fully independent space station could act as a launchpad for future endeavors, catapulting scientific inquiry to new heights, including progressing China’s long-held objective of getting taikonauts (the Chinese counterpart to NASA astronauts) to someday land on the moon. While the station will be a gateway for many planned ventures, Tiangong will be notably much smaller and have less crew capacity than the International Space Station. Despite these constraints, the vessel will still have more than enough room to conduct vitally important scientific experiments.

Along with the second module, Wentian, the newly-added Mengtian module is a nearly 60-foot-long pressurized laboratory where researchers will be able to conduct microgravity experiments as well as other physics and aerospace technology research for human exploration. Tiangong will also allow China to explore mutually beneficial partnerships with other countries. Once in action, the station will support over 1,000 experiments during its lifetime, many of which were submitted from researchers all over the world. 

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an astronautics historian, is especially interested to see how well the station will support Xuntian, the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST). While Xuntian is reputedly said to be a counterpart to the Hubble Space Telescope, because its field of view will be 300 times greater than the 32-year-old observatory, McDowell says it’s actually more similar to NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.  

“This new generation of telescopes looks at a much larger area of sky at once, perhaps in somewhat less detail [than Hubble or the James Webb Telescope],” McDowell says. “It’s mapping out large areas of the sky, rather than looking at things you already know are there and sort of probing with precision.”

[Related: With a new set of cracks, the ISS is really showing its age]

It’ll be a while before either telescope is ready to gaze into the abyss, but what is obvious is that many of China’s projects follow a deliberate pattern of replicating what’s already been achieved, applying the lessons learned by their competitors to advance and improve their own designs. For example, from the outside, Tiangong station is a near identical copy of Russia’s Mir space station, which survived nearly 15 years in orbit before breaking up over the southern Pacific Ocean in 2001. One glaring difference in China’s design is the addition of a nearly 20 foot-tall robotic arm that will be able to move different modules around as well as provide support for other spaceflight activities. As Earth’s atmosphere begins to get more crowded with human-made refuse, China’s past issues with uncontrolled rocket debris will also have to be better addressed if the agency wants to support sustainable space exploration. While there are no public plans on how the country will handle these concerns going forward, the nation is still the first and only to test experimental space debris mitigation technologies.

At present, NASA is banned from collaborating with China or Chinese-owned ventures, including providing funding and any other operational partnerships. Future collaboration between Tiangong and the ISS is also highly unlikely, given that any international scientific effort would at least in part be headed by the US. Given the United States’ tendency to take charge in its international operations, China may be wary of joining a partnership that the US has so much pull over, says McDowell.

However, the station is “very attractive to a lot of international partners that don’t have such comprehensive space programs,” says Krolikowski. “Not just developing countries that want to participate in a smaller way or in a supporting role, but even major European countries, can find attractive areas of cooperation with China.”

Still, while the nation may be behind in adopting the do’s and don’ts of responsible space practices, many in the political and scientific community are optimistic that as China’s presence in the cosmos grows, they’ll begin to catch on. 

“As time goes on and as they mature as a space power,” says McDowell, “they’ll also mature in the sense of being good space citizens.”

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When NASA’s Artemis 1 mission launches to the moon later this month, on board the Orion space capsule will be two special passengers: Helga and Zohar. 

The pair are actually mannequin torsos, called phantoms, that are inspired by hospital training tools and are made to mimic human bones, soft tissues, and the internal organs of an adult female. They were borned out of a collaboration with the Israel Space Agency and the German Aerospace Center, and are designed with sensors that can map radiation exposure levels throughout the body. Zohar, specifically, will wear a radiation protection vest designed to protect the real astronauts slated for future Artemis missions—including the first women to go to the moon.

The last time people set foot on the moon or even traveled beyond low Earth orbit was at the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Back then, the US astronaut corps did not admit women. That changed when the first American female astronaut candidates were selected in 1978, with a young Sally Ride among them.

Today, NASA astronauts are much more diverse. But that isn’t reflected in the data informing their safety protocols because of decades of male dominance in the field. So, the agency and its collaborators are firing up new experiments to understand how different human bodies respond to the extreme environment of space—and best enable all astronauts to do their jobs safely.

[Related: A brief history of menstruating in space]

“We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we’ve made a lot of progress. But there’s a lot of progress still to be made to understand [the biological nuances between astronauts],” says Jennifer Fogarty, chief scientific officer for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, which is supported by the NASA Human Research Program and led by the Baylor College of Medicine. The goal, she says, is to build spaceflight tools and healthcare regimens for astronauts “around the human body to give it the ability to do the job you’re expected to do, and reduce the possibility of getting into conflict with that body.”

Wear and tear in zero-g

To look for patterns, researchers like Fogarty have been collecting data on how sex differences might influence astronauts’ health in space. So far, however, the research on how female bodies respond to the extreme environment of space has been “pretty limited,” she says. To date, more than 600 people have flown in space; fewer than 100 of them have been women. Tools like Helga and Zohar can help gather data in a way that isn’t reliant on historic trends.

Scientifically, it’s difficult to extrapolate trends in sex differences or sex-specific healthcare that can be trusted based on those numbers because some characteristics could simply be from individual variation. For example, when a female astronaut developed a blood clot while on the International Space Station in 2020, it prompted an investigation into whether the use of hormonal contraceptives for menstrual cycle control increased the risk of clotting during spaceflights. A review of 38 female astronaut flights published later that year concluded that it does not. But given such a small sample size and how rare blood clots associated with hormonal contraceptives are, that question remains open.

In some ways, women have proven particularly “resilient” during spaceflight, Fogarty says. For example, male astronauts’ eyesight seems to be more affected by swelling around the optic nerve in zero gravity than female astronauts’. But according to a 2014 study, female astronauts have statistically experienced greater orthostatic intolerance (the inability to stand without fainting for a long period of time) upon returning to Earth.

Radiation poisoning from space

Beyond short-term conditions and changes to bodies, a lot of the focus on human health out in space is focused on exposure to cosmic radiation from stars and galactic explosions. Most of the data we currently have comes from laboratory research on rodents or observations on atomic bomb survivors, Fogarty says: It shows a pattern of female survivors being more susceptible to developing lung cancer than male ones. 

Because women seem to carry more side effects from radiation damage than men, NASA recently updated its standards for acceptable levels of exposure to be uniform, limiting all astronauts to what was previously the allowable dosage for a 35-year-old woman.

Galactic cosmic rays are different from nuclear weapon radiation, however. For one, in nuclear accidents or acts of war exposure is two-dimensional, which means certain organs might be hit with more radiation than others. But, in space, the radiation is “considered omnipresent,” Fogarty says—you’re exposed in every direction. Some calculations suggest that the radiation exposure rate on the moon is about 2.6 times higher than that experienced by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Even then, in one week on the ISS, astronauts can be exposed to the same amount of radiation as humans are over one year on the ground.

With radiation coming from all angles in space, devising a physical barrier like a spacesuit or protective vest can be tricky. It makes understanding how all human organs are affected by radiation exposure important—whether they be sex-specific reproductive organs or not. 

That’s where Helga and Zohar come in. The female “phantoms” are part of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE). Internally, they have a grid of 10,000 passive sensors and 34 active radiation detectors that will gather data for researchers on which parts of the body make the most contact with electromagnetic waves during spaceflight. Some organs may be protected by the layers of soft tissue over them, while others may not be—this will help engineers build more targeted systems to protect the most at-risk areas of the body from harmful radiation. 

“What we will get besides the difference between a man and a woman when it comes to biological effects, we will get the difference between different body organs. The difference between brain and uterus, for example,” said Ramona Gaza, MARE science team lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in a press teleconference this week.

The two torsos won’t be the only Artemis 1 experiment designed to study the effects of radiation. There will also be a suite of live organisms, including yeast, fungi, algae, and plant seeds, aboard the mission. In a NASA project called BioSentinel, the Orion capsule will release a CubeSat into orbit around the moon carrying yeast cells to test on how the organisms survive the deep-space environment.

[Related: Long spaceflights could be bad for our eyes]

In total, the Artemis 1 mission will launch 10 CubeSats: The rest will study aspects of the lunar environment that will prove important to characterize for the safety of future human travel to the moon. They include tools to study space weather and bursts of solar radiation, map stores of water ice on the lunar surface, as well as a tiny lander from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Helga and Zohar also won’t be the only “passengers” on Artemis 1. In addition to a stuffed a sheep, they will be joined by a male-bodied mannequin equipped with sensors to measure various aspects of the environment around the moon during the flight, including radiation exposure. While Helga and Zohar won’t be wearing spacesuits, Commander Moonikin Campos will be dressed in a first-generation Orion Crew Survival System, which Artemis astronauts will use when real humans return to the moon.

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Humans tend to take a lot for granted, even something as simple as a breath of fresh air. It’s easy to forget how much our bodies depend on oxygen—until it becomes an invaluable resource, such as aboard the International Space Station. 

Although astronauts are typically sent to space with stores of necessary supplies, it’d be too costly to keep sending tanks of breathable air up to the station. Instead the oxygen that astronauts rely on for primary life support is created through a process called electrolysis, wherein electricity is used to split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. On Earth, a similar process happens naturally through photosynthesis, when plants use hydrogen to make sugars for food and release oxygen into the atmosphere.

Yet because the system on the ISS requires massive amounts of energy and upkeep, scientists have been looking for alternative ways to sustainably create air in space. One such solution was recently published in NPJ Microgravity, in which researchers found a way to pull gases from liquids using magnets.

“Not a lot of people [are] aware that water and other liquids are also magnetic to some extent,” says Álvaro Romero-Calvo, currently an assistant professor at the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech and lead author of the study.

“The physical principle is pretty well known in the physics community [but] the application in space is barely explored at this point,” he says. “When a space engineer is designing a space system involving fluids, they do not even consider the possibility of using magnets to induce phase separation.”

[Related: Lunar soil could help us make oxygen in space]

At the Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Brennan in Germany, Romero-Calvo’s team was able to study the phenomenon of “magnetically-induced buoyancy.” The idea is easier to explain by visualizing a can of soda: On Earth, because the liquid is denser than carbon dioxide molecules, soda bubbles separate and float to the top of the drink when subjected to the planet’s gravity. In space, where microgravity creates a continuous freefall and removes the effect of buoyancy, the substances inside become harder to separate and these bubbles are simply left suspended in air.

To test whether magnets could make a difference, the team took their research to ZARM’s drop tower, where an experiment, once placed in an airtight drop capsule, can achieve weightlessness for a few seconds. By injecting air bubbles into syringes filled with different carrier liquids, the team was able to use the power of magnetism to successfully detach gas bubbles in microgravity. This proved that the bubbles can be both attracted to and repelled by a neodymium magnet from within various substances. 

Additionally, the researchers found that through the inherent magnetic properties of various aqueous solutions (like purified water and olive oil) they tested, it’s possible to direct air bubbles to different locations within the liquid. Essentially, it’d become easier to collect or send air through a vessel. Besides being used to create an abundance of oxygen for the crew, Romero-Calvo says the study’s results show that developing microgravity magnetic phase separators could lead to more reliable and lightweight space systems, like better propellant management devices or wastewater recycling technologies.

To demonstrate the magnets’ potential use for research purposes, the team also experimented with Lysogeny Broth, a medium used in to grow bacteria for ISS experiments. As it turns out, both the broth and the olive oil were “significantly affected” by the magnetic force expended on it. “Every bit of effort that we devote to this problem is effort well spent, because it will affect many other products in space,” Romero-Calvo says. 

[Related: How the ISS recycles its air and water]

If the next generation of space engineers do decide to apply magnets to future space stations, the new method could generate more efficient, breathable atmospheres to support human travel to other extraterrestrial environments, including the moon and most especially, to Mars. If we were to plan a human mission to the Red Planet, the ISS’s current oxygenation system is too complex to be completely reliable during the long journey. Simplifying it with magnets would lower overall mission costs and ensure that oxygen is abundant. 

Although Romero-Calvo says their breakthrough could ultimately help us touch down on Mars, other scientists are working on ways to manufacture oxygen using plasma—a state of matter that contains free charged particles like electrons which are easily excited by powerful electric fields—for fuels, fertilizers, and other materials that could help colonize the planet. And while neither project is up to scale just yet, these emerging advances represent the amazing feats humans are capable of as we keep moving forward, striving to reach beyond our familiar horizons.

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When Axiom Space sent the first private crew to the International Space Station earlier this year, an overly aggressive itinerary caused some ripples in the professional astronauts’ work performance. Though it’s unclear if the trip interfered with the ISS crew’s science goals, the atmosphere aboard the station was strained—a classic example of too many cooks in the kitchen. Operations were impacted enough that the ISS and Axiom astronauts’ collective experiences motivated NASA to release new rules that commercial space companies will have to adhere to if they continue to join in on spaceflight activities going forward. What those changes could look like, however, will depend on how supportive and accepting NASA is to the still-emerging industry. 

Notably, the agency could require a former NASA astronaut to act as mission commander for private spaceflights, a move that would essentially make the agency a permanent liaison between public and US-based private space commerce. (The Axiom flight did already have a former NASA astronaut on board, Michael Lopez-Alegría, along with three first-time passengers—a businessman, an investor, and a real-estate magnate). 

“We got up there and, boy, we were overwhelmed,” López-Alegría said during a post-mission press conference. “Getting used to zero gravity is not an overnight thing.”

To avoid packed itineraries in flight, space tourism companies might also be required to provide documentation of the private astronauts’ work schedules. Additionally, because research activities weren’t originally envisioned as something space tourists would take part in, private companies will now submit research requests to the International Space Station National Laboratory no later than a year before expected launch. This is a huge hurdle for companies with similar objectives to Axiom, whose business model offers space tourists the opportunity to engage in activities like STEM outreach, experiments, photography and filmmaking once aboard the ISS. Members of the Axiom-1 crew helped conduct tests on self-assembling technology for future space habitats, cancer stem cells, and even air purification research. But by now NASA understands that successfully privatizing space will be harder than originally thought. 

The main reason why the ISS has had a difficult time integrating private space travel into its repertoire is because tourism has never been part of NASA’s charter, says Madhu Thangavelu, a lecturer at the University of Southern California and an expert on space tourism and architecture. “NASA is more interested in exploration, human factors, and in human physiology studies on the station, which is what they excel at,” he says. 

[Related: Here are all the ways to visit space this decade (if you’re extremely rich)]

Axiom isn’t the agency’s first brush with the tourism industry—and previous attempts have been met with much more resistance. In 2001, Dennis Tito, an engineer and US millionaire, became the world’s first space tourist when he planned to visit Russia’s space station Mir. But his flight was diverted to the ISS when the Russian station was later deorbited. Tito stayed on the station for a little less than eight days, compared to the Axiom crew’s 10-day mission, but NASA later reported that his trip caused too many disruptions. 

“They were not at all welcoming to people roaming around the station when the agency is busy doing other things,” Thangavelu, who is also on the board of directors for the National Space Society, says. 

Such instances raise important moral and legal questions as private space tourism expands: Who makes the rules for astronaut behavior, misconduct, or accidents, and who should enforce them? Currently, these space travelers are free from international agency’s scrutiny that professional astronauts are subject to, which means that any misfortune aboard the station would open up a brand new can of worms for companies to deal with.  

Bigger and broader changes need to happen across the industry if space is to become easily and financially accessible to the general public. For example, instead of relying on private commercial companies to pave the way to public access, Thangavelu says that if NASA is serious about enabling commercial space activities, the agency should focus on creating a dedicated office for space tourism. 

“It’s my belief that if we give the station access to the private sector, we will get very creative in how to better manage the facility,” he says. Taking space adventurers on tours of the ISS or involving them in lab research, he says, could also drastically lower the costs of typical missions and lend structure to the preparation and resources needed to ensure both a private and professional astronaut’s continued safety.

[Related: Selling tickets to the space station is actually decades overdue]

Other experts share Thangavelu’s views. Rachel Fu, director of the University of Florida’s Eric Friedheim Tourism Institute, says that compared to typical Earth-bound leisure activities, space tourism is a much more complicated endeavor that impacts our society on a global level. The industry needs to be constantly supervised, and having at least one government entity in the new global space race take that helm would benefit all involved parties, Fu says. Beyond tourism, private companies could further open up independent research and experiments in space. Fu also notes that the more people who are able to contribute to the next generation of knowledge, the better. 

There are currently no public plans by either NASA or the ISS to create a department solely for facilitating private spaceflights. At the moment, “NASA sees private astronaut missions as an important part of stimulating demand for commercial customers and astronauts to live and work in low-Earth orbit,“ Angela Hart, program manager of NASA’s Commercial Low-Earth Orbit Development, told Popular Science in a statement over email. She also said that it offers astronauts an opportunity to interact with crews of different training levels and goals. 

Even now, as space tourism continues its meteoric rise, being able to navigate the subtler social nuances of space travel is important as humans start to expand outwards towards the stars. And when deciding who gets to soar above Earth next, industry experts are likely to prioritize them. 

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When NASA launched its International Space Station resupply mission Thursday evening, the rocket carried instruments not just to study life in space, or the far-away stars, but to point back toward Earth. Among them is a set of ultra-sensitive light sensors designed to study the properties of swirls of dust in our atmosphere.

Atmospheric dust is a powerful, but not fully understood force in Earth’s nutrient cycles. Much like how water evaporates, forms clouds, and rains down, dust has its own patterns. Dust is constantly swept up from the world’s deserts, and when it settles, it fertilizes the Amazon rainforest, feeds explosions of marine life in the deep ocean, and warms up snow on California’s mountains.

All that dust changes the climate. Light-colored sediment can reflect heat back into space, while dark, iron-rich dust soaks up heat.  When a plume of Saharan dust traveled over the southern United States this summer, it tinted the sky orange, a lot like the haze from wildfire smoke. But the cumulative result of dust’s effect is a mystery.

“We don’t really know whether mineral dust heats or cools our planet,” Robert Green, a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the principal investigator of the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) project, said Wednesday. 

When EMIT’s new sensors are installed on the ISS and ready within a few weeks, they’ll send back more than a billion measurements, which will give climate scientists their first comprehensive look at the planet’s dust cycle. These data may refine the essential tools researchers use to understand our planet: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that the unknown impacts of dust are responsible for differences between climate models and reality.

In a follow-up interview with Popular Science, Green explained how the sensors will work.

The big dust gap

Right now, when scientists want to study atmospheric grit, they must rely on fairly rough tools. Satellites may capture a few snapshots of a sandstorm, but they can’t take a global picture. Modelers use a simplified view of dust, too. Many climate models assume that all dust—whether from the chalky salt flats of Utah or the ochre Sahara—is yellow, soaking up only part of the sun’s energy.

In 2015, a team at Cornell University tried to tabulate dust by melding two sets of existing data. On the one hand, there’s a database of 5,000 soil samples, analyzed for their mineral content; and on the other, a global atlas of soil produced by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization that categorized dirt solely on its color and texture. The idea was that, ideally, mineralogists could match dust’s color and texture with the actual minerals in the dirt. “It’s, I would argue, kind of qualitative, but they needed to start somewhere,” Green says.

This turned out to be an imperfect  approximation of what’s actually in the air. For one thing, most of the 5,000 samples were gathered from farmland, not the deserts actually responsible for the dust. For another, it turns out to be very hard to know what’s in soil just based on its shape and shade. But when they compared the predictions about dust composition to real-world dust samples, “they found it didn’t agree with measurements,” Green says. “So we really don’t know the minerals on the surface.”

Eye in the sky

EMIT will directly measure the dry, dusty places of the world using spectroscopy, a technique that uses the light bouncing off surfaces to understand their molecular guts.

As the ISS orbits the planet, EMIT will point a telescope at Earth’s surface. The light that comes in will pass through a narrow slit, and then be refracted into all its constituent colors—EMIT’s sensors can detect 12,410 different bands of color.

[Related: The ISS gets an extension to 2030 to wrap up unfinished business.]

“Rocks are made of minerals, minerals are different molecules by and large, and those molecules interact differently with light,” Green says. Each mineral carries a different spectral fingerprint. The spectrometer won’t measure atmospheric dust directly—when all the dust is floating in the atmosphere, it jumbles the light. Instead, the machine will focus on the ground, giving climate modelers enough information to reconstruct the dust clouds above.

After correcting for the effects of the atmosphere and vegetation, EMIT can detect the gritty building blocks of each 645-square-foot patch it scans. 

It should take less than a year to get a complete picture of the world’s deserts, which will refine global climate models. But once that’s done, EMIT’s spectrometers could be turned to new observations.

Similar or identical spectrometers placed on airplanes have been used  to study fire risk in North American forests, biodiversity in the Peruvian rainforest, sources of plastic pollution, methane plumes, and the presence of rare earth elements. “It’s now taking this to space,” Green says, where watching dust in the wind is just the start.

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Floating around in space sounds like fun, but doing so takes a massive toll on your body. A study published on June 30 in the journal Scientific Reports found that spending just a few months in space changes astronauts’ bones, causing a loss of density equivalent to what most humans would lose in a couple of decades on Earth. More concerning is that after a year, many astronauts do not fully recover their lost bone mass.

The connection between bone mass and spaceflight has been studied for quite some time. One prior NASA study from 2007 estimated a two to nine percent loss in bone mass within nine months of space travel. Another study published in 2020 simulated the impact of a three-year spaceflight to Mars, finding a 33 percent risk of osteoporosis for long-distance travelers. Decreases in bone density can weaken a person’s skeletal structure and increase the risk of back pain, bone fractures, and loss of height.

[Related: Astronauts are losing 3 million red blood cells every second in space]

The poor osteopathic health likely results from the lack of gravity in space. Despite moving around, weightlessness removes pressure from the legs when standing or walking, mimicking the effects of extreme physical inactivity. “Even with two hours of sport a day, it is like you are bedridden for the other 22 hours,” Guillemette Gauquelin-Koch, the head of medical research at France’s CNES space agency, who was not part of the study, told The Guardian. Unless scientists figure out if the lost bone mass is fully recoverable, the findings jeopardize the hope of sending humans to Mars in 2030. “It will not be easy for the crew to set foot on Martian soil when they arrive–it’s very disabling,” Gauquelin-Koch noted in the same interview.

One hypothesis that the new study tested is whether astronauts can recuperate their lost bone mass by spending enough time back on Earth. Medical experts with NASA and its collaborators scanned the wrists and ankles of 17 astronauts (majority male) before, during, and after they’d spent months on the International Space Station (ISS). After one year back at home, nine astronauts still hadn’t recovered the density of their shinbones. The total bone mass loss across the nine subjects was comparable to a decade’s worth of bone mass loss that aging people face on Earth.

[Related: Your bones do more than you give them credit for]

Astronauts who spent the longest time on the ISS—four to seven months—showed the slowest recovery of bone density. It’s still unclear whether there’s a maximum amount of bone loss a person could endure in space. “Will it continue to get worse over time or not? We don’t know,” Steven Boyd, director of the McCaig Institute for Bone and Joint Health at the University of Calgary and study coauthor also told The Guardian. “It’s possible we hit a steady state after a while, or it’s possible that we continue to lose bone. But I can’t imagine that we’d continue to lose it until there’s nothing left.”

One shred of good news is that some exercises worked better than others in helping astronauts recuperate the lost bone mass. Deadlifting rather than cycling or running seems to work better at strengthening the remaining bone mass, which suggests that heavy lower-body exercises would be beneficial in preparing for long space missions. 

Astronauts who were fit and in their 40s also did not seem impacted as much by the bone loss. “Fatigue, light-headedness, and imbalance were immediate challenges for me on my return. Bones and muscles take the longest to recover following spaceflight.” said Robert Thirsk, a former chancellor at The University of Calgary and a former Canadian Space Agency astronaut in a press release. “But within a day of landing, I felt comfortable again as an Earthling.”

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Astronauts on long missions aboard the International Space Station often spend their holidays peering down at Earth. But while they may be missing out on the festivities on the ground, some former crew members have reported seeing a spectacular sight that signals raucous celebrations are at hand: fireworks.

It’s unlikely that viewing fireworks—chemical explosions that create blasts of crackling sounds and dazzling colors—from space would be as mesmerizing as watching from your favorite picnic spot. The small sparklers waved by eager partygoers and bottle rockets shot off in their backyards aren’t putting on any light shows for astronauts flying overhead. But what about huge, bombastic industrial-type fireworks: Would even those be pinpricks of light to space travelers looking down at us? 

In most cases, those combustions are too dim or too easily obscured by weather to be visible nearly 250 miles up, where the ISS resides in low-Earth orbit. And taking into consideration how much artificial light pollution inundates astronauts every night, successfully spotting sparks of glowing light far below isn’t a regular occurence.

Yet some lucky space visitors have reported they’ve glimpsed small, colorful dots firing over certain cities.

Former Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, for instance, wrote on Twitter that with darkness and the right timing, fireworks can indeed barely be seen blinking in and out of view of the station’s windows. Andre Kuipers, a former European Space Agency astronaut, also recalled seeing fading red and green “light spots” over Warsaw, Poland, as his crew celebrated New Year’s in 2014.

The firework industry is also scaling up bigger than ever before. The largest aerial firework launched made the Guinness World Records in 2020, when an explosion turned the entire night sky in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a bloody shade of scarlet. The fireworks’ spherical shell weighed in at about 2,800 pounds, and the humongous bomb had to be shot off from a mortar (a steel tube embedded in the ground) about 26 feet deep.

[Related: Babies and pets might freak out during fireworks shows, but you can help them relax]

Yet according to Paul Smith, director of lecture demonstrations at Purdue University, whether astronauts could see fireworks from space wouldn’t actually depend on the size of the shell. Instead, it’d come down to the light intensity, which means the strength of the radiance a source produces.

“The key thing is the intensity of the light output,” says Smith, who is also president of Pyrotechnics Guild International. So, for the brighter or more brilliant fireworks, Smith imagines that they could probably be seen from space. But if that light output is lacking in intensity, he says, “it really wouldn’t matter how big it is or how big the spread is, it’s just not going to send light far enough that they can visually pick it up.” It’s unknown whether anyone peeped the Steamboat Springs blast from as far above as the ISS. But if they did, even that record explosion probably looked nothing like what Earthlings on the ground saw: Instead, roaring red thunder would’ve been transformed into tiny flickering sparks.

The concept of intensity is also one of the reasons that certain firework colors, like reds and greens, are often more vivid than others, Smith says. But more important than creating an explosive scene for people in orbit, he notes, is improving how the people of Earth set off rockets at home. 

Smith recommends that anyone looking to engage in pyrotechnic fun check out Celebrate Safely, an education initiative that demonstrates how to properly handle backyard fireworks and discourages their misuse. The goal is to decrease the number of yearly firework-related accidents; according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an estimated 11,500 people were taken to the emergency room for these types of injuries in 2021, and at least nine people died.  

“We love fireworks and want to promote those, but we want people to understand: enjoy it, but do it safely,” says Smith. It’s nearly impossible for astronauts to appreciate your backyard fireworks–but a commemoration that doesn’t require medical attention is its own reward.

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As NASA plans to return to the moon, future astronauts could soon be sporting some brand new outerwear. After 40 years of withstanding the wear-and-tear of living in space, modern spacesuits are finally getting a makeover. 

On Wednesday, the agency announced that it’s partnering with two private space companies, Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, to build the next generation of spacesuits. Astronauts will wear those suits to conduct spacewalks aboard the International Space Station, explore the lunar surface during Artemis missions, and prepare for human-led missions to Mars. 

The companies were chosen as part of the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contract, an agreement that allows selected companies to compete for tasks through 2034. These tasks, which include demonstrations outside the space station and for the Artemis III mission, have a combined maximum worth of $3.5 billion. 

During the June 1 NASA press conference, agency officials said that while the companies will technically own the spacesuits they create, developing public-private partnerships like this one allows NASA to save on costs while accomplishing more from a design and development standpoint than the agency could possibly do alone. 

“We’re not only meeting NASA’s objectives, but also helping to support and encourage an emerging space economy,” said Lindsay Aitchison, a program executive for NASA’s Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program. “It’s exciting, it leads to innovation, and makes sure that we have sustained competition along the way.”

The spacesuits will also be “a key focal point when we take those first steps back on the lunar South Pole,” Aitchison added, and the contract is a major milestone toward that goal. As for potential suit designs, both companies are still in the early design stages, so it’s hard to say what the new outfits will look like. But they could potentially be much different than previous iterations, as NASA’s current spacesuits aren’t capable of withstanding the harsh conditions future deep-space explorers will experience. 

They’ll also replace the aged spacesuits ISS astronauts use for extravehicular activity, or what are known as spacewalks. The ones used now are so old, they were originally designed nearly half-a-century ago for the Space Shuttle program. “The existing spacesuit has been the workhorse for the agency for 40 years, and it’s helped maintain and utilize the International Space Station as well as construct it,” said Dina Contella, the operations integration manager for the International Space Station program at the NASA Johnson Space Center.

In 169 of the 250 spacewalks that have been completed aboard the station, she said, astronauts wore the current iteration of the space suit. But because they’re restrictive, rarely upgraded, and have had a long history of issues—the latest being a shelved spacewalk due to a space helmet leaking water—they just won’t cut it for long-term space exploration. And it’s about time to try out new spacesuit technologies anyway, Contella said. 

[Related: Why NASA is running out of spacesuits]

While plans are still in place to retire the ISS in 2030, testing how the suits fare on the station will help guide astronaut’s gear needs for future missions. “[The] ISS is a testbed, and especially a testbed for exploration,“ Contella said. “We’re looking forward to learning what we can on ISS and then handing what we’ve learned over to Artemis.”

And as we race toward learning more about deep-space exploration, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time the agency has put some serious thought into revamping its lunar mission suit designs. In 2019, NASA released the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Units, or xEMU, a suit tailor-made for Artemis-era missions, and said that they would build two of them by 2024. 

But due to the pandemic, funding shortfalls and an array of technical challenges, it’s now highly unlikely that the xEMU design will be flight-ready even by 2025. 

According to a 2021 report from NASA’s inspector general office, by the time two xEMUs are completed, the agency will have already spent over $1 billion sponsoring the creation of the next-gen spacesuits Axiom and Collins Aerospace are currently working on. That’s a huge jump, considering that since 2007, NASA has poured about $420 million into spacesuit development. More than half of that was spent in the last five years.

To bring their vision of the next NASA spacesuit to life, Dan Burbank, a senior technical fellow at Collins Aerospace, said that one of the company’s goals is to have users, which could someday include both astronauts and future space tourists, “deeply embedded” in the design aspect of the project. 

“Although we will often call the spacesuit the world’s smallest spacecraft, it’s human shaped, human-sized, it shouldn’t feel like a spacecraft,” he said during the conference. “We want to be able to create an immersive environment that for the crew member gives them the most amount of mobility, that complements a crew member’s capability rather than constrains it. So we’re very excited to do this.”

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Updated (May 26, 2022): Yesterday evening, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft safely parachuted down in the New Mexico desert, completing the second uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 to the International Space Station. NASA and Boeing were able to hit the planned test objectives, such as launch and orbital trajectory, separation from the Atlas V rocket, and docking and undocking from the space station. Boeing has retrieved the spacecraft from the landing site and it is being transported back to processing facilities.

As the saying goes: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. 

Tomorrow, Boeing will attempt to re-launch its Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), the second uncrewed flight for the aerospace company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, to the International Space Station, following its delay last summer. 

The trip will test the spacecraft’s ability to get to and from the ISS safely—which will be a major feat after past tests encountered a slew of technical complications Boeing has experienced since the project’s inception. The craft will fly out of Earth’s atmosphere on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V N22 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying with it more than 500 pounds of cargo up to the station, more than half of which consist of food and supplies for the current crew. After spending about a week docked there, it will return with about 600 pounds of crew supplies, including three Nitrogen Oxygen Recharge System (NORS) tanks that provide breathable air to crew.

However, one of the reasons the test is so risky is because Boeing has yet to really  prove that their technology can go the distance. 

Since the Space Shuttle program was shut down in 2011, the US has been reliant on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Astronaut Mark Vande Hei, who returned in March, was the latest to touch down in one of Russia’s rockets. But NASA is aiming to expand its options to deliver human payloads into space. That’s why NASA’s Commercial Crew program originally tapped both SpaceX and Boeing to build and operate spacecraft that could carry crew and supplies to the ISS.

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft successfully launched its maiden crewed flight in November 2020. Now Boeing is next up on the test pad. If Boeing’s test on Thursday is successful, Starliner could eventually become the second vehicle to be used as an alternative service and supply missions for private and commercial flights. But in the past few years, the company has experienced more than a few ups-and-downs in trying to perfect the spacecraft. 

[Related: SpaceX and Boeing are one big step closer to launching astronauts into space]

The first Starliner OFT mission flew in December 2019. The craft did reach orbit, software errors prevented the thrusters from firing, which catapulted the craft away from the trajectory needed to rendezvous with the ISS. Although experts on NASA’s safety panel expected the glitches to lead to a “catastrophic spacecraft failure,” the craft instead landed back on Earth intact two days later. Even though it didn’t complete its original mission, Starliner’s first successful landing will help pave the way for future missions to make similar touchdowns  After receiving permission from NASA to do the test again, its successor, OFT-2 was rescheduled for August 2021. 

But the first iteration of OFT-2 never left the launchpad. The mission was scrubbed once again after 13 of the craft’s valves, which are used to transport key propellant needed for flight, failed to open as designed as they were stuck in the wrong alignment. Because the problem couldn’t be diagnosed or fixed onsite, the craft was sent back to Boeing’s factory at Kennedy Space Center for more in-depth testing. 

These false starts aside, NASA and Boeing experts alike have high hopes for the company’s third test. 

During a NASA pre-launch press conference on May 17, Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for the Boeing Commercial Crew Program, said that (pending good weather) pre-flight checks signal that all systems look good to go. “We did one last cycle of all the valves yesterday, and they all operate nominally so we’re in good shape,” he said. “There’s really no outstanding issues and we’re ready for roll on Wednesday morning.”

[Related: This is why rocket launches always get delayed]

During the same conference, when asked whether Russian cosmonauts would someday be invited to travel back and forth via the American service spacecrafts, Dana Weigel, deputy manager of NASA’s International Space Station program, said the agency welcomes the opportunity to shuttle space crew members from around the world.

“It’s our goal to have what we call integrated crew, meaning we have Russian crew flying on our US group vehicles, and we’d like to fly our crew members on the Soyuz vehicle,” said Weigel. But before that happens, “with newly flying spacecraft, the Russians would like to make sure we’re finished testing, certifying and demonstrating that capability.”

Starliner was also created to be completely autonomous, a move that greatly reduces the training time needed for a potential crew. But for now, Boeing’s uncrewed spacecraft will be monitored by astronauts after it docks at the ISS. Once it reaches the station, the crew will send a few commands to Starliner to see if it responds as expected, and then send that data back to mission control on Earth. 

The information NASA will receive about its capabilities could mean the difference between Boeing’s long-awaited success, or in a fourth bid, another year of long-winded tests and inspections. Here’s hoping the third time’s the charm. 

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Updated (April 25, 2022): Last night, the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour undocked from the International Space Station after waiting nearly a week past the expected departure date due to adverse weather conditions at the seven possible landing sites back home. At 9:10 PM Eastern Sunday, the capsule closed its hatch and began to move towards low Earth orbit, where it remained for almost 17 hours. It splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean around 1:06 PM Eastern today, and the four Ax-1 crew members disembarked for post-flight health checks. Watch here for more updates.

Update (April 9, 2022): The Ax-1 crew successfully docked at the International Space Station today at 8:29 a.m. EST, about 45 minutes after the intended time, due to a video routing error. It will take several more hours of testing and calibration before the hatch opens to let the SpaceX passengers to embark.

NASA’s first crew of astronauts touched the stars in 1961 with Project Mercury. The Kennedy Space Center’s latest flight, however, had a different sort of crew: paying passengers.

SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavor rocket launched from Cape Canaveral at 11:17 a.m. EST on Friday, and is currently en route to the International Space Station. The crew is set to spend eight days in orbit and land back on Earth on April 18. Instead of a typical team of astronaut corps members, the four passengers include Michael Lopez-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut now working for Axiom (a management and consulting company) as well as three first-time space travelers—a businessman, an investor, and a real-estate magnate. While some have referred to the SpaceX crew members as “space tourists,” Lopez-Alegría disagrees with that description. 

“This mission is very different from what you may have heard of in some of the recent—especially suborbital—missions. We are not space tourists,” Lopez-Alegría told reporters earlier this month. “I think there’s an important role for space tourism, but it is not what Axiom is about.”

[Related: Why space lettuce could be the pharmacy astronauts need]

Before takeoff, the passengers underwent hundreds of hours of training at NASA and SpaceX facilities. In addition, each passenger will be assisting in research onboard the ISS, including collaborations with the Mayo and Cleveland Clinic, a partnership with Canadian hospitals, and several conservation-awareness projects.

For Lopez-Alegría, who was inspired by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions as a child, going back to space as part of a historic crew is a dream come true.

“It was such an inspiration to me, and to be able to participate in what I think is opening the next chapter is truly an honor,”  López-Alegría said at a news conference on April 1. “I can say with zero hesitation that we are ready to fly.”

[Related: Here are all the ways to visit space this decade (if you’re extremely rich)]

Friday’s launch is just the first in a string of planned SpaceX and NASA flights. This new era of space exploration largely began with former President Donald Trump’s Space Policy Directive 1. Signed in December 2017, the policy called for a return to the moon, eventual exploration of Mars, and a synthesis of governmental, private, and international efforts. In 2019, NASA announced a change in policy allowing for the usage of government resources for commercial activities on the ISS, commercial destinations in low-Earth orbits, and opportunities for private astronaut expeditions.

 Axiom is currently offering three seats on its next mission, set to take place in 2023, to any interested space enthusiasts. All you need is a spare $55 million.

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Mark Vande Hei has finally made it home from the International Space Station. Touching down early Wednesday morning aboard a Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft, Vande Hei and two cosmonauts, Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov, were picked up in a remote area southwest of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. 

Back on Earth for the first time in nearly a year, the crew was met with a crowd of international agency officials. With the astronauts adjusting their space legs to Earth’s gravity, they were carried out of the spacecraft into medical tents. Vande Hei was whisked back to Houston, and cosmonauts Dubrov and Shkaplerov went to a training base in Star City Russia. 

The Soyuz’s landing was a bit of a rougher ride than expected, Vande Hei had said. The lead up to the astronauts’ return had garnered unprecedented attention due to the recent geopolitical tensions between the US and Russia. Many were even concerned about Vande Hei hitching a ride back on a Russian-operated spacecraft.

Earlier this month, Russian space agency director Dmitry Rogozin allegedly threatened to leave the 55-year-old Minnesota native in space, but days later, NASA reassured the public that their Russian colleagues would remain professional throughout exit operations. 

“Each of the partners have different capabilities that they bring and together we work,“ said ISS program manager Joel Montalbano, in a press briefing on March 14. “It’s not a process where one group can separate from the other.”

Russia’s Soyuz crafts have been used to ferry cosmonauts to and from the International Space Station for decades. Before SpaceX’s Dragon rockets transported NASA crew up in 2020, the Russian-made vehicles were the only method of delivering and removing crew. 

But the safe landing early this morning indicates that there wasn’t anything to worry about. 

Right before settling into the spacecraft, Vande Hei and many of his colleagues aboard the station hugged goodbye, and took a few pictures to commemorate their farewell. It was especially heart-felt considering Vande Hei has stated in the past that this expedition would be the last time he took to the stars.

[Related: The ISS gets an extension to 2030 to wrap up unfinished business]

During a pre-recorded NASA interview that aired during last night’s livestream, Vande Hei reflected on his time aboard the ISS and the mental rigors of spaceflight: 

“Physically, this is a challenging environment to be in,” he said. ”There’s times when you just feel very physically uncomfortable; those are probably the low points. It colors everything you’re doing, and it takes a lot more work to stay in the right frame of mind in those situations.”

To combat those feelings, Vande Hei tried to remain connected to his relationships on the ground, and made a habit of meditating everyday. 

“Trying to look for things to be grateful for as opposed to things to gripe about. That goes a long way with making whatever you’re doing more palatable,” he said.

During his time on the station, Vande Hei broke the record for the longest single space flight made by an American astronaut, spending 355 days in orbit—the previous record was held by astronaut Scott Kelly at 340 days. Between his two spaceflights, Vande Hei lived in space for a total of 523 days.

According to NASA, Vande Hei’s mission went around Earth about 5,680 times, and traveled more than 150 million miles.

The three returning crew members were the last of Expedition 66, the 66th long-duration mission to the ISS. Their departure makes way for the next batch of ISS residents.

On Tuesday, former ISS commander Shkaplerov handed over the reins to the station to NASA astronaut Thomas Mashburn by giving a symbolic key during a live change of command ceremony. During the exchange, Shkaplerov remarked: “I know you. You’re professional, and I know you will [be a] very professional commander of ISS.”

After the Soyuz departed, commander Mashburn along with NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov officially boarded the station. Their arrival marks the start of Expedition 67, which is predicted to last until September of this year. 

You can rewatch NASA’s livestream of the event here.

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It’s an archaeologists’ day job to unearth stories out of the things we leave behind. Earthly possessions and artifacts can give a glimpse into ancient civilizations and even modern-day life. But as humans venture beyond our planet, how do you keep archaeology alive in space? One playground where archaeologists could answer this question already exists: the International Space Station.

In the first archaeological survey of its kind, scientists piloting the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP) are studying the physical objects used by astronauts aboard the 23-year-old laboratory and mini-community. But the ISS isn’t your typical excavation site with chisels and brushes. Instead of digging up evidence, researchers treated the ISS like an archive, sifting through a library of old and new pictures. The investigation will wrap up its data collection late this month, but once published, its results could provide both sociologists and space historians a window into what life in space really looks like.

Developed in 2015, ISSAP originally began as a way to show NASA that the social sciences also have a place amongst the stars. Since its inception, the International Space Station has been host to many disciplines of scientific research, says Justin Walsh, one of the project leads and an associate professor at Chapman University. 

“The socio-cultural component of long-duration spaceflight has essentially been left to the side,” he says. “We have designed a recording technique to capture archaeological data for archaeological questions.”

Space archaeology is an emerging field, with experts taking a wide range of approaches. Scientists have used the term to describe human activity in space, or human activity done with the goal of exploring space, like launch facilities, observatories or rockets. But according to Walsh, ISSAP is mainly concerned with how astronauts interact with and change the objects and spaces in the ISS—much like how loss or religion can shape an environment.

“All of our civilizations are documented in one way or another, whether that’s oral history or written documents,” says Chantal Brousseau, a masters student of history at Carleton University in Canada who helped develop a tool to help compile archaeological data for the project. “But we don’t have any sort of documentation about life in space as it is now.”

[Related: Sorry, you can’t eat these popular foods on the International Space Station]

Living on the station is a lot different than living on Earth. In fact, this small mirror of our society is guided by its own laws and heritage. For example, there is a hierarchy of the crew members that influences team dynamics. After astronauts arrive on the station, ISS partner agencies designate one crew member as the commander, a position that takes primary responsibility for all decision-making on board. All astronauts are also supposed to understand both English and Russian, but in reality, there’s varying degrees of fluency. 

The ISSAP team also observed that rules impact the presence of religious displays and personal effects. In the US segment of the station, there is a distinct lack of religious displays—a marked difference from the Russian side. But they do have a memorial to deceased colleagues, which is often left out of public photos. 

When the first long-term residents arrived on the station in 2000, photographs of the station and its inhabitants were often limited by how many canisters of film a mission could pack into the payload. But today’s digital photography has allowed astronauts to build a much larger repository of images. Walsh says that they’ve been able to use hundreds of thousands of images and the metadata associated with them to map out entire “behaviors and associations over the history of ISS.”

Their first project, called the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment, or SQuARE, uses six locations on the station as sample areas to visually evaluate how items and areas change over time. 

Five of these locations were carefully chosen by the researchers, while astronauts were able to choose where the last “dig” would take place. Although ISSAP is collecting final data from the experiment at the end of this month, Walsh and his team were already able to make some initial observations. Areas, like the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo where astronauts conduct medical and educational experiments, experienced lower amounts of human activity—places astronauts didn’t visit as often. 

Meanwhile, other rooms, like the kitchen and the Hygiene Compartment, experienced higher amounts of human activity. Determining what areas get the most use could tell scientists a lot about the crew’s patterns, and even what kinds of equipment are getting the most use, Walsh says. 

Still, of the challenges of conducting archaeology in space, Walsh says in some cases it’s easier to conduct research on the environment because they can always ask astronauts about their surroundings, compared to archaeologists who study long-deceased civilizations. 

“Nobody has ever tried to systematically record the material culture of a space habitat before,” he says. 

According to Walsh, the project comes at an opportune time. Plans have been announced to retire the station in the next decade. Before that happens, learning how astronauts interact with their surroundings—and each other—inside these microcosms could help inform what the next generation of space stations will look like.

“We are perfectly positioned to give data-driven insights into the way a space habitat is being used, for the people who are designing and building space habitats,” says Walsh. These manufacturers might end up incorporating that data into their designs, which could affect how we view and create human-oriented structures in outer space.  

But to do that, Walsh’s team is working with collaborators like Chantal Brousseau to figure out how to interpret these archaeological insights. Brousseau ended up creating an independent web app to help record all information the experiment gathered. 

[Related: There’s a lot we don’t know about the International Space Station’s ocean grave]

After modifying an open-access image-annotator tool, she was able to modify its code to help create a database available to both the ISS and ISSAP team. Eventually, ISSAP’s goal is to eventually turn this information into legacy data—like a public file system for training computer models—that can be used by other archaeologists. 

“When you’re doing machine learning, you need to give the computer examples so it can learn,” says Brousseau. After the team annotates and labels the images from the ISS accordingly, they are able to sync multiple image databases using an application Brousseau created. “I’m thinking about developing it further for a data science tool.”

As humankind prepares to further explore the cosmos, it’s important to understand the fundamental aspects of how we change our environments, says Walsh.  He adds that this project is more than just food for thought for future space station engineers. 

It’s about understanding where we’ve been, and where that upward trajectory might take us next. 

“We have an obligation to look at the evolution of our technology,” says Beth O’Leary, a professor of space archaeology at New Mexico State University.

From an archaeological perspective, researchers and the public should remember that every culture on Earth has a relationship with the stars and the moon. Pushing the envelope of traditional archaeology is just another way to connect with each other. 

“The future of space is really international,” O’Leary says. “That’s why it’s really important to think about what’s important to preserve for humanity.”

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Have you heard the joke about the astronaut who got food poisoning? Probably not, and for good reason. It’s because such an event has honestly never happened. To date, no astronaut has ever gotten a food-borne illness in space.

“At NASA, we actually have a higher microbiological standard compared to most companies in the general food industry,” says Xulei Wu, a NASA food scientist and food system manager for the International Space Station. In other words, NASA is a stickler about food safety and storage when it comes to space travel. 

To reduce the risk of potential sickness, all food products sent to the ISS must undergo rigorous testing. If a food fails the test, those products are immediately thrown out of the running to become freeze-dried astronaut chow. In contrast, a successful dish has to be both safe to eat, and able to provide a lot of nutrition in one serving. 

What’s inside an astronaut’s pantry?  

However an astronaut’s diet, while certainly strict, isn’t necessarily a bland one. 

On any given day, the International Space Station’s pantry-style dining setup has about 200 dishes an astronaut can choose to eat. This freeze-dried buffet accounts for about 70-75 percent of all the crew’s meals. The rest mostly comes from crew-specific menu food—each astronaut is able to make a kind of culinary wishlist, and request certain foods or drinks they want for the duration of their mission. 

Even so, many of these fan favorites may not end up making it to the station in time for an astronaut’s stay, and in some cases, at all. From production all the way to transport, it takes quite a long time for food to get approved and then loaded onto a rocket. Even then, once food makes it into orbit, it could take years before it’s consumed by a peckish astronaut who has a craving for their favorite snack. 

[Related: Why space lettuce could be the pharmacy astronauts need]

“We don’t have a cargo vehicle to go there every week to send what they want,” says Wu. “Therefore we have to pre-pack their food and load all the food on cargo vehicles before the crew member even launches.” 

As space travel becomes even less of a distant reality, NASA eventually wants to work on improving better processing and packaging technologies to make food last as long as possible. 

But transportation aside, there are some foods that are currently banned on the space station—and the reasons why may surprise you. 

Crumbs

In our homes, these small scraps are often categorized as an annoyance and mess rather than a real problem. But once you’ve left the safety of Earth’s orbit, the petite particles are considered an occupational hazard. 

Crumbs are labeled Foreign Object Debris (FOD), or any object that could cause damage to a craft or system. NASA says that these wayward particles could interfere with mission equipment, be inhaled by crew members and in some cases, float into their eyes. 

But luckily, this doesn’t mean that astronauts must go without crumbly foods (which is a lot of food) completely. For example, instead of typical bread products, like rolls or biscuits, that easily break apart and crumble, NASA’s food lab says it’s been sending alternative options to the station. 

“The tortilla is super popular. It’s not really a leavened bread, but it kind of serves a [similar] purpose,” says Wu. “It’s versatile, but tortillas don’t crumble like most bread.” 

There are other foods that can create big crumbly messes too, including ice cream. In microgravity, these dehydrated treats could become so brittle that they crack apart entirely, and send flavored flakes of these icy treats flying everywhere.

Collaborations between several groups and launch facilities have been developing other types of frozen treats like popsicles, which NASA hopes to send to the ISS in the future, says Wu.  

Salt and Pepper

Sorry, there’s no conventional seasoning out in space. If you were to shake salt and pepper out in space, the grains would end up suspended in the air and be a similar hazard to floating crumbs. To add a little more flavor to foods, NASA scientists have come up with a clever alternative: liquid spice. Instead of using salt-and-pepper shakers, astronauts pour on pre-made salt and pepper solutions like they would salad dressing or sauces. NASA’s food lab dissolves the salt in water and the pepper in oil before sending off the liquid spice to space. 

Carbonated Drinks

Fizzy beverages are probably the most dangerous of banned space foods, purely because the consequences of drinking them still aren’t fully understood. 

Carbonated drinks, by definition, contain dissolved carbon dioxide. To get rid of this carbon dioxide, people typically end up releasing the gas with a burp, but according to NASA, carbonation and soda don’t separate in microgravity. Without gravity to push these bubbles out, after swallowing, they could become trapped in an astronaut’s digestive system and cause adverse health effects. 

[Related: There’s a lot we don’t know about the International Space Station’s ocean grave]

“In the microgravity environment, it could be a wet burp because the gas and the liquid don’t tend to separate automatically,” she says. “It will be a discomfort for sure.”

However, it’s difficult to pin down the exact health consequences of bubbly drinks because NASA hasn’t been able to safely conduct tests on astronauts to see how carbonation in microgravity could potentially harm the crew. 

Alcohol

After a long day or for celebratory occasions, astronauts can’t whip up a cocktail or pop a bottle of champagne. But alcohol isn’t just banned to ensure ISS crew members stay focused and alert. One of the main reasons libations are not allowed on board is because it could potentially damage the Environmental Control and Life Support System, or ECLSS.

One of ECLSS’ many responsibilities is to provide clean air and clean water to the station by recycling urine, cabin condensation, and other waste products. A key ingredient in alcohol is ethanol, a compound which could also become extremely volatile in space. Because the recycled water has strict purity standards, anything interfering with an astronaut’s natural digestive processes, including extra chemical contaminants like ethanol breathed out by crew, could put the entire life system in jeopardy. 

“That system is very sensitive to ethanol,” says Wu. “Therefore, if alcohol is being sent up [and consumed], that will evaporate and interfere with the system’s [ability] to regenerate air and water.”

But historically, while some astronauts certainly have no problem going without a drink for a few months, there have been some cases of crew members sneaking their own spirits aboard.

Correction (March 30, 2022): This story has been updated to correct a typo in the acronym for the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS).

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Future astronauts may be able to grow certain medicines in space, rather than pack those drugs, based on new research presented Tuesday.

A research group grew lettuce that produces a protein used to treat loss of bone density—a key health issue for astronauts living in microgravity for long periods.

“Plants have a number of advantages” over the other possible ways of making drugs offworld, says Kevin Yates, a chemical engineering PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis who presented the research at the American Chemical Society’s Spring 2022 meeting. His research is part of NASA’s Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES), which is all about using plants and microbes to make resources on the fly during space exploration.

Making these kinds of drugs on Earth is already complicated. Drug makers can chemically synthesize proteins, but the process is inefficient as well as complicated and expensive, Yates says–not plausible to do in space. For this reason, current mission plans call for astronauts to carry all the drugs they need. Several other proposals include using a bioreactor, a kind of tank where microbes consume nutrients and turn them into a desired product, to create useful proteins on a space station. But these reactors can require fine-tuned conditions, and they are much harder to maintain than the average garden plant. 

With a plant that’s been genetically modified to produce the desired drug, things are simpler. “You literally just grow the plant,” then harvest it, Yates says.

Similar projects could work with other plants, but Yates says lettuce is a good starting point because green-thumbed astronauts have already grown plenty of it in space, inside the International Space Station’s tiny garden. A meal of fresh lettuce can also benefit astronauts who are typically stuck eating dehydrated, pre-packaged food. 

Making supplies during a mission could cut costs and avoid radiation damage. The cost of sending along supplies for astronauts, especially on longer expeditions such as Mars missions, is enormous. On top of that, there’s the issue that “pharmaceuticals can degrade in space” due to radiation, Yates says.

A Mars mission would run roughly three years, including eight months of traveling each way to the planet. Even sending Martian supply drops ahead of time risks exposing supplies to years of damaging radiation, possibly preventing medicine from working. 

[Related: NASA has big plans for space farms]

Yates’s goal is to produce a protein to combat human bone loss using only lettuce. The protein, called parathyroid hormone, naturally occurs in humans. It’s used to stimulate bone growth to counteract the loss of bone mineral density—osteoporosis—here on Earth. A drug named Forteo, a synthetic look-alike of the parathyroid hormone, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat this disease. The lettuce produces a similar protein to Forteo, which is typically administered with injections.

Yates is growing different lines of the plants and selecting the ones that produce the most protein to maximize its yield. Based on the amount it produces now, the lettuce would have to be ground up and purified to administer enough of the drug. But it’s possible with future versions of the project “you may be able to simply eat the plant,” he says. The hormone has been genetically tailored to be easier for humans to absorb, but Yates still needs to make sure it’s completely safe before trying to feed it to people.

“I think it’s a brilliant concept,” says Susan Bloomfield, a physiologist at Texas A&M University who has studied the effects of microgravity on bone density and isn’t involved with the lettuce project. Getting an oral drug past an acidic stomach is “the key challenge for any medication,” Bloomfield says, and one that an edible approach will have to overcome. 

With more research, it’s possible that researchers will find an easier way to administer the hormone and still get its benefits, Yates says. 

Our bodies constantly deposit new bone matter to repair and build bones, while bone matter is also being reabsorbed back into our blood. But in space, microgravity disrupts this balance. Most middle-aged adults quickly lose bone density in microgravity, Bloomfield says. Although exercise, vitamin D supplements, and good nutrition slow this process significantly, she says, bone loss is inevitable no matter how much iron the astronauts pump daily. 

The parathyroid hormone helps bones rebuild faster, though it doesn’t directly prevent bone loss. Bone formation slows in microgravity, but the increased speed of bone loss is the bigger issue, Broomfield says, so future research will need to figure out how much parathyroid hormone can help during microgravity stints.

Yates says this technology wouldn’t just be useful in space. It could also lead to better, cheaper ways to produce drugs on Earth, especially in lower-resource areas. The company Medicago, for instance, is already growing COVID-19 vaccine material in plants.

The next steps for Yates’s research are to verify that this plant-grown protein “behaves the way we expect it to,” and to figure out whether it’s safe and effective in humans. Yates says he’s hopeful that researchers will get a chance to attempt to grow the plants in microgravity.

Bloomfield also says the team needs to “try an animal model that would eat the lettuce” to see how much of the protein can be absorbed that way. Maybe rabbits will be the first to sample this lettuce.

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After more than two decades of scientific service, the International Space Station (ISS) is expected to bid a final farewell. The research hub has allowed us to expand our understanding of Earth, the solar system, and beyond. More than two hundred astronauts have visited the station, while researchers have conducted thousands of experiments and studies—from tracing the origin of stars to understanding the impacts of space on the human body. This space laboratory has touched and transformed nearly every major scientific discipline.   

Earlier this year, NASA announced plans for the station’s eventual retirement in 2031, but it’s unlikely that the 450-ton lab will meet a quick demise. Once operations end, most dead satellites drift out of orbit and eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. 

However, most of the ISS will sink into Point Nemo, a remote area of the Pacific Ocean so far from land that many scientists refer to it as a “space cemetery,” after the number of spacecraft laid to rest in the watery grave. 

The isolated stretch of ocean is an ideal location for a spacecraft to crash without causing any potential harm to humans or destruction to cities, as NASA describes in the ISS’s transition plan. The name “nemo” is Latin for “no one” and just as the moniker implies, it’s uninhabited by humans. In fact, it’s the furthest point from any landmass on Earth. 

There’s hardly any life in the nutrient-poor waters—the lack of biological diversity is one of the reasons Point Nemo is used as a galactic dumping ground. At one time, Point Nemo offered a perfect blank canvas to study a deep underwater location completely untouched by the human environment, says Leila Hamdan, associate director of the school of ocean science and engineering at the University of Southern Mississippi. Hamdan studies deep sea biogeography—particularly, how shipwrecks change the biodiversity of the ocean floor. 

But large technology exposed to the elements of space presents a whole different set of unknown variables. With the clock ticking on the ISS’s impending watery doom, some are questioning how space exploration ultimately impacts marine life. 

“Before we even had the technology to go [to Point Nemo], and put deep submersibles in the ocean and collect samples from that location, we’ve already been putting the relics of space exploration there,” says Hamdan. 

According to Hamdan, it’s hard to know whether the long-term effects of throwing satellites into the ocean has a positive or negative impact on marine wildlife and local ecology. But shipwrecks might offer some clues, she says. 

When a ship runs aground, the microbes surrounding the wreck tend to be more diverse and play an important part in keeping the environment healthy. However, unlike vessels that sail across the sea, these structures orbiting Earth have traveled through space. The ISS, for instance, contains decades of experimental equipment, materials, and even traces of altered human DNA. It’s uncertain what kind of long-term effects the crafts—and what they carry—will have on Earth’s seabed.

“That’s going to be a really large human structure with a lot of human materials in it, that is now sitting on the seafloor,” She says. “It would be naive to think that that’s not going to change the ecology that’s present.”

[Related: This meteor-tracking system could prevent a falling-rocket debris disaster]

Space junk is just one type of marine debris that contributes to the increasing widespread pollution of Earth’s oceans. According to the Office of Coastal Management, more than 800 marine species have been injured, become ill, or died due to consumer plastics, metal, rubber, paper, and other debris. While the ISS is larger than most trash in the ocean, other experts are less worried about its immense size in comparison to other sunken junk. 

“If you look at the volume of the International Space Station, it’s nothing compared to an ocean tanker,” says Cameron Ainsworth, an associate professor of physical oceanography at University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science. An average 700-foot-long tanker easily surpasses the ISS’s end-to-end length of 356 feet, making the station equivalent to “a few tons of aluminum crashing down into the ocean, which is going to be no more impactful than a ship sinking.”

But as Earth’s orbit becomes increasingly cluttered with more space junk crowding, those few hundred pounds of debris per craft will eventually add up. 

“The ocean isn’t a limitless repository, for all of our space junk,” says Erik Cordes, a professor and vice chair of biology at Temple University. Cordes, who was one of many experts called in to help after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, knows all too well the damage human activities can have on marine life. 

Although he understands the appeal in landing decommissioned spacecraft as far from people as possible, Cordes says that there are a lot of “unpredictable” consequences to dropping tons of scientific equipment in an area that scientists historically don’t know enough about. 

“People generally think of the deep sea as this big, muddy, barren desert, and that’s really not the case,” he says. “The more exploration we do, the more really amazing habitats and ecosystems and animals we start to discover on the ocean floor.”

[Related: The ocean is a giant dump for chemical weapons. Can we clean it up before it’s too late?]

Marine scientists often have to resort to making guesses about what’s lurking at the bottom of the ocean, Cordes says. But until they have real data, like high-resolution maps and images to scan the deepest parts of the seafloor, more work is needed before it becomes possible to predict what, if any, long-term impact dropping satellites into Earth’s oceans really has. 

NASA states in the ISS decommissioning debrief that impacts to marine life are likely to be minimal: “During descent through the Earth’s atmosphere, the space station would burn, break up, and vaporize into fragments of various sizes. Some fragments of station [sic] would likely survive the thermal stresses of re-entry and fall to Earth. Environmental impacts of these debris pieces within the anticipated impact area would be expected to be small.” 

When PopSci reached out to NASA and other government agencies for comment, they said that there are no official efforts to track space debris after it falls into the ocean. There is still time to explore other avenues or set up marine habitat monitoring before the ISS begins its decommission plans in 2030. NASA writes in the transition plan that it will continue “to investigate alternate footprint targets and ground paths for station disposal to minimize risk the to [sic] Earth’s population.” But until scientists know more, it’s a waiting game.

“I think with all the money that we spend to put this stuff up there,” Cordes says, “we should be spending a little bit of money finding out what happens when it comes back down.”

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The new movie Moonfall is exactly what it sounds like: It’s about the moon mysteriously yeet-ing itself out of orbit and causing absolute calamity on Earth. It’s the kind of big-budget action film that asks a lot of silly questions. What if our atmosphere suddenly lost its integrity and started spilling oxygen out into space like a leaky air mattress? What if the moon were a hollow piece of alien technology? Could the US government stop an impending cosmic disaster by firing a nuke at it? 

But Moonfall also asks a question that real-life astronauts and flight surgeons have to face every single day: What happens if you get diarrhea in space?

Okay, so the movie doesn’t actually feature any instances of extraterrestrial gastrointestinal distress. But it does involve a conspiracy-theorist-turned-amateur-astronaut with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) who finds himself launched into space with nary a bathroom break beforehand.

Mika McKinnon, a geophysicist and disaster researcher who served as the film’s scientific advisor, is pleased to report that topsy turvy tummies are perfectly welcome on the International Space Station (ISS). “IBS would not be an eliminating factor if you’re an astronaut candidate,” she says. 

NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid, who takes care of astronaut health both on the ground and while they’re in orbit, confirms that the space program is prepared to handle a whole array of poop problems. 

“There are a lot of folks who have issues,” he says. “One thing I remember from my medical training is that the only ‘normal’ person just hasn’t been evaluated enough.” In most cases, he says, he and other members of the medical team simply endeavor to give the astronaut candidate the medical care they need to take care of the problem. 

In fact, even the healthiest astronauts might find themselves as focused on their bowel movements as most IBS sufferers are on the ground. The ISS generally houses six or seven international crew members at a time (though it’s packed in as many as 13), and they all share just one or two suction-powered toilets. 

“Hygiene time” is rigidly scheduled—just like everything an astronaut does—to avoid pile-ups, which can reasonably stress some newcomers out. And some astronauts say that despite the strange effects that zero gravity may have on the fluids (and solids) sloshing around inside, the urge to go to the bathroom still hits them just as it would on the ground. Schmid explains that astronauts are welcome to squeeze in necessary bathroom breaks by finishing up various tasks a little early—no one actually expects them to poop on a perfect schedule. And in their first few days in orbit, their daily tasks are limited, so they have the freedom to settle in and poop at will (their half-a-dozen shipmates’ schedules notwithstanding). 

“One of the things I ask them each day when they get to orbit is, ‘how are you eating?’ And the next thing I ask them is, ‘how is the bathroom function going?’ Because I know that once there’s no constipation, they’re really settled in and doing well,” Schmid says. 

Just like any stressful situation, a trip to the stars can cause gut upheaval in either direction. But stagnation is actually more common than diarrhea, perhaps because microgravity puts the gastrointestinal tract in an odd position. Dehydration, which can increase constipation, is also a frequent issue during the first few days on the ISS. Astronauts know that the position they sit in for launches—with their feet at the same level as their hearts—causes fluids to pool and makes them need to urinate, which is something they often try to avoid by drinking less. You can’t blame them for wanting to stay dry: On the Soyuz launch vehicles, astronauts have to pee into ultra-absorbent garments and fitted condoms. 

During launches, the best way to poop is with the help of what basically amounts to a triple-layer plastic bag on a bucket. (Things were even more dire on Apollo missions, where crew members had to stick plastic bags directly to their butts and use manual pressure to make dangling turds fall inside, leading to at least one infamous floater incident). To this day, astronauts are given the option of getting an enema before they take off, just to lessen the possibility of an urgent bowel movement while they’re en route. 

[Related: A brief history of menstruating in space]

So, even if you’re plagued by frequent and uncomfortable poops, you can always choose to start your space flight with an empty gut to mitigate the need for pit stops. And once you’re in orbit, you’ll be in good company as you make your awkward adjustment to the new facilities. The whole ISS crew is on a monitored diet and hydration schedule, intended, in part, to keep them regular, and everyone gets plenty of guidance on how to … go. “All astronauts are getting toilet training,” Schmid says with a laugh. Voiding into the station’s toilets, which gently suck your solids into little baggies for collection and periodic disposal, takes some getting used to. 

(Side note: As both Schmid and McKinnon went out of their way to explain, astronauts can’t just dump the dried poo out of an airlock, because it would most likely cluster close to the spacecraft and stick to its surfaces. Instead, it gets sent down on used cargo vessels, which have enough heft to get into the atmosphere and burn up “like shooting stars.” NASA is, as ever, open to better solutions.)

In some instances, it can even be simpler to handle an astronaut with a known gastric issue. That means Schmid has months or even years to figure out how best to manage their symptoms. “I can send them up with their fiber supplement of choice, or specific prescriptions,” he says, “and I’ve got medications we keep on board that I can recommend based on how they’re feeling. I do a lot of trying to read the tea leaves.” 

Meanwhile, even the healthiest individuals can feel thrown for a loop once they head into orbit. Schmid has seen seasoned pilots with stomachs of steel deal with agonizing nausea during their first few days of flight. “I can’t just order a prescription for someone and tell them to send it on up,” he says with a laugh. “So I have to hope I’ve got what everyone needs.” 

According to a risk report published by NASA’s Human Research Project in 2016, “several events of diarrhea attributed to multiple causes have been reported in space flight.” Figuring out how to contain soft stools so they don’t put other astronauts at risk—as well as how to deal with the dehydration and electrolyte imbalance that often come with extended periods of diarrhea—is considered a high priority before future lunar and near-Earth asteroid missions. The agency floats highly absorbent garments as one possible solution, which makes a trip to the moon sound ever-so-slightly less thrilling. 

Moonfall features only a short flight to the falling moon in question—the IBS-afflicted astronaut onscreen would definitely be stuck with one of those plastic bag getups—but McKinnon hopes the joke will inspire viewers to look into the fascinating and funny history of space toilets. 

“When you’re doing science consulting, just throwing out a whole bunch of ideas and cool things to the writers, you never really know what’s going to stick,” she says. “It brings me such unbelievable joy and happiness that we had this nice little reference to pooping in space.” 

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Scientists have long known that life in space places a physical toll on an astronaut’s body. As humankind continues to plan longer and more distant missions beyond Earth, understanding how space impacts health is imperative to both safe and successful journeys.  

Since early crewed missions, astronauts returned from space with anemia—a condition in which the body lacks enough red blood cells to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues. Anemia is just one of the health issues observed in astronauts. Health experts were stumped on how this happens, but a new study in Nature, funded by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), reveals the mechanisms that contribute to this potentially harmful condition. 

Of the more than 35 trillion red blood cells in a healthy adult human body, at least 2 million are created and hemolyzed—or destroyed—every second. But in space, about 3 million red blood cells are being destroyed every second, causing astronauts to lose about 54 percent more blood cells than they would on Earth. 

When astronauts come back to Earth, they’re treated like a person coming back from an injury, says lead author Guy Trudel, a rehabilitation physician and researcher at the Ottawa Hospital and professor at the University of Ottawa. “We want to know how fast they recover, and how full the recovery is.” 

[Related: Astronauts lose weight in space, and it might be because their food is literally floating around inside them]

It was previously thought that this anemia was only temporary, signaled by a 10 to 12 percent decrease in red blood cell count during an astronaut’s first 10 days in space when the body’s fluids shifted to adjust. 

But Trudel’s study reveals that this process doesn’t stop in space, but that the anemia actually continues for the next six months. 

Trudel and his team first demonstrated the cause of space anemia, but created methods that differed from previous studies, which analyzed blood samples and radioactive injections. Instead, his team analyzed both breath and blood samples. “Just taking blood is not enough to know about destruction, and that’s why this knowledge was hidden for so long,” he says. 

Between 2015 and 2020, the samples were collected from 14 astronauts (11 men and 3 women) before they left Earth, during their stay on the International Space Station (ISS), and once again when they returned. Trudel’s team measured the concentration of carbon monoxide molecules left behind in the astronaut’s breath when the blood degraded—a sign that, if high, indicates an increase in red blood cell destruction in the body. They found that this destruction, or hemolysis, was a “primary effect” of microgravity, which indicates that the anemia is caused by the astronaut’s environment. 

Although the specimens were collected from astronauts on six month missions, the researchers reasoned that longer space missions could cause more severe anemia. 

Nearly 25 percent of the population already has some form of anemia, according to the World Health Organization. This latest discovery could be used to enforce stricter health requirements for astronauts assigned on longer crewed missions, and individuals interested in signing up for space tourism.

Their findings are some of the first to come out of MARROW, a CSA-led investigation looking into the effects of microgravity on bone marrow—a type of tissue that contains stem cells, which help with red blood cell production. 

Dorit Donoviel, director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at Baylor College of Medicine, says that studying diseases in space can be challenging, but is a fascinating way to study our own physiology.

Because Earthbound research studies on human health are often focused on disease, rather than baseline conditions, space has become a prime location for medical research. “And so the astronauts are healthy, normal people that are put into an extreme environment that really changes things in their bodies,” says Donoviel, who was not involved in the study. 

One of the reasons the recent anemia study is so interesting, Donoviel says, is because it helps space experts understand what is “healthy and normal for an individual,” especially as humans continue to venture to places with harsh environments, like the moon and Mars.

However, Donoviel is skeptical of one aspect of the study: According to Trudel’s research, after leaving the ISS astronauts continued to experience anemia even up to a full year later, meaning that their red blood cell count never returned to pre-flight levels. “I would be more convinced if they had more than one baseline measurement for these people,” she says. 

Donoviel says more research needs to be done to validate the finding before completely concluding that space has long-term effects on blood. But along with more tests, one thing many experts are looking forward to is developing countermeasures that could help the overall health of future astronauts, and prevent or treat blood-related illnesses.  

But before that can happen, Donoviel says she’d like to see the ISS install a laboratory capable of doing more in-depth analyses. 

“We’ve been up there for 20 years, we even have the National Lab, and all the samples have to come back to Earth,” she says. “If we had the capability of studying complete blood counts in orbit, and it was easy to do, we probably would have had this finding a long, long time ago.” 

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Last week, NASA announced that the Biden-Harris Administration intends to extend International Space Station (ISS) operations through 2030, extending the US’s previous funding deadline by a few years.

“As more and more nations are active in space, it’s more important than ever that the United States continues to lead the world in growing international alliances and modeling rules and norms for the peaceful and responsible use of space,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a NASA statement Friday. 

Funding for the ISS was previously set to expire in 2024, as per an act of Congress in 2014. But NASA anticipates that it will officially fund the ISS through 2030, says Robyn Gatens, director of the ISS for space operations.

The extension was unsurprising to Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor of strategy and security studies at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. “I think the plan has always been sort of to extend it,” she says. “Obviously, NASA funding is always sort of this political battle of sorts, and so Congress has only been willing to fund it out a certain number of years.”

The International Space Station’s mission: a history

The first parts of the ISS were launched into orbit in 1998, and it was constructed in lower-Earth orbit over the years, piece by piece, like an outer space Lego set. The 356-foot-long lab has hosted more than 3,000 research investigations over the past 24 years; studies include how to grow peas in space and how space travel affects itty-bitty baby squid.

As a collaboration between five space agencies and 15 countries, the ISS has been continuously manned since November 2000. It’s been a “great symbol of international cooperation amongst countries even when countries disagree with one another,” Whitman Cobb says. Even Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, has been a significant contributor.

According to Gatens, the purpose of the ISS has greatly evolved over that timespan. 

“The first decade, we were really just assembling the space station … The second decade, we really started using the platform and expanding what we could do with it,” Gatens says. “Now that we’ve entered the third decade … we can really return a lot of value from this platform. So we’re calling it kind of the decade of results.”

The ISS extension to 2030 is vital to NASA’s plans to return to the moon with the Artemis mission in 2025 and to launch a manned mission to Mars further in the future. “It provides the perfect testbed and platform for technologies such as life support systems that will be required for long-duration missions,” Gatens says. “We need a long time to test these systems so that we can count on them and know they’re going to be reliable.” She also notes that the 2030 extension is necessary to continue researching the possible human health risks of extensive space travel and ways to counteract them. 

[Related: Alexa will tag along on an uncrewed mission to the moon]

The other important reason to keep the ISS afloat is to make sure there’s a continuous presence in low-Earth orbit (LEO) until commercial space stations can take over. In December, NASA funded three Space Act Agreements with Nanoracks LLC, Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. and Blue Origin (run by former Amazon CEO and space cowboy Jeff Bezos, who ironically sued NASA back in August) to build private space stations.

NASA seeks to avoid a gap in the US’s presence in LEO, especially with China planning to launch its own Tiangong space station by the end of 2022.

“We can’t allow the perception that we will cede our 20-plus years of humans working in LEO to others,” Jeffrey Manber, Nanoracks ​​Chairman of the Board, said in a House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing last September.

“It became clear to us that it was going to take a little bit more time than the mid-2020s for us to enable a smooth transition and not have a gap,” Gatens says.

According to Gatens, NASA predicts there will be operational, commercial space stations by 2028, leaving a two-year overlap with the ISS. 

A microgravity lab built to last

But the question remains, can the ISS hold itself together until 2030? The station is already starting to show cracks in its surface and is vulnerable to space debris such as Russian satellites blown to smithereens. However, both NASA and Boeing, the primary contractor of the ISS, are confident in the viability of its infrastructure. 

“The International Space Station has shown in our assessment to be in terrific condition and is in great shape through 2030 and well beyond,” John Mulholland, Boeing vice president and program manager of the International Space Station program, writes in an email. 

Gatens echoes that, saying that NASA’s analysis showed “no red flags” but that, as always, they would continue to monitor the health of the station. 

But the biggest challenge to the ISS might not come from outer space after all. “I think the immediate problem is actually going to be getting Russia to join in with this, particularly given the other international geopolitical circumstances that we find ourselves confronting with them,” Whitman Cobb says. 

According to Gatens, every ISS space agency partner has to go through the same process with their own government to extend funding for the lab. However, she adds that “at the space agency level, [Russia is] committed to do the extension.”

The fate of the ISS after 2030

Even with all the space agencies on board, it seems that the ISS will finally meet its maker in 2030. Gatens says that the only reason she could see the station being used past this next decade would be because commercial space stations weren’t operational yet.

“​​I think this is probably the last leg,” Whitman Cobb says, noting that by 2030 it would have been almost 40 years since some of the technology was designed. “Space is a very harsh environment in terms of radiation, debris, and the difficulty of operating there, so I don’t think there’s much appetite to go beyond 2030.” 

Once all the partnering space agencies are ready to cease ISS operations, there’s still the matter of deorbiting the 925,335-pound hunk of metal, which is roughly the size of a football field.

“This is a large piece of machinery. You need to make sure that it comes down over unpopulated waters so that you’re not hurting and dangering or damaging anybody or any property,” Whitman Cobb says. “I think that will be the ultimate challenge.”

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Earth was perfectly aligned with the moon and sun on Saturday, December 4, creating the only total solar eclipse of 2021 and plunging Antarctica into darkness.

Although the eclipse was partially visible from parts of Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and South Africa, only a few lucky observers saw the full total eclipse from the ground in Antarctica. A few non-Earthbound onlookers also witnessed the eclipse—seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station huddled into the Cupola, the panoramic dome attached to the station, to enjoy the phenomenon. 

“Saturday morning, the Expedition 66 crew squeezed into the Cupola to check out the total solar eclipse that occurred over Antarctica and the Southern Ocean,” tweeted NASA astronaut Kayla Barron, sharing two photos of the spacefarers’ view. “Here the moon casts an oblong shadow on the Earth’s surface. It was an incredible sight to behold.”

Total solar eclipses happen somewhere on Earth approximately once every 18 months on average, but some specific places go centuries between eclipses. The last total solar eclipse to happen over Antarctica was on November 23, 2003, and the next one won’t occur until April 20, 2039.

[Related: One weird thing about eclipses you’ve probably never noticed]

This specific solar eclipse was extra special because it occurred during Antarctic summer. In an Antarctic summer, the region is bathed in light around the clock—the sun never sets—in a phenomenon called midnight sun. The juxtaposition of perpetual light, a few minutes of complete darkness, then back to perpetual light must have made this an event to behold. 

The last total solar eclipse in the United States stunned sky gazers from Oregon to South Carolina in 2017. 2022 will be completely without any solar eclipses, partial or total. The next partial eclipse will occur on April 20, 2023 and will be visible from Southeast Asia, Australia, and Antarctica. The next total solar eclipse in the United States will be visible from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024.

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Early in the morning of November 15, Moscow time, a Russian missile blasted a Russian satellite to smithereens. The destroyed satellite, Kosmos-1408, had been in orbit for nearly four decades. With at least 1,500 trackable pieces, and countless more too small for detection, the remains of Kosmos-1408 pose a threat to other objects in orbit. The destruction itself caused astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station to shelter in space. It also risked harm to China’s taikonauts aboard the Tiangong space station.

“Earlier today, due to the debris generated by the destructive Russian Anti-Satellite (ASAT) test, ISS astronauts and cosmonauts undertook emergency procedures for safety,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement on Monday.

Because the ISS orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, it repeatedly passes through or near the debris cloud, with the shelter-in-place order in effect for the second and third passes near the debris.

The destruction of Kosmos-1408, along with the creation of a debris field, showcased a kind of Earth-launched anti-satellite weapon. The quantity of debris, combined with the altitude at which it was destroyed, risks harm to all satellites and space stations for the conceivable future. 

Here is what we know of the incident.

What was destroyed?

Kosmos-1408 was a Soviet satellite, put into orbit in 1982 and used to listen for radio signals on the Earth below. This is part of the more mundane work of surveillance satellites, which were one of the major ways nations used objects in orbit for military ends. Long before there was a Space Force, the militaries capable of satellite launches used them to keep track of the world below.

With a mass of about 4,400 lbs, the Kosmos-1408 was large enough to create a field of debris when destroyed.

How was Kosmos-1408 destroyed?

Anti-satellite missiles, or ASATs, are one of the most straightforward ways for a nation to destroy an object in orbit. This one appears to have been an A-235 / PL-19 Nudol ASAT system, launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome some 500 miles north of Moscow and about 400 miles northeast of Saint Petersburg. Russia had tested the Nubol missile at least 10 times before, but this marks the first time it was used against a satellite.

With this destruction, Russia joins China, the United States, and India as nations that have all successfully destroyed their own satellites as tests and demonstrations of their own ground-launched missiles. It is a dubious distinction. The physics of satellite destruction invariably means the creation of debris, and that debris in turn risks damage to all other objects it encounters. Every nation that has destroyed an object in orbit has at least some investment in satellites, and every debris cloud threatens their continued viability.

Why is space debris such a big problem?

Orbit is fundamentally a relationship between an object in motion and the Earth, and objects in orbit are always falling. Satellites can stay in space for decades with modest to no adjustments if they are placed in good trajectories at the start. In orbit, satellites are perpetually falling in such a way that gravity keeps them in motion until, eventually, the orbit degrades and they reenter the atmosphere.

Debris follows this same basic logic. As time passes, the shattered parts of a former satellite will drift, falling into a new relationship with the Earth. Some of those pieces will drift low, where they will reenter the atmosphere and most likely burn up. The majority of debris will fall into some sort of regular orbit, as the cloud becomes more diffuse. 

We know this pattern, because it has been observed before. Analysis of a Chinese satellite’s destruction in 2007 shows how the debris of this test is likely to spread and persist.

“Within minutes after the collision, the debris cloud started to spread around the satellite’s original orbit,” wrote Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation in 2007. “Ten days after the ASAT test, the debris had spread throughout the entire orbit, resulting in a “ring” of debris around the Earth. Three years after the test, the debris has spread out even more, effectively covering much of [Low Earth Orbit].”

The threshold for trackable debris is an object about 2 inches in diameter, and smaller debris, which travels just as fast, is harder for sensors to pick up. All debris poses some risk to satellites and astronauts in orbit. Space debris in low earth orbit travels at 17,500 mph, and NASA found that even paint flecks at that speed caused damage to the windows of the Space Shuttle. 

Fast-moving small particles are the equivalent of shotgun blasts to delicate systems, and large debris can tear chunks off of vulnerable structures like shielding or solar panels. Compounding matters is that risk calculation is probability math, and any error is likely magnified if the math is wrong. 

Can we clean up space debris?

Nations are still figuring this out. In 2019, the European Space Agency commissioned a debris-cleaning mission with a planned launch by 2025, with a goal of actively removing large items from orbit. In 2018, the RemoveDEBRIS mission tested a harpoon for hooking large pieces of debris while in orbit, among other techniques. And in March 2021, a Japanese-built and UK-run test of a cleaning system called ELSA-d reached orbit. 

These efforts all show a vested interest in cleaning orbit, which makes sense. In 2021, the Satellite Industry Association estimated the value of the global space economy at $371 billion. Debris threatens all of that, to say nothing of the risk it poses to military satellites.

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From their perch, astronauts on the International Space Station have a special vantage of the Earth. Sometimes that view reveals things impossible to observe from the ground. 

In late September, astronauts Thomas Pesquet and Andreas Mogensen spotted a glowing blue light over Europe from up in the ISS. They recorded a timelapse and posted a frame of it on Flickr. Pesquet’s caption calls the light a “thunder strike with a ‘transient luminous event’ in the upper atmosphere,” and says this rare occurrence will be further observed by a facility outside Europe’s Columbus laboratory near Munich, Germany. 

Spectacular light events in the upper atmosphere are of increasing interest, and astronauts and astronomers have gotten creative naming them. While this particular luminous event hasn’t been named, other  unique variations on storms include blue jets, red sprites, and elves. Blue jets are lightning bolts that zap upwards from thunderstorms into the stratosphere. Red SPRITEs (Stratospheric/mesospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification) are brief, soft flashes of color that emanate above an active thunderstorm. The glow can  appear in a variety of colors but are usually red and often resemble jellyfish, carrots, or columns. ELVES (Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources) are disk-shaped bursts of light that last just a thousandth of a second. Other fantastically named light phenomena include trolls, gnomes, and pixies.

[Related: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is whirling faster than ever.]

In his caption, Pesquet adds that “just a few decades ago [this lightning] had been observed anecdotally by pilots and scientists [who] were not convinced they actually existed. Fast forward a few years and we can confirm elves, and sprites are very real and could be influencing our climate too!” 

Now that scientists have empirically proven the existence of these strange but brilliant atmospheric light shows, the next steps are to study and understand the phenomena—a difficult task since they’re nearly impossible to see from Earth. Analysis like this relies on data captured from the International Space Station. One such research paper published in Nature early in 2021 documented the electromagnetic waves emitted while the lights flashed. 

These new discoveries in the atmosphere are impressive, Astrid Orr, The European Space Agency’s Physical Sciences Coordinator for human and robotic spaceflight, said in a statement, and “shows that we still have so much to discover and learn about our Universe.”

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New cracks have been found by Russian cosmonauts in a part of the International Space Station (ISS), Reuters reported on Monday. 

Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer of rocket and space corporation Energia, told RIA news agency that the “superficial fissures” were spotted on the Zarya module, but did not elaborate on whether the cracks could lead to any air leaks.

This incident is only the latest minor mishap to befall the ISS. In March, Space.com reported that Russian cosmonauts had sealed cracks in the Zveda module that had caused tiny air leaks, following an investigation by Russian space agency Roscosmos and NASA. Then, in July, a software glitch caused the station to be momentarily thrown off-course. 

The ISS has housed otherworldly research projects for over 20 years. Some of the more peculiar research guests that it has been home to include “The Blob,” tiny squids, and tardigrades. 

The station, first launched in 1998, was originally facing a 2024 retirement. Retiring, of course, would involve a long process of decommissioning and deorbiting parts of the ISS to a spacecraft graveyard at the bottom of the sea. But at the end of 2020, the Senate passed a NASA authorization bill that would extend its retirement date to 2030, The Washington Post reported. 

Yet, one thing is clear: The infrastructure on the ISS is aging and becoming more likely to fail, and its upkeep could become increasingly expensive. (An estimated $3-4 billion a year is currently needed to keep it in orbit.) 

Based on a 2018 report from the office of the NASA inspector general, the plan for the future of the ISS is to “transition responsibility for its operations” to private and commercial companies such as Orbital ATK, SpaceX, and Boeing over the next decade. NASA only has guaranteed federal support to sustain ISS operations through fall 2024. 

“ISS is an amazing system, but unfortunately it won’t last forever; it could experience an unrecoverable anomaly at any time,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA, told the Houston Chronicle in March. “The way we see the transition [from ISS] is, we’re not going to just turn off the lights one day…We’re going to have an overlap period where we draw down the operations of ISS as we increase operations for [commercial low Earth orbit] destinations.”

That timing isn’t ideal, however, as many private space companies have been squeezed by the COVID pandemic, and several are now facing a shortage in liquid oxygen (which rockets need to blast into orbit). 

[Related: Jeff Bezos is suing NASA. Here’s why.] 

As they inch closer to the handoff date, NASA announced in July that it would extend a contract to 15 companies across the US to provide spaceflight hardware, software, and mission-based services to the ISS as part of the long-term effort to commercialize low-Earth orbit.

In the meantime, NASA will continue to collaborate with international partners from Russia, the European Space Agency, Canada, and Japan to maintain its systems, and patch problems as they come up. 

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Aside from its monumental rocket landing attempt, last week’s SpaceX launch made headlines for another reason: It jettisoned an espresso machine into space for the first time ever. Called the ISSpresso, the coffee maker is about the size of a microwave, and all it needs is a pouch of water and a capsule of espresso to make a great pick-me-up for sleepy astronauts.

While space-faring coffee machines may make for interesting cargo, the Falcon 9’s Dragon capsule also held other precious freight. Embedded within the capsule, five experiments–ranging from musculoskeletal and neurological research on rodents to synthetic muscles–made their way to the International Space Station. The sponsors of this research? Private companies including Novartis, Merck, and Ras Labs.

The station’s primary function is to serve as a research laboratory. Its sterile microgravity environment, surrounded by the harshness of space, makes it a unique place for testing the behavior of various materials and textiles, as well as experimenting with the growth of biological tissues and crystals. NASA has conducted a significant amount of research on the station, but now the space agency is beginning to understand how the ISS could help the private sector as well.

CASIS wants to spread the word to private companies across the globe: the ISS is at your disposal.

That’s where CASIS comes in. Short for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, CASIS manages research conducted in the U.S. National Laboratory on the ISS. In order to get the maximum utility out of the orbital laboratory, CASIS wants to spread the word to private companies across the globe: the ISS is at your disposal.

“We’re working with large pharma, biotech, and material tech companies, as well as small innovative startups,” Cindy Bouthot, CASIS director of business development, tells Popular Science. This most recent payload aboard the Falcon 9 included the fifth series of payloads sponsored by CASIS.

From a research and development perspective, the ISS holds a number of unique properties and variables you can’t recreate easily for experimentation on Earth. For one, its microgravity environment can accelerate the onset of disease, making it attractive for companies hoping to understand the aging process.

“Any living organism in a microgravity environment is in a very different environment than what they’ve experienced in their evolution,” says Michael Roberts, CASIS senior research manager. “When you remove that gravity vector, you uncover gene expression and protein expression that help us to understand various pathways in the body, which are similar to pathways that cause disease on Earth.”

Research Launches To Space

An equally appealing component of the station environment is also reduced sedimentation. On Earth, gravitational forces cause particles in a fluid to settle. This can muck up experiments that involve things like protein crystal formation, as the particles within the crystals aren’t evenly distributed.

That’s something Merck hopes to bypass, by crystalizing two types of human monoclonal antibodies on the space station. (Monoclonal antibodies are important medical tools, often used to target cancer cells and treat autoimmune diseases.) The company hopes that by learning how to grow these crystals in microgravity, they can develop the best crystal structures to improve drug delivery.

“On the station, you’ll have reduced sedimentation, reduced molecular diffusion as well as reduced convection currents,” says Paul Reichert, research fellow at Merck. “All this adds up to larger crystals which are more pure and have more uniform particle size distribution. In the short term, we want to see what benefits we get from this, and see if we can mimic those conditions with Earth processes.”

And of course, there is the severity of space right next door. Material companies hoping to put their products through the ringer can introduce them to the vacuum of space in low Earth orbit, which experiences a wide range of temperatures over the course of a few hours. Bouthot mentioned an undisclosed car company that is proving its engine can withstand the harsh space environment.

“We’re really offering this compelling science platform and we show them that it is worth putting their own skin in the game.”

While conducting research and development on the space station may seem attractive to companies, there’s still the cost to consider. Bouthot says CASIS offers a good return on investment, but sending an experiment into space is still not cheap.

“With this entire infrastructure that’s been created, we’re not charging them for the launch vehicle or the astronaut being their lab tech,” says Bouthot. “Obviously there are internal development costs, their own resources, all of those types of efforts associated with the project have a cost. That can range anywhere from $50,000 and beyond, and they may use CASIS grant money to help defray that cost, or we may ask the customer to pay for that.”

Unfortunately, CASIS doesn’t have much money to give. With a budget of $15 million a year, the non-profit sometimes has to get creative to convince companies that they should send their lab work to space. Otherwise, the station’s resources are at risk of underutilization.

“When we talk with companies, we do lead with the science,” says Buothot. “We’re really offering this compelling science platform and we show them that it is worth putting their own skin in the game.”

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First American Spacewalk

One Small Step

Why Spacewalk When You Can Drive?

USA! USA!

Super Scooper

You Go, Girl

Unleashed

Rescue Mission

ISS Assembly

Construction Continues

Fixing Hubble

Future: Asteroids

Future: Mars

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“To travel in space is to be awestruck, over and over and over.”–Don Pettit, Spaceborne.

Don Pettit and his crewmates flew into space three times, capturing about 600,000 photos from their shuttle missions and long-term stays on the International Space Station. In his new book, Spaceborne, the astronaut/photographer highlights some of the best of the collection, leading to page after page of mind-blowingly beautiful space imagery. This is a good one for the coffee table.

Popular Science‘s photo director, Thom Payne, chose 10 of his favorite Spaceborne images. Here are his picks, with captions excerpted from the book.

Infrared

The Bosphorus Strait, Turkey

Blue marble

Sunshine on the International Space Station

Betisboka River delta in Madagascar

Aurora

Space station over aurorae

Solar panels in front of the terminator

Adapted from Spaceborne, by Don Pettit. Published by PSG.

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The Final ISS

The International Space Station (ISS) is one of the most complex structures ever built and serves as an orbiting laboratory for astronauts from all over the world, but it didn’t happen over night. Construction of the ISS started way back in 1998 when its first module entered orbit. Since then, it’s expanded quite a lot while providing researchers with extremely valuable data about life in space, which is vital if we ever plan on leaving Earth. So with a new inflatable piece just added to the structure, let’s take a look back at how the ISS got to this point.

ISS Assembly Mission 1 A/R

ISS Assembly Mission 2A

ISS Assembly Mission 1R

ISS Assembly Mission 3A

ISS Assembly Mission 4A

ISS Assembly Mission 5A

ISS Assembly Mission 6A

ISS Assembly Mission 7A

ISS Assembly Mission 8A

ISS Assembly Mission 9A

ISS Assembly Mission 12A

ISS Assembly Mission 13A

ISS Assembly Mission 10A

ISS Assembly Mission ULF2

ISS Assembly Mission 19A

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Red Epic Dragon 6K

What does a Hollywood legend like James Cameron have in common with a bunch of scientists on the International Space Station? They all use Red cameras to capture otherworldly landscapes.

Ever since Jim Jannard created the Red One, the company’s first 4K cinema camera, in 2007, it has become a go-to shooter for serious filmmakers. Up until then, HD cameras couldn’t match the resolution, dynamic range, and color of film. But the Red One could, and at a price of $17,500, it could do it for far less than the $200,000 HD units from Sony, Arri, and Panavision.

Red cameras were used to film a multi­plex of blockbusters, like Spider-Man and The Hobbit. In 2010, it became even better with a 5K sensor— the Mysterium-X—which was sold as an upgrade. Modularity became another selling point. The company added lenses, microphones, and tactical grips. NASA currently uses the Epic Dragon 6k on the international space station; high resolution and fast frame rates capture more detail when filming experiments. Since, Red has rolled out the Weapon Dragon 6K camera, which captures more than nine times the pixels of standard HD.

Today Jannard is betting Red can outperform itself again. The company recently introduced an 8K-sensor upgrade to the Weapon Dragon, which will enable wider angles, truer colors, and easier editing. Through a process called “down­sampling,” filmmakers can take an image captured at a higher resolution than monitors are even capable of displaying, and rescale it to fit lower-resolution screens—leaving cleaner, less-distorted video. Don’t be surprised if your favorite science-fiction movie of next year is shot with Red.

Specs

6K Sensor

19 megapixels

8K Sensor Upgrade

35 megapixels

Frame Rate

100 fps @ 6K

Frame Rate on Upgrade

60 fps @ 8K capture

Monitor Output

HD-SDI and HDMI

Weight

About 3.3 lb. (brain only)

Price

Starts at $20,000

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title “A Camera That Shoots For The Stars.”

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Storage is hard to come by aboard the International Space Station. Even if a rocket had room to ferry thousands of pounds of water and oxygen to supply a six-month mission, you’d struggle to find anywhere to stash it. So engineers have devised creative ways to squeeze essentials from astronauts’ sweat, urine, and breath. But we’re not at total recovery yet. Right now, the ISS recycles 90 percent of its water—or more than 1,000 gallons annually—and 40 percent of the oxygen astronauts breathe. The rest comes up on resupply missions. This diagram shows how NASA gets so close to a self-­sustaining space home.

1. Astronaut

An Earth-bound human uses about 80 gallons of water each day, but an ISS resident stretches just one for drinking, showering, and hydrating food. Astronauts’ bodies produce plenty of sweat droplets and ­carbon dioxide, both of which get sucked into vents, destined for recycling.

2. Urine recovery system (toilet)

When astronauts go number one, a slight vacuum in the toilet pulls urine into a low-​­pressure chamber, which forces the water to evaporate. This results in a salty brine, which resupply vehicles later jettison to burn up in the atmosphere, and water vapor, which heads off for decontamination.

3. Oxygen generating system

H₂O can perform double-duty if its atomic components separate. Behind the walls of the U.S. lab, an electrified membrane splits the molecules. Oxygen pumps into the cabin while hydrogen heads to a specialized reactor, a Sabatier, to become water again.

4. Sabatier reactor

Inside this machine, a blast of roughly 750°F heat breaks the bonds inside CO₂, forcing it into its constituent elements. The carbon and oxygen combine with hydrogen from the station’s ­oxygen ​­generating system to make H₂O and methane (CH₄), the latter of which vents into space.

5. Water recovery system

Reclaimed water flows into a chamber in the U.S. Lab module, where an ­OxyClean-​like reaction zaps odor-​­causing molecules and kills bacteria. A shot of iodine eliminates any potential stragglers, but astronauts test the water regularly just to be sure.

6. Water dispenser

Astronauts fill small metallic pouches and suck hydration through a straw, or squeeze water through a syringe onto dehydrated food. To shower, crewmembers pipe moisture directly onto their skin and hair, then mix in no-rinse shampoo to keep ­post-​­workout smells in check.

This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 Make It Last issue of Popular Science.

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NASA announced last week that it would open the International Space Station up to new opportunities in the commercial sector, giving businesses the ability to send private astronauts into space for up to $35,000 a night. The move comes as part of a grander effort in U.S. space policy to hand the reins of low-Earth operations over to the commercial sector, as the agency devotes more time and resources to deep space ambitions of sending humans to the moon and Mars.

“We’re hoping new capabilities will develop that can one day take over for the space station,” Robyn Gatens, the deputy space station director for NASA, said at Friday’s announcement. “We won’t transition off station until we have something else to go to, so we don’t have a date certain.”

While the move makes it possible for private companies to use the ISS as a hotel for rich thrill-seekers, NASA is adamant that it is not making a foray into space tourism. Private companies—ones able to figure out their own launch service needs—can pay $11,250 a day per person for their crews to use life support systems and the station’s toilet, and $22,500 per day for access to food, medicine, and other supplies. NASA would even charge for power, at a rate of $42 per kilowatt-hour. But the agency contends that none of these charges are designed to make any real profit; they would simply help offset some of NASA’s costs.

While there weren’t any hints of the announcement beforehand, this is far from a surprising move. John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University, says the genesis of this decision goes back to 1983. President Reagan wanted NASA to establish a permanently crewed space station, and part of the administration’s sales pitch to Congress was that such a platform could open up opportunities to businesses interested in spaceflight, enabling “billions of dollars of economic activity in space.” Technically, says, Logsdon, this decision is 30 years overdue.

Freedom never came to fruition, and NASA folded its vision into the ISS—including the push to use such a platform to expand private-sector spaceflight. This was actually a selling point for the international community. “Commercial activities are part of the reason why the ISS’s partner countries chose to participate,” says Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz, professor emerita in space law at the University of Mississippi and editor in chief emerita for the Journal of Space Law. “One of the four major bodies of law contained in the ISS Intergovernmental Agreement covers intellectual property,” and the partner countries all signed on under hopes that the ISS could be used as a laboratory for innovation, including contributions from private companies.

According to Gabrynowicz, the IGA allows each ISS partner to select its own astronauts. Countries have always had the option of outsourcing those spots to private companies with their own candidates, as long as they have the consent of the other ISS partners. If NASA decided to rent out a couple astronaut beds to SpaceX, for instance, those SpaceX astronauts would be under the jurisdiction of the U.S., be governed under U.S. law, and required to follow the crew code of conduct required of anyone else on board. There wouldn’t even be any new rules or regulations to write.

The most significant change is in terms of implicit policy. The U.S. module is designated as a national laboratory. While there are already a number of significant commercial activities that occur there, everything revolves around research. With this new change, “you can do commercial marketing activities,” says Logsdon. Companies will not be allowed to establish sponsorship deals with ISS partners, nor will NASA astronauts be allowed to endorse products, but paying customers will be able to produce ads and commercials in space. “It’s allowing a broader range of activities aboard the station,” he says. (The potential for sponsored Instagram posts alone boggle the mind.)

Arguably, that’s just part of the natural evolution of the station. For much of this past decade, there have been discussions about what might succeed the ISS. With NASA currently working on the Gateway, an orbital space station designed to help facilitate a permanent return to the moon and deep space exploration efforts like the journey to Mars, the push to turn the ISS over to the private sector has grown in recent years. The Trump administration came into office expressly interested in giving businesses more opportunities to expand their presence in orbit, and used this as part of its argument to end federal funding for the ISS by 2025, as shown in internal White House documents leaked last year.

And as Logsdon points out, “underpinning all of this is a desire from NASA to stop paying for the station.” The agency spends more than $8 million a day on ISS operations.

Spaceflight is still incredibly expensive, and it will be up to private companies to generate actual revenue by marking up ticket prices. For example, a proposal by Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Space Operations calls for sending as many as 16 private astronauts to the space station next year for 30 to 60 days, at a whopping $52 million per seat aboard a SpaceX launch. (SpaceX, it should be noted, has yet to actually send an astronaut to the ISS.)

The spaceflight industry consistently insists that off-world activities such as mining and tourism could be worth trillions of dollars in the future. Access to the ISS gives companies a chance to take those estimates for a spin.

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Astronauts love plants. In the sterile, mechanical International Space Station, spacefarers are so desperate for a hint of green that they will eagerly volunteer their free time to tend to the plant experiments onboard. But a new terrarium means they will have to spend very little mandatory time gardening—once it starts working properly, anyway.

NASA scientists have been collaborating with Techshot and Tupperware since 2017 to create the perfect container for cultivating greenery in space. The result is a low-maintenance, mini-nursery called the passive orbital nutrient delivery system, or PONDS.

Each PONDS is a plastic box. Inside there is a small pot that contains orange clay sediment like you’d find on the paths at a baseball field, fertilizer, and two seeds. The outer container stores water. The idea is that the roots eventually grow out of the main container and into the water, without any human intervention.

NASA isn’t trying to take #plantshelfies away from the ISS crew. But an astronaut’s time is precious, says David Reed, launch operations director at Techshot, a research and development company that’s made a lot of the station’s hardware. Since their packed schedules are a major constraint on space experiments, the less time astronauts have to spend on plant maintenance, the better.

Two sets of PONDS have made their way to space, the first in April 2018 and another earlier this month. But they haven’t quite worked as planned. In the most recent experiment, the seed germinated, but came up short—probably due to a lack of water. “They dried out,” says Howard Levine, chief scientist of the International Space Station research office. “That was a little frustrating, but there was a lot learned.”

Nothing works quite the same way in space as it does here on Earth. Imagine a houseplant. Usually, it’s in some sort of pot with a drainage hole. The plant sits in soil within the container. When the caretaker of the plant adds water, it seeps down to the roots and then the excess water flows out of the hole on the bottom of the pot. In space, this concept completely breaks down. Aspirational botanists run into the same problems that space scientists have faced when confronting how to design the best wastewater disposal systems, fuel tanks, and even coffee cups: Nothing stays put inside its container. Even when scientists found a way to hold all the right parts together, the water in a planter would not flow downward, but continuously saturate—a no-no for most plants.

For many years, NASA scientists solved these problems with various strategies. Lately, they’ve used “pillows”—packets of clay, fertilizer, and seeds that the ISS crew members water every three days or so. Leafy greens like romaine grow well in the pillows, which is good news for astronauts who might be short of some lettuce-y nutrients. However, the pillows don’t hold enough water to support fruiting plants, like tomatoes or bell peppers—the impetus for PONDS.

Howard Levine and his team at NASA developed the prototype using whatever materials they could find at home goods supply stores. Techshot got involved to further develop the model and present the idea to Tupperware. Engineers at the food packaging have expertise in safe plastic technology that won’t leach toxic plastics, and they understand how to mold those materials for various uses, says David Kusuma, Tupperware’s vice president of research and product innovation. Even with the collective knowledge, the team turned to outside consultants like Mark Weislogel, a zero-gravity-obsessed materials engineer from Portland State University, and other plant biologists at the Kennedy Space Center.

PONDS’ future hinges on finding the exact right amount of water to keep the plants alive and thriving. So far, the plants in the experiments have drowned and dried up, so future success depends on hitting the Goldilocks just-right equilibrium. If all goes well, Reed estimates the team will have a PONDS 3.0 ready for tomato experiments on the ISS in the next year. Eventually, he envisions a large tank that could operate autonomously and water many different edible plants at the same time. Perfecting the technology could allow for longer space missions, a crucial step in traveling to Mars.

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On Friday morning, two female astronauts will make history as they venture outside the safe confines of the International Space Station. Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir are the team behind the first all-female spacewalk. In NASA’s 61-year history, only 14 women have completed the task. The first all-female walk was scheduled for March of this year only to be cancelled due to the station’s lack of medium sized suits.

The spacewalk is scheduled for 7:50 AM Eastern Standard Time, but a livestream will begin on NASA’s site at 6:30 AM. Originally planned for October 21, the excursion had to be moved up to tomorrow due to an issue with one of the space station’s battery charge-discharge units (BCDU).

BCDU’s regulate the amount of energy stored within batteries as the station’s solar arrays collect energy during periods of sunlight. During nighttime passes around the Earth, the ISS relies on these batteries for power. The BCDU failed to activate following an October 11 installation of new lithium-ion batteries. While the station’s overall power supply remains sufficient, it is not running at full capacity due to the failure. This is the second BCDU failure this year, so NASA scientists intend to investigate the failures further before installing anymore lithium-ion batteries.

Replacing the 230-pound BCDU will take about three to three and a half hours. Because the activity is relatively quick—spacewalks usually span five to eight hours— the two astronauts will perform a few other tasks on their spacewalk. They will be folding back a section of the Multilayer Insulation (MLI), a protective thermal blanket surrounding the station. By folding back a section, the astronauts are going to uncover a robotic arm expansion that can make future repairs. They will also be installing a piece of hardware that supports an upcoming experimental platform that the station’s European scientists plan to establish next year.

Koch and Meir were both selected by NASA to be astronauts in 2013. This will be Koch’s fourth spacewalk, and she is slated to set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with an expected total of 328 days in space. Meir joined the station on September 29, so this will be her first spacewalk.

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August 2007 was a special time on the International Space Station. A shuttle crew—new blood, fresh supplies—would soon arrive. Astronaut Clayton Anderson, the only American aboard since that June, was ready for new people to talk to.

First, though, he had to deal with ­Mission Control. Anderson had come aboard the ISS with the explicit goal of improving procedures for future crews; his work on the ground had included astronaut support and communications. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that he regularly felt annoyed by the tedious processes Houston demanded he follow. In preparation for the shuttle’s arrival, for instance, they had instructed him to remove a special spacewalk bag (storage for equipment like gloves and eyeglasses) from the airlock, place it in a second bag, take a new spacewalk bag from the arriving crew, remove the old bag from the outer bag, and give it to the new arrivals to put in the shuttle.

If you think that sounds convoluted, Anderson would agree. He tried to suggest a simpler approach, but the people on the ground weren’t interested. In fact, the flight director forwarded him an email containing their frustrated internal communications: “Why doesn’t he just be quiet and do what he’s told?” and “Why don’t they just bring him home?”

Anderson kept notes and journals about his gripes—as well as more-pleasant experiences—and turned his reminiscences into a 2015 memoir, The Ordinary Spaceman. But his diaries were also part of a review that NASA had commissioned to identify the most difficult aspects of lengthy space travel as the agency began planning for missions to Mars and elsewhere. Promised anonymity, Anderson and 19 other space-station crewmembers shared their reflections with anthropologist Jack Stuster, who heads a consulting firm specializing in behavioral research. Password-protected and encrypted, the dear-diaries winged their way to ground stations whenever the astronauts composed an entry. They slipped onto a NASA server, Stuster downloaded them, and NASA deleted them. Anderson notwithstanding, only Stuster knows the identities of the spacefarers he followed in a pair of studies conducted between 2003 and 2016.

During his 152 days aboard the ISS, Anderson continued to express his irritation to Stuster. On another occasion, he and two crewmembers each detached and reattached the same door, along with its 44 fasteners, for different chores on the same day. Why hadn’t Mission Control let them do all those tasks while the door was off the first time? Just days after the space-bag incident, he cut all but essential communication with the ground. When he returned to Earth, the Astronaut Evaluation Board noted, “Clay will need to rebuild his relationship with Mission Control if he is to fly again.”

Anderson, though, thinks people on the ground could be more considerate of astronauts’ experiences. “Imagine you’re living in your house, and someone 100 miles away is trying to tell you the best place to pack stuff and put stuff away,” Anderson, now retired, says about his time in orbit. “It was very frustrating to me.”

Stuster saw Anderson not as an overly autonomous subordinate, but rather as a crewmember bucking the tradition of “praise inflation.” Astronauts and their handlers typically act more solicitously toward each other than they would in person: lots of congratulations, unearned compliments, pleases, and thank-yous. Mission Control, used to constant deference, couldn’t brook Anderson’s opinions. “They labeled Clay a complainer and treated him badly,” Stuster says. “It was unfair and petty.”

Having studied the human dynamics of space travel since the ’80s, Stuster has often seen relations between crew and ground falter in similar ways. The distance between Earth and astronauts will only grow, literally and figuratively, on missions to places like Mars. This will introduce fresh challenges.

Stuster recently finished a new study that analyzes NASA’s hypothetical plans for such a journey: what the trip would require of space travelers and the kinds of problems they might experience, from dental emergencies to behavioral breakdowns. He says the current Red Planet strategy makes him nervous. NASA wants to increase the route time from around six months each way to a year per leg. Going slower would save fuel and money—just as biking is cheaper than driving. “It’s extremely dangerous,” he says. The crew’s exposure to radiation would double. And the longer its members remain confined, the risk of behavioral and psychological issues would skyrocket. ­“NASA’s going in the wrong direction,” ­Stuster says. “My mission is to convince the mission planners that is a bad idea.”

For 13 years, 20 astronauts typed their joy, pain, annoyance, elation, boredom, anger, contentment, and loneliness into massive files that, by Stuster’s estimate, could fill two Russian novels he alone would read. “They might not confess their frailties to their colleagues or their flight surgeon, but they did to me,” says Stuster of the material for the two studies he completed, first from 2003 to 2010, then 2011 to 2016. With the data dumps complete, he could start looking for trends.

No surprise, the novelty of space travel eventually wore off as newer ISS crewmembers got used to watching the great world spin below. “I don’t quite feel the compulsion to head to the cupola every spare second anymore,” a diarist wrote about the seven-windowed domed module. “Not saying the view isn’t amazing, it is, but I don’t feel that curiosity quite as much.”

Still, the ISS offered other new experiences, including tethering oneself to the hull and floating in the cosmos. If those activities didn’t happen, though, disappointment could hit hard. “I’ve been avoiding the journal,” confessed a participant when NASA canceled their spacewalk, which, they noted, “is a bit of a dagger in the heart.” The crewmember, channeling optimism, recounted the positives: safety and health first. Still, it took two days to put away all the equipment and tear down the riggings. “Let me tell you, that sucked.”

Even when time passed as planned, work always floated to top of mind—as did its constraints. “Today was a hard day,” someone wrote. “Small things are getting to me. I am tired. I think that the ground is scheduling less time for tasks than before.” Another diarist noted that it sometimes seemed like Mission Control didn’t have a clue what things were actually like out in space: “Only 30 minutes to execute a 55-step procedure that required collecting 21 items.”

Clearly, Anderson wasn’t the only crewmember displeased with NASA’s inscrutable ways. How many people does it take to change a lightbulb on the ISS? Just one—but a lot of effort. “I had to have safety glasses and a vacuum cleaner handy,” a frustrated flier wrote. But the bulb was already in a plastic case that would have contained any shards if it broke. “Also, I had to take a photo of the installed bulb before turning it on,” they added. “Why? I have no idea! It’s just the way NASA does things.”

The tedium compounded quickly. “I become more convinced every day that we sacrifice crew efficiency and time on orbit to make things easier/cheaper for the ground,” someone grumbled about being forced to do a “consumables audit”: opening bags of supplies, removing and counting everything, then putting it all back—rather than keeping track as they used items.

Those processes could also prove worthless. Once, due to a NASA miscommunication, main courses would be used up two weeks before a resupply arrived. “We should not have complained about chicken, since that chicken may soon run out!” a crewmember opined. Another, during a nutrition shortage, lamented the results of calorie restriction. “It makes a big difference whether one is choosing to lose the weight or if one is being forced,” they wrote, hangrily.

ISS residents could also annoy one another—both online and in real life. When an astronaut was livestreaming or became internet famous, teammates would grow resentful of the work their colleague missed. They also experienced the “she’s breathing on me” difficulties akin to siblings on weekend road trips. “I think I do need to get out of here,” a journal-keeper admitted. “Living in close quarters with people over a long period of time, even things that normally wouldn’t bother you much at all can bother you after a while.”

Orbiting teams didn’t always complain, though. Lighter fare included floating competitions to see who could do the illest tricks. One ISS resident, undressing in a room with a view, told crewmates they were mooning the world. Journals recounted American and Russian crews watching the Stanley Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey together.

On another occasion, a ­science-​­fiction-​­literate astronaut made uninitiated team members screen all the Star Trek movies. The first time Spock gave the V-shaped Vulcan salute, the group spontaneously attempted the gesture. “To see them doing something for the first time that I did for the first time about 40 years ago was unbelievably funny and nostalgic,” this person wrote.

Taking and sharing photographs was also a prime joy. One shutterbug tried for a week to catch Kerguelen Island, a French station in Antarctica, where researchers also toil in isolation. Finally, they spotted it, and successfully snapped an image of their analogs. “I think I’ll try to email it to the folks there,” they wrote.

Seeing Earth from above, as a borderless planet in blank space, also causes a mood shift that psychologists call the overview effect. With our orb in its proper (insignificant) cosmic context, national boundaries become social constructs, and viewers come to value the globe as beautiful, fragile, and worth caring for. As one astronaut put it, “I think I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to understand what I saw here every day for 6 months.”

Throughout it all, the planet below held its appeal. “My list of things I miss the most has grown,” someone wrote. “Family first, then a shower, then a latte, then rain.… I miss being under a blanket of clouds and guess I’ll always be a child of the Earth.”

Stuster has spent much of his 40-​plus-year career analyzing how humans handle objectively unpleasant exploration by land, sea, and space. His terrestrial research looked at, for example, polar adventurers trapped in tents and on ships, and it informed his thinking on the astronauts, trapped in an orbiting tin can. “Engineers, architects build models and subject them to stresses,” he says. “Medical researchers use animal models, even economic models, to test hypotheses. And in the behavioral sciences, we look to analogous conditions.” He began working with NASA in the 1980s and soon convinced the agency that this approach could help forecast space-station hardships.

He started by reading historic reports, from Christopher Columbus onward, to learn what had plagued and placated past explorers. Take ­Belgica‘s journey to Antarctica, the first to winter over. When the vessel got stuck in ice for nearly a year, its physician, Frederick Cook, prescribed exercise: The crew walked around and around the ship daily, in what they came to call the Madhouse Promenade. Cook directed the maddest, saddest people to sit before the stove, whose light and heat seemed impossible after so much cold and dark. With scurvy setting in, they began eating penguin meat, which prevented further breakdowns in a broken situation.

Ritual, structure, exercise, sensation, and sustenance seemed key to Stuster. Fridtjof Nansen, who led the first team across Greenland, could have told you all that in 1897. “Truly,” he wrote in his book Farthest North, “the whole secret lies in arranging things sensibly, and especially in being careful about the food.” On a North Pole expedition, Nansen and a companion spent nine winter months stuck in a hut above the Arctic Circle. “Their entire world [was] illuminated by the pale glow of a blubber lamp that you can hold in your hand,” Stuster says.

The two men emerged intact. “Humans,” Stuster says, “can endure almost anything to be among the first.”

After he sorted the ISS journal entries, he realized that operations in orbit were no longer novel enough to excuse hardship. Astronauts can put up with a lot if they get to wear the badge of being “the first.” But, by the time Stuster’s initial study began in 2003, crews had been doing stints on the ISS since 2000. The austere conditions now chafed. The structure was sometimes too rigid, as the diaries noted, and the food subpar. But holiday celebrations, regular calls to family, movie nights, and the daily wake/​work/​run-​on-​a-​floating-​­treadmill/​sleep routine helped boost morale.

In his 2010 report, Stuster suggested ­friction-​­reducing tweaks like evenly distributing tedious tasks among crewmembers, making work meaningful, and scheduling enough time for chores. Mission Control should correct errors and deficiencies in procedures, and give astronauts as much influence as possible over their schedules; include them in discussions about whatever might affect them, such as changes in policy; and get training on the unique challenges of their isolation and confinement in space.

Apparently not a lot changed, because Stuster wrote pretty much the same thing again in 2016, at the conclusion of his second diary study. At least by then, praise inflation had deflated, he noted, citing a healthier and more mature dynamic.

Alexandra Whitmire is deputy scientist for NASA’s human factors and behavior performance research group, which oversees the strategies the agency employs for its astronauts on future missions. “We look at the gaps between where we are and where we need to be, and we solicit research to help address these gaps,” Whitmire says. Her group specifically advocated for Stuster’s work. “He’s made a tremendous contribution.” Having concrete analyses like his, rather than conjecture, she says, “lends credibility to areas that we think NASA needs to focus on.” Stuster’s studies will inform future efforts and strategy direction, even if they don’t make it into operational policies immediately.

Space missions have one distinct disadvantage compared to the Belgica and other earthly expeditions: Once those bygone pioneers ventured out on their own, they truly were on their own. No one in a sooty city could tell them how they should run their fat-cell light source. In space, though, a terrestrial agency is still the boss. On a Mars mission, the crew would be more autonomous because of the lag in communications and the inability of those on Earth to give direct help—a difference that could cause new issues. Still, when you’re in orbit, it’s easy to believe that those back on land just don’t get it. It’s like how teenagers feel about their parents. Neither group is really wrong.

Relations tend to be exacerbated by what psychologist Vadim Gushin of the Russian Academy of Sciences calls “psychological closing.” Sequestered in the monotony and isolation of space, astronauts start to limit their conversation with the ground. While this is happening, the crew is getting better at space life. (What does some guy in Korolyov know about extravehicular activity? Has Houston ever had to wear goggles to change a bulb?) Ground, Gushin suggests, “should turn from controlling the crew to consulting,” as they naturally would on distant missions. That’s good, because as Stuster has noted, only astronauts understand what it’s like to be astronauts.

Partly because of that fundamental limit to empathy, friction will likely always exist between the landlubbers and the low-Earth orbiters. And that’s not entirely bad. Getting angry at your crewmates would make life in the spacecraft untenable. Sometimes it’s better to toss your feelings downward. It’s classic displacement, says Nick Kanas, a University of California at San Francisco psychiatrist who did 10 years of research on the ISS and Mir astronauts. “You have a boss who tells you to do something, you can’t tell him off. You go home and yell at your spouse,” he says. Aboard the ISS, you yell at Jim in Houston.

On a trip to Mars, Jim will get farther and farther away, and this planet’s pale blue point will grow smaller and smaller. “Nobody knows what it will mean to an astronaut to see Earth as an insignificant dot,” Kanas says. Barring mission simulations—sending astronauts to the moon and pretending it’s Mars (which NASA has no plans to invest in)—“we may just have to wing it more than we’d like .”

Stuster thinks NASA is winging the whole Mars thing more than it should. He discovered a few years ago that the agency didn’t even have a comprehensive list of tasks the astronauts would perform on a mission to the Red Planet, so they didn’t know what kind of crew would do the best job. One geologist or three? All or no Air Force pilots? What would the spacesuits be like? “Even the designers of yoga pants and running shoes and hiking boots have a firm understanding of the work that will be performed,” he says. NASA had a prototype spacesuit, but no grasp of exactly what ­astronauts will do while thusly attired.

That’s why, in December 2018, Stuster provided NASA with a report that identifies each task, and assesses how hard it is to learn, how often it needs to be done, and how important it is. He based it on a mission that spends six months in transit in each direction, and 18 months on the Martian surface, which until recently had been NASA’s favored itinerary.

Now the agency leans ­toward a longer travel time. More “are we there yet?” moments and less time at the destination would reduce energy and engineering expenses, but Stuster believes those cuts will have human costs. Based on the rate of behavioral problems on earthly expeditions, he estimates a 99 percent chance that someone on a Mars mission will develop serious issues, like depression so severe they can no longer function as part of the crew, or become a danger to themselves. On Earth, you’d send that someone to a hospital. Stuster and Kanas agree that a Mars-bound ship should include restraints in its emergency equipment. One of the required tasks in Stuster’s 2018 report is “Apply physical force and binding/duct tape, manually with the help of another crewmember, to restrain a crewmember experiencing a behavioral emergency.”

Even if everyone stays sane, though, they won’t stay the same. The longer the astronauts spend together, absent the influence of Earth, the more they’ll form their own subculture. Stuster has noted that even on the relatively short stays aboard the ISS, crews morph into communities with their own social norms, such as focusing on overarching goals rather than individual or national differences (something we’re not great at down here). Left without much outside influence, forced to get along in a claustrophobic space, they evolve new ways of interacting that keep the peace and make their mutual isolation tolerable. Just imagine how much deeper those conventions will become when the community members can no longer see their planet.

They’ll become Marslings. Earthtians. No one knows, exactly, what their private society will endure to be among the first.

This story originally published in the Out There issue of Popular Science.

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Robot bees are no replacement for our vital pollinators here on Earth. Up on the International Space Station, however, robots bearing the bee name could help spacefaring humans save precious time.

On Friday, NASA astronaut Anne McClain took one of the trio of Astrobees out for a spin. Bumble and its companion Honey both arrived on the ISS a month ago, and are currently going through a series of checks. Bumble passed the first hurdle when McClain manually flew it around the Japanese Experiment Module. Bumble took photos of the module which will be used to make a map for all the Astrobees, guiding them as they begin their tests there.

The three cube-shaped robots (Queen will arrive from Earth in the SpaceX resupply mission this July) don’t look anything like their namesakes, but they are non-threatening by design, says Astrobee project manager Maria Bualat. Since they’re built to fly around autonomously, doing tasks for the crew of the International Space Station, “one of our hardest problems is actually dealing with safety concerns,” she says.

A robot that’s too hard or heavy or that flies too fast could injure an astronaut or damage equipment by accident. “You want it to have enough thrust that it can actually move around a reasonable sized payload, and yet not be so powerful that it would break a window if we ran into it,” says Bualat. The design they came up with is padded on the corners and powered by impeller fans that lightly pressurize the cube, allowing it to navigate the space station by releasing little puffs of air out of two nozzles located on each of its sides.

“Because every face has those nozzles, it can move in any direction, and it can rotate around any axis,” says Bualat. That gives it more flexibility in its movements, but Astrobee does have a preferred face—one side is equipped with an HD camera for video streaming, as well as a navigational camera and a depth camera to help it get around.

The Astrobee was conceived as the next generation of the three SPHERES, free-flying robots that have to be monitored at all times by astronauts. The technology in the SPHERES is more than a decade old, Bualat says, and any smartphone today has more sophisticated capabilities. In fact, when coming up with the idea for the Astrobees, “we did a proof-of-concept where we basically stuck a smartphone on the SPHERE,” she says.

Robots like the Astrobees could potentially shift the dynamics of space exploration by giving their human companions more time. Astronauts are busy people: back in the 1970s, a crew on the predecessor to the ISS infamously refused to work for a day in protest of their over-booked schedules.

Although today’s space program is a far cry from that of the militaristic Space Age, simple tasks like cleaning, preparing food, and conducting experiments take up a lot of astronaut time. “It’s very hard to get people into space and keep them alive and healthy and working,” says University of Colorado space robotic engineer Jay McMahon, who was not involved with the Astrobees project. “To really expand space exploration, we’re going to need to count on robots to do a lot of these types of activities.”

However, the Astrobees aren’t ready to clean toilets or look for missing equipment anytime soon. Once they’ve gone through basic testing and astronauts have fully mapped out the spaces where they’re going to fly, the robots will join the crew of the ISS as test subjects for algorithms and hardware that might make them useful later on. For instance, a team from Stanford will be trying out a sticky hand (modelled after a gecko) that will help the Astrobees grab onto handrails to get around, while the Naval Postgraduate School is working on software to help the robot astronauts navigate better.

But all that’s in the future. Next up: Bumble’s first solo flight is scheduled for June 6.

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In honor of Sally Ride’s birthday and the historic Falcon 9 rocket launch this week, we’re reliving one of the age-old questions that kept female astronauts out of space for decades.

This story was originally published on June 10, 2016.

When NASA was preparing for Sally Ride’s first spaceflight in 1983, there was some question about what should go in her personal kit. Namely, engineers needed to figure out how many tampons she would need for a one-week mission. “Is 100 the right number?” they asked her. “No. That would not be the right number,” she replied. The engineers explained they wanted to be safe, and she assured them that they could cut that number in half without a problem.

After first allowing women into the astronaut corps in 1978, NASA really didn’t know what to do with them. Funny as questions over tampons and possible makeup kits in space seem in hindsight, it’s an interesting look at an agency’s rude awakening when faced with a whole new suite of astronauts.

Women not in space

In 1959, 32 military test pilots went through some of the most rigorous physical testing ever devised at the Lovelace clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The men were probed, prodded, inspected inside and out until not a body single secret was kept from the physicians. Seven of the men went on to pass similarly rigorous psychological screening and emerged as NASA’s first class of astronauts.

The following year, the clinic’s founder, Dr. Randy Lovelace, along with USAF Brigadier General Donald Flickinger invited pilot Geraldine “Jerrie” Cobb to go through the same testing. The men were curious to see how women would fare. On average, women are smaller, lighter, and consume fewer resources than men, making them potentially better suited to flying in the cramped spacecraft of the 1960s. Cobb passed the tests, and by the end of the summer of 1961, another 18 female pilots had submitted to the same rigorous testing as the Mercury astronauts. The only difference was the addition of a gynecological exam.

Thirteen women ultimately passed, proving themselves as ready for spaceflight as any of the Mercury astronauts. They actually had a higher success rate than the men; only 18 of the 32 male candidates passed the physical testing, a 56 percent success rate compared to 68 percent for the women.

But however physically fit, there was some question over women’s suitability to spaceflight. In a 1964 report published after the short-lived women’s program was terminated, the question was raised whether a menstrual cycle would affect a woman’s ability to work in space. The authors point specifically to the “intricacies of matching a temperamental psychophysiologic [read: PMS-ing] human and the complicated machine [i.e. spacecraft].” The difficulties, they said, “are many and, obviously, both need to be ready at the same time [read: the woman would have to time a flight to her cycle].” The implication is clear: a menstruating or hormonal woman just wouldn’t be able to handle herself in the challenging environment of spaceflight.

But it was probably fine, the report concluded, because “it seems doubtful that women will be in demand for space roles in the very near future.” Besides, for the moment in the mid-1960s, NASA wasn’t open to women. The requirements for astronauts stipulated that they be military test pilots, and this excluded women across the board. No amount of campaigning would change the agency’s ruling during the Space Race.

The rules governing astronaut candidacy changed in the post-Apollo era. The agency began breaking its astronauts into two categories: pilots and mission specialists. At the same time it also opened applications to a wider swath of the population. The astronaut class of 1978 brought 35 new members into the fold. Three were African American men, one was an Asian American man, and six were women.

Blood in space

With female astronauts training for spaceflight, NASA finally had to address the issue of merging a “temperamental psychophysiologic human” with a “complicated machine.” And specifically, what would happen when that “temperamental psychophysiologic human” went through a menstrual cycle in said “complicated machine” in microgravity.

By the 1970s, NASA knew that the cardiovascular system was greatly affected by spaceflight. Because humans evolved in Earth’s gravity, our bodies got really good at fighting gravity to pump blood from the lower extremities to the chest, where that blood can be reoxygenated and recirculated through the body. But when there’s no gravity to fight, the system gets sort of “lazy.” The heart doesn’t need to work as hard, and blood and fluids pool in the upper body and head, giving astronauts the characteristic puffy face/chicken legs look.

Knowing this, engineers and flight surgeons weren’t sure if something similar might happen to a menstruating woman in space. If blood in the body pools in the torso and head, could menstrual blood float upwards and pool in the abdomen? Retrograde menstrual flow was a real worry because the consequences could be significant. Worst case, this could cause a condition known as peritonitis, an inflammation of the membrane lining the abdominal wall and organ inside the abdomen. Left untreated, peritonitis can be a life-threatening condition. No one wanted to send a woman into space only to have her die because of her body’s natural cycle.

But there’s a pretty big difference between blood circulation and menstruation (lots of differences, really, to be clear): the former is controlled by a network of arteries and veins that work all the time while the latter is controlled by hormones. The flow of menstrual blood isn’t guided the way circulating blood is. So while male engineers were worried about retrograde bleeding, the female astronauts weren’t worried at all; they expected a period in space to be the same as a period on Earth and wanted to treat it as a non-issue until it became an issue. The problem was, there was no way to prove the women right. Someone would have to menstruate in space to close the issue.

To bleed or not to bleed

It’s not clear who was the first woman to menstruate in space, but someone did it and the answer came back just as the female astronauts expected it would: a period is the same in space as on Earth.

The challenge then became for NASA to deal with its menstruating astronauts. No two women menstruate exactly alike or have the same preferences, so the agency had to make provisions for women to carry the right number of their favored implements on board, be they pads or tampons. But when you’re dealing with spaceflight and rocket science, this is a pretty easy problem to solve.

There is, however, another option for female astronauts and that’s not having periods at all. Properly called medically induced amenorrhea, it’s possible to suppress menstruation by messing with the body’s natural hormones, which is what some birth control methods do. The combined oral contraceptive pill is taken daily. For 21 days the pills contain an active ingredient that suppresses ovulation and thins the uterine lining. The fourth week is seven days of a placebo pill that allows the body to go through withdrawal bleeding, which is different than menstruation. Taking the active pill for a full month, or many months, completely stops any bleeding (though there might be light spotting).

Another option is an hormonal intrauterine device (IUD) that achieves the same result through a localized release of low dose hormones. In some cases, like spaceflight, this could be a better option. Not only does an IUD negate the risk of missing a pill and getting a period, it’s small and inside the body. An astronaut could be in space for years—say, on a mission to Mars—and not have to think twice about menstruating. It would just be a non-issue. And she could resume a natural cycle once the IUD is removed.

Even in the immediate future there are some advantages to astronauts suppressing menstruation. The toilets on the American side of the International Space Station are deigned to recycle water from urine, but they aren’t designed to handle menstrual blood, so minimizing bleeding means more reclaimed water on board. There’s also the practical side of having limited hygiene products and clean clothes in space. Not having to change a pad or tampon could make a trip more comfortable.

But at the end of the day, NASA does have provisions on board the ISS for astronauts to menstruate in space should they choose to go with a natural body cycle or not use hormonal birth control. Which is a good thing. Not only are women not dying having periods in space, they have the same Earthly right to make their own choices about their reproductive health.

Additional sources: NASA; Kathy Sullivan Oral History at JSC; CollectSpace; “Medically induced amenorrhea in female astronauts” in Nature; NASA; NASA Blogs

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Astronauts—they’re just like us. Last week, the International Space Station was plagued by a leaky toilet. The crew onboard had to put their plumbers’ hats on and get to work repairing the system as gallons of water spilled weightlessly out into the spacecraft, 250 miles above the surface of the earth. Yeeeesh, that’s rough.

Problems arose when the crew began preparations for the eventual installation of a brand new advanced toilet system, the Universal Waste Management System, designed to handle astronaut waste and disposal more efficiently. The UWMS is supposed to be 75 percent more compact than previous toilet system used on the ISS and the Space Shuttle, and improve cleanliness as well.

Unfortunately, installing a new toilet is space is as messy as it is here on Earth. According to NASA, the leak sprung while astronauts on the American side of the station were unhooking a connection point from the potable water system. About 2.5 gallons of water spilled out, and the astronauts had to soak it all up using—what else—towels!

This is far from the first time the ISS crew has had to deal with toilet issues. Problems arose in 2008 as well as 2010. That’s more frequent than you might expect for something that cost tens of millions of dollars to develop.

While the loss of water isn’t a huge deal, it’s worth remembering that most of the water circulating through the ISS is recycled. Crew members are allotted about half a gallon a day. Whatever’s used in the shower, or released through sweat and urine, is filtered and turned back into potable water. Yes, that means some of the water you pee could just end up going right back into your body when you’re feeling thirsty. If worst comes to worst and the filtration system breaks down, there are about 530 gallons of water stored as a precautionary reserve.

After astronauts settled the leak last week, the crew finished installing a new double-stall enclosure in anticipation of the full installation of the UWMS next year. The same sort of system is set to fly on the first few missions of the Orion spacecraft that will return astronauts to the moon and potentially go to Mars, so the ISS will be an important testing ground. Relieving yourself in space is fraught with challenges, especially when it comes to managing cleanliness. Toilets are havens for potentially infectious pathogens, and even the ISS is no stranger to drug resistant bacteria. The UWMS is supposed to mitigate those problems to a certain extent, especially when it comes to pooping.

Relatedly, NASA’s also eager to figure out a new waste management system for astronaut spacesuits, in the anticipation that future spacefarers may have to stay inside these things for many more hours or even days at a time. Currently, anyone going off on a spacewalk has to settle for diapers, which are obviously far from ideal. Imagine going through years of training and getting selected as one of the few people to ever travel outside of Earth’s atmosphere—only to be told to put on a diaper before you’re allowed to outside the spacecraft.

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We are already aware of many of the dangers that spaceflight can inflict on the human body. Loss of bone and muscle mass, distortions on eyeball size and function, and radiation are just a few in the long list of health consequences that can result from spending time in zero G. But one area of study that’s increasingly concerning is how space environments might damage the brain, and how microgravity itself can induce unique irregularities in brain shape and structure. A new study published in JAMA Neurology this week provides more concerning details on how spaceflight changes the brain. The findings inadvertently underscore just how little we know about the effects of space on brain health and safety, creating a worrisome specter that’s sure to grow larger as we start sending astronauts into space for years at a time.

“These brain changes were in the same direction as what you would see with aging, but they occurred at a faster speed,” says Rachael Seidler, a professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at the University of Florida, and a coauthor of the new JAMA paper. “They were greater with longer spaceflight mission durations, and larger brain changes were correlated with greater balance declines.”

The study’s findings center around the movement of intracranial fluids within the skull, as well as—for the first time —an examination of how spaceflight affects the brain’s white matter. As opposed to gray matter, which is composed largely of neuronal cell bodies and plays a significant role in muscle control and sensory perception, white matter is mostly made of fat-covered nerve fibers, passing along messages between different parts of the brain and the nervous system.

While gray matter development peaks in a person’s 20s, white matter continues to develop long after and won’t peak until middle age, creating larger concerns that spaceflight could effectively stunt or warp parts of the brain’s development in young astronauts normally thought to be fit for space missions.

It’s been well-documented that astronauts often come back to Earth feeling disoriented, experiencing and showing impairments in motor control, balance, and functional mobility and cognition. And it was already known that the brain shifts upward within the skull during spaceflight, and that the somatosensory cortex (which processes sensory information for the brain) also increases in gray matter volume. However, it’s never been completely clear how these various disturbances relate to one-another. More importantly, it’s never been understood what effect spaceflight has on white matter.

Seidler and her team developed a new technique that would allow them to quantify the fluid shifts occurring within astronaut brains using diffusion MRI (dMRI) scans that could track the movement of water molecules in the brain. Water molecule motion is limited by white matter fiber tracts in the brain, enabling the researchers to get a better sense of how white matter structure changes as a result of spaceflight.

NASA made available preflight and postflight dMRI scans of 15 astronauts taken from 2010 to 2015—seven of whom took part in a Space Shuttle mission lasting less than 30 days, and eight of whom completed a long-duration mission to the International Space Station lasting less than 200 days. The median age was 47.2, with 12 men and 3 women.

The findings weren’t all that surprising: Spaceflight decreased fluid around the top of the brain, and significantly increased fluid around the base of the brain, indicating that fluid distributions are altered by the upward shift of the brain within the skull. Moreover, the team found changes to white matter around pathways in the brain that process visual and spatial information, balance, vertical perception, and movement control. Astronauts with the most white matter changes experienced the most significant disturbances in these processes.

“It was compelling how well these results reflect the changes seen in rodents that have flown in space,” says Seidler.

There were a few encouraging signs that the human body can adapt. Astronauts who had simply gone on more missions—regardless of mission duration or cumulative days in space—experienced less drastic intracranial fluid movements. The researchers think it might be a sign the human body is capable of adapting to microgravity environments, but it requires multiple instances of transitions between environments to get there.

There’s no question NASA and other spaceflight parties want to avoid having their astronauts experience unsafe changes to their bodies in space, especially the brain. Unfortunately, the problem right now is that there is just too much of a lack of data to fully assess how bad or worrisome these changes really are. We’ve only launched a small percentage of people into space, and most have not spent more than a few months in orbit at a time.

“The consequences of these brain changes are unknown at this point,” says Seidler. “Long term follow up is important to understand how these brain changes might interact with aging and how or whether they recover over time.” Seidler and her team are in the process of collecting follow-up MRI scans that could illustrate what the recovery process looks like, but we won’t really learn anything until several months or years later.

Moreover, while fluid movements and white matter changes might be problematic for terrestrial living, an editorial published in JAMA along with the new study suggests it might actually be the brain’s way of adapting to space environments, representing “a beneficial neuroadaptive response to the spaceflight environment”, perhaps not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Again, this area of research is unfortunately stuck in a catch-22. Understanding more about how the brain changes due to spaceflight requires much more extensive study of the astronauts prepared to go on these missions, even though longer and more frequent flights could prove to induce deleterious problems for these individuals down the road. NASA can’t do much more than assess the risks as the studies move forward and proceed with caution, but hopefully as the goals to expand humanity’s presence in space starts to ramp up, the research and resources allocated to these studies will increase as well.

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We’ve all read science fiction stories about a disease going rogue on a space ship, decimating the crew. While space holds plenty of other terrors, new research suggests that bacteria we bring with us from Earth are more likely to evolve to survive alongside the spaceship’s human crew.

Bacteria are inescapable, wherever life exists. That includes all built environments, from houses to the International Space Station. However, scientists have only started to study how microbes adapt to these living conditions. “There are a lot of questions about how space flight and space conditions will affect organisms including microbes,” says Erica Hartmann, Northwestern University microbiologist and environmental engineer and author of a new paper that holds answers for at least some of those questions.

Humans living in space have weakened immune systems, which potentially makes spacefaring people more vulnerable to infection. How bacteria respond is less well-documented, and there have been some concerns that they’ll adapt to space conditions in ways that will make them harmful to humans. The new study, published this week in the journal mSystems, offers a promising hint that in space, bacteria are just adapting to survive.

Hartmann and her colleagues compared the genomes of microbes from the International Space Station and ones here on Earth. Unlike humans, who generally carry the same genes, bacteria can differ—even within the same species. Of course, not all humans are identical, but we all carry the same kinds of genetic information: we may have brown or blue eyes, but almost all of us are born with the genes that create peepers of some sort. For bacteria, “it would sort of be the equivalent of some of the bacteria in a species having wings and some having arms,” says Hartmann.

They looked at two common bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus. “We picked these two because they have very different lifestyles,” says Hartmann. S. aureus is a typical resident of the human microbiome, but can blossom into an infection in the right conditions. B. cereus lives in soil.

Hartmann and her colleagues found that the bacteria on the ISS were genetically different from their counterparts on Earth—but not in ways that made them more virulent or resistant to measures like antibiotics. “Our findings suggest that the most crucial bacterial functions involved in this potential adaptive response are specific to bacterial lifestyle and do not appear to have direct impacts on human health,” the researchers write.

It’s a promising set of first results, but we can’t assume the estimated one trillion species of microbes on Earth will all behave the same way in space. “Bacterial diversity is huge,” Hartmann says. She hopes further research can expand the comparison by analyzing other bacteria, and doing experiments to try to replicate the changes in lab environments.

Hartmann’s team “did a really good job,” says David Coil, a UC Davis microbiologist who studies the ISS. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering about microbes in general and particularly microbes on the space station,” he says. The approach Hartmann’s team used, looking at the changes in space microbes at a genetic level, offers an evidence-based and reasonable assessment of the ways the bacteria they studied adapt to space conditions, he says. Their results are “sort of reassuring,” he adds, because they indicate that bacteria don’t seem to adapt to space-faring conditions by becoming more virulent.

Research of this kind could have vast applications, from spacecraft design to home design. If researchers can figure out what kinds of surfaces promote bad adaptations in extraterrestrial bacteria, for instance, spacecraft designers can concentrate on minimizing those structures or using alternatives. All built environments have microbes, says Hartmann, because they contain life—it’s just a matter of figuring out how to best live with them, rather than trying to wipe them all out.

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One of the year’s biggest space stories just gets weirder and weirder. Earlier this week, a Russian cosmonaut who investigated the mysterious hole in the Soyuz capsule docked to the International Space Station revealed that the hole was definitely drilled from the inside, according to authorities, underscoring previous suggestions that the hole was not created by any collisions with meteorites or small debris in space—and further deepening the mystery about exactly who or what created the hole.

To recap: NASA was first put on alert in late August, when flight controllers at Johnson Space Center noticed dropping air pressure in the space station (although the crew was never in any real danger). Astronauts quickly found the leak was coming from a two-millimeter-wide hole in a Russian Soyuz capsule docked to the ISS, which had just brought three astronauts to the space station in June. The crew plugged the hole with epoxy and gauze, which effectively solved the leak, but everyone remained flummoxed as to how it got there in the first place—by all indications, the hole probably wasn’t created by an impact with space junk or micrometeoroids, which left open the possibility it was created by a human.

Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin, head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, stoked theories of sabotage by saying the hole might have been created deliberately, either by someone on Earth or by a crew member aboard the space station. (Russian authorities quickly backtracked on those suggestions afterward, but the damage to Russia and U.S. space relations was already done.)

On December 11, Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Oleg Kononenko went on an eight-hour spacewalk to investigate the hole, cutting into the Soyuz capsule with knives and excising a 10-inch sample to send back to Earth for study.

We now have some new details about that investigation. Prokopyev told media on Monday that the hole in the Soyuz capsule started from the interior, which doubles down on the notion that it had to have been created by a human, whether accidentally or on purpose. It’s still possible the incident occurred in space (a Russian politician even suggested earlier that an astronaut may have created the hole in a rather outlandish effort to come home early). Still, the idea of an astronaut intentionally boring into the Soyuz capsule remains a farfetched idea—it’s extremely hard to drill holes in microgravity, and it’s difficult to imagine an astronaut trudging through the close quarters of the ISS with a drill in hand, off the books. Prokopyev himself explicitly brushed off theories that the hole was made by astronauts aboard the ISS, saying “you shouldn’t think so badly of our crew.”

Much more likely (and worrisome) is that an engineer created the hole while the Soyuz capsule was on the ground. Someone may have damaged the spacecraft during its production, or during maintenance and repairs, and simply neglected to notice and report the problem. Or they may have covered the hole up using some kind of sealant that fell off in orbit.

That sort of mistake seems much more realistic than malicious sabotage, but it would also raise concerns about the procedures Roscosmos and its partners use to ensure the Soyuz spacecraft will not jeopardize the safety of crew members using it to go into space or return to Earth. The Space Shuttle Columbia and Challenger disasters are good reminders that even the smallest problem with a spacecraft can lead to catastrophe during spaceflight. If it turns out someone on the ground was truly responsible for the hole, it could lead to a pretty scrutinizing audit of Roscosmos’ safety check protocols, and raise concerns from international partners who regularly participate in Soyuz launches.

Neither NASA nor Roscosmos responded to requests for comment. We’ll have more details for you as the investigation unfolds.

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After a successful launch in the wee hours of the morning, three astronauts are on their way to the space station. NASA’s coverage of the docking process will begin around 11:45 a.m. Eastern, and you can watch it here.

The crew includes Tim Kopra from NASA, Tim Peake from the European Space Agency, and Yuri Malenchenko from Russia’s space agency. Peake is the first British astronaut to visit the International Space Station.

The three launched from Kazakhstan in a Soyuz capsule at 6:03 a.m. At about 2:25 p.m., the Soyuz’s hatch will open and the newest residents of the ISS will come aboard. They’ll join astronauts Scott Kelly, Mikhail Kornienko, and Sergey Volkov.

The crew will spend the next few months doing scientific experiments in microgravity. In March 2016, Kelly and Kornienko will return to Earth after having spent an entire year in space.

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If you’ve ever dreamed of being an astronaut, today’s the day! NASA just posted the coolest job listing ever, and anyone with the right qualifications can apply to be an Astronaut Candidate. Awesome.

Those qualifications are pretty strict. In order to apply, you have to:

• Be a US citizen
• Have at least a Bachelors’ degree in “engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science, or mathematics” (nursing, many social sciences, and some psychology degrees don’t make the cut)
• Have 3 years of professional experience in your field (teaching is ok), or have 1,000 hours of “pilot in command” time on a jet
• Be able to see in 20/20, or have glasses that let you see in 20/20
• Be between 5 feet 2 inches and 6 feet 3 inches tall, so you can fit into the space suit

NASA is hiring more astronauts because they’re planning a lot of missions in the coming years, including trips that will pave the way to landing a person on Mars, NASA’s current long-term goal for crewed missions.

“NASA is on an ambitious journey to Mars and we’re looking for talented men and women from diverse backgrounds and every walk of life to help get us there,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. “Today, we opened the application process for our next class of astronauts, extraordinary Americans who will take the next giant leap in exploration. This group will launch to space from U.S. soil on American-made spacecraft and blaze the trail on our journey to the Red Planet.”

If you have questions about what it takes to be an astronaut, astronaut Shannon Walker and astronaut selection manager Anne Roemer will be taking questions at 4PM today in a Reddit Ask Me Anything.

Selections will be announced in spring of 2017.

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The first Martians are going to have a long ride to red planet, and NASA isn’t quite sure what they’ll ride in. The cramped Orion capsule will have to dock with a larger habitat that provides room for astronauts to live, sleep, work, and exercise. That habitat’s design is still TBD at this point.

To help figure out the best layout for long-term human spaceflight, a company called Draper is developing a way to monitor every aspect of how astronauts use the International Space Station. The idea is to track the astronauts as they move around in microgravity, to learn how much space each person needs to exercise, perform maintenance tasks, and more.

“There’s a lot that we can learn from how they’re using the space station,” Draper’s Kevin Duda told Popular Science. “If you were to design a spacecraft to go to Mars, and you know they’re going to be doing these tasks which are similar to what they’re doing on the space station, you can design something that’s most efficient for their time.”

“There’s a lot that we can learn from how they’re using the space station.”

For example, he says, if an astronaut is fixing something on one end of the ship, “You don’t want the toolbox to be on the other side of the spacecraft.”

Mihriban Whitmore, a scientist with NASA’s Space Human Factors and Habitability research division, thinks the technology will be useful. “Being able to quantify the 3-D space utilization will enable us to determine the smallest habitable volume we can have that is still acceptable to the astronauts of a Mars-bound spacecraft,” she told Popular Science in an email. Space is at a premium because larger habitats are more difficult and expensive to launch.

Draper originally designed their astronaut-tracking system for use in military scenarios where GPS isn’t available, but they’re adapting it for use in space after NASA put out a call for proposals on how to collect data to model the next spaceship. If it’s selected, it could fly on the ISS in a few years. But first they have to do a lot of testing.

How it works

Draper recently tested its tracking tech in a space station mockup at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. You can watch the video of the test below.

The tracking method is pretty simple. Astronauts would wear a small sensor system that includes a camera, accelerometer, and gyroscope. The accelerometer measures speed, which the system uses to calculate the astronaut’s position. The gyroscope measures rotation, which helps to determine the astronaut’s orientation as they float in space.

Lastly, the built-in camera keeps an eye on the astronaut’s surroundings to improve accuracy. The sensors sometimes register movement even when the tracker is motionless, so by comparing pictures of the surroundings from one moment to the next, the camera can determine whether the perceived movement is real or imagined.

Camera’s view of the ISS mock-up

The dots on the video feed represent features that the camera compares from frame to frame to see if the astronaut has moved.

After a 550-foot trek through the space station mockup, the tracking system was off by less than a yard. Draper would like to whittle down the error rate even further.

What’s next?

The test in the ISS mockup was just to see if the system would work. But to really understand how astronauts move, they need to try it out in microgravity.

“The long-term goal is to have this on the ISS,” says Duda. “But there’s a number of things we need to do in between.” The company plans to take the system on a parabolic flight to make sure it works in a weightless environment, and they’ll need to show that it can work for hours at a time.

“The biggest challenge for this type of technology,” says Whitmore, “is providing unobtrusive data capture so that we protect the privacy of the astronauts.” Duda says that the team doesn’t intend to save the video footage from real astronauts. The path analysis will be conducted in real-time, and only the position and orientation data (and how they changed over time) will be saved.

Getting the system to the ISS will ultimately be up to NASA, and there are no guarantees as of yet.

“It would be fantastic if we could get this up there in the next 3 to 5 years,” says Duda. That should give NASA plenty of time to collect and analyze the data and design a ship that could be bound for Mars in the 2030s or ’40s.

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What’s life like on the International Space Station? Earlier this morning, Popular Science had the opportunity to ask two of the people best equipped to answer that question in the entire universe: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, both of whom are currently living on the station for over a year! (So far, they’ve spent over 257 days in orbit.)

In a video interview streamed live on NASA TV, Popular Science executive editor Jennifer Bogo asked Kelly and Kornienko a variety of questions on several subjects, including some fielded by you, the readers. These touched upon everything from how astronauts will use their newly arrived Microsoft HoloLens headsets to growing vegetables in space to their view of climate change and the Paris Climate Talks to times they’ve had to hack the space station itself. All of the answers the astronauts provided were fascinating.

Watch the full interview for yourself above. And be sure to join us for more #AskPopSci events in the near future!

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Earlier today, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a welcome delivery from Earth: over 7,700 pounds of supplies, including food, science experiments, and most unusual of all, several Microsoft HoloLens headsets. Just what will the astronauts be using these crazy new headsets for?

Popular Science got the opportunity to ask this very question in a live interview earlier today with NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko (video above).

Both men are spending over a year aboard the station as part of a grand experiment to find out how long missions in space affect the human body. And having already spent 257 days of their year-long mission inside the relatively cramped confines up in orbit, they’re probably more eager than most to try something totally new.

But beyond that, it’s easy to see how Microsoft’s HoloLens could be quite useful aboard the station: the experimental headset uses a type of technology known as augmented reality (or “AR” for short), which lets you see computer graphics and other digital information layered over the real world around you (unlike virtual reality, which blocks the real world and immerses you totally in a virtual one).

In the few previous demos of the HoloLens, Microsoft has shown off gamers battling hordes of virtual robots that appear to break through the walls of your living room, as well as more mundane but potentially constructive purposes like letting medical students see inside models of the human body, or letting product designers mock-up 3D designs out of thin-air.

So what will the station astronauts be doing with the HoloLens? Popular Science executive editor Jennifer Bogo asked Scott Kelly, and he responded by pointing out two possible working situations: going through a list of procedures, and interacting with space station equipment. As Kelly said:

The HoloLens won’t be available outside of Microsoft and the space station until early 2016, and even then, the first copies will go only to registered software developers for the eye-popping price of $3,000 for each headset. So for now, we’ll all have to enjoy its capabilities through the eyes of the astronauts!

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In April, while runners wait eagerly at the starting line for the London Marathon, another competitor will be waiting as well but far far away, on the International Space Station. That extraterrestrial competitor is Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA). He ran the London Marathon (from Earth, obviously) in 1999, but will be running this year in space. And while it might seem like running in microgravity is cheating, it will still take a lot of work.

Peake will run the full 26.2 miles on a treadmill, which, despite the location of that treadmill, sounds pretty darn boring. Luckily, he’ll be equipped with an iPad that will make him feel like he’s running through the streets of London. Though, it might be a little tricky to really feel like you’re there when you’ve been strapped down to keep you from floating away. The elastic straps and waist belt provide downward force, which allows astronauts to run and keep their muscles working while in space. Peake told the ESA that “after about 40 minutes, that gets very uncomfortable.”

Though he ran the 1999 marathon in a respectable three hours and 18 minutes, he doesn’t plan to make this race about breaking that time. “I’ve set myself a goal of anywhere between 3:30 to 4 hours,” Peake says in an ESA post.

Peake is currently in Kazakhstan, awaiting his December 15 shuttle to the space station.

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We may be dreaming of Mars this week, with NASA’s InSight lander having touched down on the red planet yesterday. But before we join InSight out in the stars, there’s still a lot of research to be done closer to home when it comes to understanding how bacteria and humans can live together in space. Researchers are finding that all kinds of bacteria are thriving on the artificially-habitable International Space Station. A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looked at one of these—namely, which strains of a potentially infectious kind of bacteria called Enterobacter follow astronauts onto the International Space Station.

Don’t freak out. For starters, none of the strains of enterobacter that they found are going to make astronauts sick. But scientific proof that these strains of the bacteria can thrive up there helps us better understand how to keep the ISS and other spacefaring vessels safe for humans.

“Understanding how microbial life grows in a closed environment like the ISS will help us be better prepared for the health concerns that come with space travel,” wrote study first author Nitin Singh in a statement provided to Popular Science by the JPL.

Enterobacter is a relatively common type of bacteria and benign strains are often found in our intestinal tracts as well as in soil and water. While most are innocuous, at least a handful of strains of these bacteria are harmful to humans and can infect our respiratory and other organ systems. The researchers analyzed five isolated Enterobacter strains collected on the ISS in 2015 as part of a series of experiments done by the JPL (another one, published recently, also looks at the staphylococcus bacteria.) Four of those came from the “waste and hygiene compartment” (where astronauts go to do their business) and the other one was from the exercise area. They sequenced the genomes of each strain and compared them to the genomes of all available Earth samples—comprising more than 1200 different strains—to see if the bacteria on the ISS were like the bacteria on Earth.

They found that the ISS strains most resemble three strains of Enterobacter bugandensis, a potentially pathogenic bacteria. Although none of the ISS Enterobacter can cause illness right now, researchers concluded that they should be watched, because E. bugandensis has caused illness here on Earth.

This study is part of a larger project at the JPL to understand and catalogue the microbial life of the ISS. “This study highlights why it’s important to monitor the microbiome of the ISS,” writes Singh. “Keeping an eye on how microbes grow and adapt lets us take better care of astronaut health, teaching us where and how frequently to clean different parts of the station.”

In space, this is extra-important, he writes, because “human immune systems are especially stressed while in space.” This means that unexpected bacteria—or low quantities of bacteria that wouldn’t make a healthy person on Earth unwell—could potentially have outsize effects.

“I think the concern on the ISS is actually no different than the concern in hospitals,” says David Coil, a University of California, Davis microbiologist who has studied bacteria on the ISS. Like hospitals, on the ISS, the natural bacteria are absent from the environment because of cleaning practices, leaving open niches for harmful bacteria to settle in–and humans themselves are often a source of these potentially harmful bacteria.

Then there’s also the fact that we don’t really understand microbiomes here on Earth. That means every paper has the potential to contribute totally new knowledge to the field. And that information is essential for space travel. “The dream of human exploration through space won’t be possible without understanding the microbial world around us,” writes Singh. “Studying these fields is a crucial part of preparing for that future.”

Maybe someday, Coil speculates, we’ll seed the ISS and spacefaring craft with a prepared microbiome to take with us into the stars, one that promotes astronaut health and is better than the current policies of keeping things as bacteria-free as possible. “We’re not there yet,” he says. “We don’t have the understanding to do that.” But, maybe someday.

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Astronaut Scott Kelly posted this picture to Instagram on Sunday, saying “Our plants aren’t looking too good. Would be a problem on Mars. I’m going to have to channel my inner Mark Watney.”

The folks onboard the International Space Station successfully grew, harvested, and ate their own lettuce this year, but the plants in the picture are looking not-so-crisp. What happened?

The space lettuce crop is not in jeopardy. The dying plants in the photo are Profusion zinnias (Zinnia hybrida), a type of flower that you might find in your neighbor’s garden. They’re generally grown for their beauty rather than as food, but they are technically edible.

NASA public affairs officer Dan Huot tells Popular Science that the plants are withering because they’re nearing the end of their natural lifespan of about 60 days.

This particular crop got a lot done during their ephemeral time in this world, though. They are the first flowering plants on the space station, and the astronauts are growing these plants in preparation for growing tomato plants in 2017.

Zinnias take a bit more work to cultivate than lettuce, and they live for about twice as long.

Huot writes in an email:

Tomato plants will be a bigger challenge yet, because they need to grow for about 90 days before bearing their juicy fruits, and then live for an additional 30 days after that. The astronauts will have to pollinate the plants’ flowers themselves, since there are no bees in space.

This post was updated on 12/28/2015 at 12:05 pm EST to include the species name of the zinnia plants.

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Virtual and augmented reality devices have slowly edged their way into our lives, popping up on headsets and in cars. Now, they are boldly going where no AR or VR has gone before, into space.

This week a resupply mission will carry two Microsoft HoloLenses to the International Space Station (ISS). The devices will be used by astronauts like real-time instruction manuals, part of a NASA project called Project Sidekick. The idea is to facilitate closer communication between astronauts in space and ground control. A technician in Houston could see what an astronaut wearing the HoloLens is seeing in real time. The person in ground control could then draw a circle around a particular piece of hardware or button on the space station, pointing it out to the astronaut and making instructions for repairs or experiments even more clear than relying on written or vocal instructions.

“HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station,” Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS program said in a statement. “This new technology could also empower future explorers requiring greater autonomy on the journey to Mars.”

To make sure the devices would work in a low-gravity environment, the headsets were tested on NASA’s Weightless Wonder, a jet that allows people to experience brief moments of weightlessness while the plane is diving towards the ground. You can watch these tests in the short video below. It’s essentially watching highly educated engineers float around weightless making strange movements in the air with their fingers, set to dramatic music.

Even though this is augmented reality, and not virtual reality, we all know that it’s only a matter of time before astronauts start getting trapped in crazy holodeck adventures. You have to admit, it might make time in the cramped quarters of the ISS fly by.

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There’s perhaps no more powerful force in nature than light. It influences everything from our cells to our mood and metabolism. Blue wavelengths cue the brain to produce cortisol to make us alert, while red wavelengths allow the production of melatonin to help us sleep—a cycle that once followed the sun and moon. The invention of the lightbulb (and smartphones) changed that. Engineers are now using lightbulbs to change it back.

“The science has led us to understand that the light we’ve been using for the past 100 years has caused damage to us,” says Fred Maxik, founder of bulb-maker Lighting Science Group. When our circadian rhythms went rogue, it increased our risk of developing obesity, depression, and even cancer. That doesn’t have to be the case, Maxik says: “We have the ability to create lights that have purposes other than just illuminating our world.”

“The light we’ve been using for the past 100 years has caused damage to us.”

Such bulbs have started to reach sockets. Last year, the Renton School District in Washington became the first to install tunable LEDs. They can be adjusted from red wavelengths, to calm students after recess, to blue, to improve test-day concentration. The Seattle Mariners installed LEDs at Safeco Field that can make nighttime games seem more like day; the New York Yankees will follow suit in 2016.

This year, NASA also plans to change the bulbs on the International Space Station, where the sun sets every 90 minutes, and constant light makes astronauts chronic insomniacs. The new bulbs will subtly shift from blue wavelengths during the workday to red when the crew needs to rest. LEDs like Lighting Science’s new Genesis Light, which hits shelves in January, will do the same thing for homes.

“We have been in this era of efficiency,” says Michael Siminovitch, a University of California at Davis professor of lighting design. “Now what can we do with technology that actually does something for us?”

This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science, as part of our Big Ideas Of 2016 feature.

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The lucky residents of the international Space Station pull 12-hour shifts, including two and a half hours of gym time and six and a half hours of lab work, among other duties. They sleep eight hours, leaving another four for goofing off in zero gravity. If the timing’s right, they call home to catch up. They watch their alma maters play football (the Army-Navy game is particularly popular). NASA has sent up playthings like guitars, keyboards, and a saxophone, as well as a chess set outfitted with Velcro to keep the pieces from floating away.

Staying entertained is vital because when you’re on long space flights, boredom can be dangerous. “It leads to performance errors,” says NASA Senior Operational Psychologist James Picano. Breaking a tool is a lot more worrisome when you’re trying to keep a vessel that weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds on course. Not only does playtime keep operations smooth, it also plugs the team into pop culture and helps Americans relate to their high-flying idols.

But astronauts might not always have that solid link to Earth—or room for guitars. NASA’s plans to go to Mars by 2040 may require a seven-month voyage in a craft with the living space of a two-car garage. Maintaining a constant long-distance signal will be tough, but when bandwidth allows, Houston could beam up TV series for binge-watching. The agency is also looking into virtual reality so interplanetary travelers can spend an afternoon at the beach.

What will the people we send to space do for fun decades from now, when they’re setting up shop on Mars and the moon? “Boy, I have no idea,” Picano says. For a glimpse, look to the South Pole’s McMurdo Research Station, which once had a manually operated bowling alley and now features a wine and coffee bar. “As a species we are innovators,” Picano adds. “If you send soldiers or scientists to confined or austere environments, they will find ways to play. It never ceases to amaze me.”

This story appeared in the Summer 2020, Play issue of Popular Science.

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Making a meal for your family or a group of hungry friends can be challenging enough. Now imagine trying to feed three people 250 miles above the Earth, who for months at a time will have no access to grocery stores or drive-thrus. All the menus you create have to be nutritionally balanced. The food needs to survive for months without refrigeration, and it needs to be pretty good, too–eating is one of the few comforts during an astronaut’s long-term stay on the International Space Station.

Food scientist Vickie Kloeris makes meals for astronauts

Vickie Kloeris’ job is to feed those astronauts. As one of NASA’s top food scientists, she manages the agency’s food laboratory as well as the ISS’s food system, making sure everyone onboard has plenty to eat and a varying menu. She’s also spent her fair share of time up new recipes for the space station residents, spending months perfecting a meal that can be freeze-dried and sterilized.

But, even as challenging as all that sounds, the space station is practically right in Earth’s backyard–venturing deeper into space will to be a lot more difficult. NASA is aiming to put the first humans on Mars in the 2030s or 40s, and contrary to popular belief, the first missions to Mars probably aren’t going to be able to depend on hydroponic greenhouses for food. It’s up to NASA’s food scientists to design and create all the food for the three-year journey to Mars and back, and that’s raising some interesting new challenges. We talked with Kloeris to find out more.

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Popular Science: What are some of the biggest challenges in designing food for a trip to Mars?

Vickie Kloeris: For the initial trip to Mars, the food will almost all be pre-positioned, so that it’s waiting for them when they arrive. If you consider it’s a 6-month trip to Mars, that food is going to be 5 to 7 years old when they get there. ¹

The challenge is having enough variety of foods that will last for that length of time, and will be high enough quality that the astronauts won’t quit eating. There is a very real phenomenon called menu fatigue, where if people don’t have enough variety or they get really bored with the food system, then they tend to eat enough to survive and not enough to thrive. We want the crew to be at top performance.

If people don’t have enough food variety, then they tend to only eat enough to survive and not enough to thrive.

The other challenge that we have is that the nutritional content of this food will decay over time. Even though our food packages are considered sterile, there are chemical reactions that take pace. The color is going to change, the texture is going to change, and the nutrition degrades over time. We need to know, after 5 to 7 years, how much nutrition is it really going to have left in it, and will there be certain nutrients that will be too scarce?

To find out, we’ve taken some of our current products and we’re doing shelf-life studies to see how the nutrients survive over time.

Will you have to develop new recipes to ensure there’s enough variety for astronauts on Mars?

We have about 200 different foods and beverages in our core menu on the ISS. So really I think that the amount of variety we have now is adequate, but the problem is that not all the foods we have now will be able to last that long. We can make foods that from a microbiological point will be safe to eat, but the quality of it and the nutritional content of it would be very questionable.

What can you do about the nutrient problem?

There is the possibility of fortification. You could put an excessive amount of a nutrient in the food to begin with, so that when it degrades over time, it’ll still be at an acceptable level.

The military has some of the same concerns that we do–they’d love to make food that lasts a really long time for the troops, so we’ve actually partnered with them on some research that’s being done. They’re looking into two emerging technologies: high pressure processing and microwave sterilization². The advantages to these two technologies is that theoretically they don’t do as much heat damage to the food that you’re processing. If you’re applying less heat or for a shorter period of time, you degrade fewer nutrients. And if you’re starting at a higher level of nutrients, you can end with a higher level.

Because you’re using less heat, you get a better color, better texture, better flavor, and more nutrients. That’s the hope anyway.

Are there other concerns about feeding astronauts on Mars?

Deep space radiation and its effects on food are kind of an unknown at this time, and one of the problems that we have is there’s no good way to recreate that on Earth to test it.

A few years ago we did an experiment. We kept control sets of food and medicine on the ground, and sent equivalent items to the ISS, then brought them back and compared. Radiation in low Earth orbit on the ISS did not have a significant effect on the food’s quality and nutrients. But that kind of radiation is quite different from when they totally leave Earth’s atmosphere.

Deep space radiation and its effects on food are unknown

NASA is looking at having a small waypoint destination somewhere near the moon. We’re looking at possibly sending food there, and possibly keeping in there for a while to see what effect deep space radiation might have on the food.

Will Mars explorers grow their own food?

One of the things that I definitely see happening would be them growing some pick-and-eat items in something like the Veggie machine. The volume of what they’re going to be able to grow is going to be so small that it’s probably not going to have a significant contribution to their nutrition, but it will probably have a huge psychological contribution.

Astronaut Steve Swanson stands next to Veggie

The idea of growing significant amounts of food on that first mission is probably just not going to happen. If we really make the commitment to colonize mars, to actually keep people there like on the ISS, then you’re probably going to have some kind of module to grow plants continuously.

What role will 3D printing play in martian meals?

They’re 3D printing now on station, in terms of tools and parts. But for now, 3D printing of food is not as mature as 3D printing of tools is.

The thing about 3D printing of tools and parts is, there’s a lot of incentive to carry that forward and to perfect that technology. People have demonstrated they could make lighter-weight parts for airplanes that actually are stronger than what they were producing before. For 3D printing of food, there’s not so much of a financial incentive. Right now it’s much more of a fad, but it all depends on what happens with the technology going forward.

What if 3D printing of food improves?

Then the tradeoff is going to be, can you get enough products out of that 3d printer to make it worth the mass and the volume it takes to get it to Mars?

Insects are another recent food fad. Could bugs becoming a part of an astronaut’s diet?

[Laughs] I don’t see that happening. Food is one of the few creature comforts that the astronauts have, so the food has become really important from a psychological perspective.

I worked on practically every shuttle mission, and those were so short, the food was not all that important. They thought, ‘It’s like a camping trip, I’ll find something I’ll like.’

Conceptual Rendering Of A Greenhouse On Mars.

On long-duration missions, food becomes more important from a psychological perspective

When we started doing long-duration stays on Mir and now the ISS, the crews quickly realized the food becomes more important from a psychological perspective. For Mars we’re talking about a three-year trip, so food is definitely going to be important. That’s why I personally believe we’re never going to have a lot of traction with getting them to eat algae or insects.

Will astronauts need to eat more food, or more of any particular nutrients, when they’re on Mars?

All of the research that we have done thus far indicates that there is no significant difference between [a person’s needs at Earth’s gravity] and microgravity. Experiments done on the shuttle program used doubly labeled water, where the astronaut ingests an isotope of water, and then you can trace it coming out in the urine. By tracing how much comes out, you can calculate exactly how many calories a person is using.

They did these experiments on shuttle astronauts, comparing when they were on ground and in orbit, and found no significant difference. Now, the shuttle flights were short, so because of that, the Europeans are repeating those experiments now on the ISS, to see if caloric needs change during longer a stay in space. It’ll be very interesting to see what they find.

Footnotes

1.

The trip takes so long because NASA has to wait for Earth and Mars to be in their closest alignment, which happens about every two years. It also depends on what method of propulsion NASA uses to send the pre-supply missions to Mars–some methods are faster than others. Go back

2.

Kloeris’ team normally uses high heat and a little bit of pressure to sterilize food. High pressure processing uses exactly the opposite–low heat and high pressure–to do the same job.

Microwave sterilization still uses quite a bit of heat, but it applies it for a shorter period of time, which should also theoretically result in fewer chemical and nutritional changes.

These two sterilization techniques are still in the experimental stages, requiring approval from the FDA and USDA. If all goes well, companies would still need to find a way to scale the processes up in order to process large amounts of food. Go back

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The International Space Station maybe not be international for much longer. According to an NASA email leaked (by an undetermined source) to the Orlando Sentinel, the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010 will cede de facto control of the ISS to Russia. That control will come just as NASA finishes assembling the ISS in 2011.

The email, written by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, notes that retiring the space shuttle before NASA deploys a replacement leaves Russia as the only country in the world able to ferry man and material back and forth from the ISS. With the replacement for the shuttle slated for “no later than 2014,” that leaves the operation of the ISS dependent on Russian good will for four years. And good will is something that Russia doesn’t seem to be throwing around a lot of these days.

Griffin has spent the last few days appearing on various news outlets from CBS News to Florida Today, all the while painting a rather bleak picture of future American involvement with the ISS. NASA’s missions with its Russian counterpart hinge on Congress exempting NASA from the Iran, North Korea, Syria Non-Proliferation Act that regulates advanced technology exchange between the US and Russia. The Russian Soyuz capsules used to service the ISS fall under that treaty, and NASA needs to custom order the capsules for their missions. The order for the next mission needs to be completed by early 2009, and with the recent conflict in Georgia souring relations between Russia and the US, Griffin believes that it is unlikely the exemption would be approved in time to order the capsule.

Additionally, Griffin posits that the next administration might extend the life of the shuttle, but seeing as that might come at the cost of developing its replacement, it may merely push the period of Russian control into the future without shortening it. What Russia is going to do with the ISS is anyone’s guess. I, for one, can think of a certain super villain president, fresh off a tiger-tranquillizing binge, who might need a space station to replace his secret volcano lair.

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[UPDATE: At the press conference, NASA awarded three private spaceflight companies commercial resupply contracts to the International Space Station]

NASA has announced that there will be a ‘major announcement’ about cargo transport to the International Space Station today. What will they be announcing? We can’t say for sure, but we thought of a few possibilities.

There’s a strong chance that it will be about awarding contracts for new companies to resupply the space station. In 2014, NASA put out a call for new commercial contract proposals, and we could be seeing the results today. Currently there are two companies running supplies to the station: SpaceX and Orbital ATK, but others, including Sierra Nevada, are still hoping for a chance to fly cargo to the ISS.

The announcement might also be related to SpaceX’s return to running supplies to the station next month, on February 7. The company hasn’t been back to the ISS since their resupply flight exploded last June.

Transporting cargo is essential to the continued operation of the space station. Without resupply missions, astronauts would not be able to stay on the ISS for long periods of time. Cargo resupply missions include basics like food, but also tools, equipment, and science experiments.

The webcast will start at 4PM eastern and can be watched on NASA TV. For the livestream, click here.

International Space Station

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The competition in commercial space just got a little more intense. In an highly anticipated press conference today, NASA officials announced private spaceflight company Sierra Nevada will join SpaceX and Orbital ATK and begin launching cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.

Sierra Nevada is not expected to start flying its Space Shuttle-like Dream Chaser vehicle to the ISS until 2019, but it’s expected to be a game-changer for science. Sierra Nevada’s missions will include an option that will have a relatively soft landing and can be quickly and easily unloaded, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Sierra Nevada anticipates being able to return cargo from the ISS and recover it on Earth within 3-6 hours. That would be a huge advantage to scientists who currently might have to wait days to recover samples.

Each company will have a minimum of six flights to the ISS.

This is the second round of commercial resupply contracts awarded. The first round awarded commercial contracts to SpaceX and Orbital ATK. The fact that both of the current contract holders suffered failures (read: they exploded) played a role in the selection of a third candidate as well. Though specifics of the selection process will be released later, NASA obviously wants to make sure that they have plenty of different routes to get supplies to the space station. These new contracts will last thorough 2024.

SpaceX’s next mission to the ISS is expected to occur next month or later.

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If NASA really wants to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, it needs to up its game. That’s according to the latest report from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), a group that advises NASA on safety issues.

The report raises some serious safety concerns over the rocket and spacecraft that will send NASA astronauts to Mars. The report also says that NASA’s overall plan to get to Mars is too vague.

The lack of a clearly defined plan could put the “Journey to Mars” at risk.

Part of the problem, as the report points out, is political uncertainty. NASA scientists spent years during the Bush administration planning the Constellation program—a plan to send humans back to the moon and then on to Mars–which mostly got scrapped when President Obama took office. With another election year coming up, NASA officials may be reluctant to enter into any major projects.

However, by not spelling out a clearly defined plan for getting to Mars, the space agency could be putting the Journey to Mars program at risk.

We should also consider going back to the moon before Mars, according to the report. Everyone and their brother is taking aim at the moon these days—from the European Space Agency to Russia and private companies. Plus, says the report, it is “unclear how NASA will develop low-gravity surface experience and technology without lunar surface experience.”

It makes sense that we should learn to live on the moon before going all the way to the red planet. But it would also come at an added cost to the already cash-strapped space agency. And it will probably require an Administration change; President Obama’s attitude toward human exploration of the moon is basically “been there, done that.”

Continuing the ISS past 2024 may delay the Journey to Mars.

Finally, it looks like NASA may have to choose between maintaining the International Space Station and getting to Mars.

America’s space agency has some tough choices ahead. NASA is often praised for doing so much on such a relatively small budget, but lately it seems the agency is spreading itself too thin. Sometimes, less is more.

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Happy holidays from the International Space Station! Film student Giacomo Sardelli created this timelapse video of the ISS to promote world connectedness and peace on Earth. ‘Tis the season. Although this background music is way more epic than “Frosty The Snowman.”

Further Up Yonder from Giacomo Sardelli on Vimeo.

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Astronaut insomnia is somewhat legendary at NASA, with astronauts popping sleep pills with regularity and averaging only six hours of sleep a night, far less than the eight and a half hours they’re technically allotted. This can cause serious problems as fatigue sets in. To help matters, NASA is embarking on a major mission to change all the light bulbs on the space station.

The right type of light can work wonders for people whose circadian rhythms are messed with by working in (or through, as it were) space. Scientists working on Mars missions have to live on Mars time, for instance, which causes great consternation as sleep schedules constantly shift. But a recent study by Steven Lockley at Harvard University found that blue light and efficient “sleep hygiene,” as it’s known, can improve matters.

This is partly because of the relatively recent discovery that mammal eyes have a special time-telling ability. Photoreceptors in ganglion cells at the front of the retina are not used for vision, but are able to detect light at the blue end of the spectrum (which we learned about in Lockley’s Mars blue-light study this fall). These cells help the body calculate time, and stimulating them can affect a person’s perception of day and night. This works in part by interfering with the production of melatonin.

On the ISS, astronauts’ ganglion photoreceptors are constantly stimulated by the 90-minute cycle of sunrise and sunset–and the constant presence of the station’s interior lighting system. The result could be less melatonin production, and therefore fitful sleep.

NASA plans to swap out 85 fluorescent lights on the U.S. portion of the orbital lab and replace them with special diffused LEDs, which can filter light into different hues. They would provide white light during work hours, bluish light in the morning or when it’s important that astronauts wake up for an emergency, and reddish light to help them sleep. Scientific American reviews the effort by Boeing to build the new lights, which would be installed by 2015.

Lockley, who conducted the Mars blue-light study, is also studying the efficacy of the new lights. Meanwhile, electronics giant Philips recently announced its new Hue bulb, which can be tuned to the red or blue end of the spectrum using a smartphone. So it’s possible lights like this will be prevalent on Earth as well as in space.

Still, as the SciAm article points out, the reasons for astronaut insomnia are many and varied, encompassing anything from Houston-Moscow command center time zone shifts to stale air and constant noise. New light bulbs won’t change any of that, unfortunately.

SciAm

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Taking time to stop and smell the flowers can be difficult when you’re 248 miles above the Earth traveling at 17,500 mph. But now, the astronauts on the International Space Station actually have some flowers onboard, and they didn’t even have to stop for them (not that they could).

Over the weekend, astronaut Scott Kelly showed the world a lovely orange zinnia, an annual that’s usually pretty easy to grow here on Earth. But up on the ISS, getting it to grow safely was a challenge.

Back in December, NASA announced that the zinnias were not doing so well, nearing the end of their lifespan and growing a coating of mold. Frustrated with the prescribed instructions for plant care from the ground, on Christmas, Kelly requested permission to take over the plant’s care, becoming one of the first autonomous space gardeners (sorry, Mark Watney).

With some careful monitoring, watering and a well-placed fan to help dry off the leaves (and inhibit mold growth), some of the plants started to recover, eventually blooming beautifully.

NASA is particularly interested in gardening, not just to learn more about plants, but as a way for astronauts to relieve stress in cramped quarters. NASA’s behavorial health researchers believe that caring for plants can help astronauts maintain their mental health while in space while giving them meaningful work.

While the zinnias are among the first flowers to bloom on the space station, they aren’t the first flowers to bloom in space. Sunflowers, zucchini and even lettuce have bloomed safely.

The zinnias are a step up in difficulty from the lettuce plants that the astronauts grew (and ate!) back in August last year. Successfully growing zinnias will help future Space Station crews learn enough about plant care to eventually grow tomatoes by 2017.

Lettuce and tomato…all they need now is some bacon. Space pigs anyone?

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In the movie The Martian, a stranded astronaut is able to survive for years in a habitat that NASA originally designed to last 30 days. The movie is fictional, but the premise is not so far from reality: a lot of the stuff that NASA designs ends up lasting well beyond its original expiration date–from Mars rovers to the Kepler Space Telescope.

From 1998 to 2011, five different space agencies assembled the the largest structure ever built in space. In the beginning, NASA thought the International Space Station would last through 2015. Well, it’s 2015 now, and the station’s 15-year anniversary just passed. It’s holding up pretty well for such an old-timer. Could it survive another 15 years?

Over the past few years, the ISS’s life expectancy has been extended to 2020, and then 2024. That gives us another 9 years to perform fun science experiments in microgravity and test out commercial spacecraft as well as technologies that could help us on a journey to Mars. But NASA may be able to squeeze even more years out of the space habitat.

A Life Beyond 2024?

Boeing, the primary contractor for the ISS, is in the midst of a feasibility study to see if the station could survive until 2028.

As the ISS orbits our planet, it gets baked by the sun on one side of Earth, then freezes on the other, darker side. Those thermal extremes can cause its materials to expand and contract, and that can lead to wear and tear. The docking and undocking of spacecraft also causes mechanical stress, says Brad Cothran, Boeing’s director of sustaining engineering for the ISS program.

Nevertheless, the space station stands a good chance of surviving to 2028. “Right now we don’t see any show stoppers,” Cothran told Popular Science, though he adds: “There are things we’re going to have to address.”

Weak Points

With the constant addition of new science experiments on the ISS, the station’s solar panels are going to need to collect more energy than ever. Unfortunately, they’re looking a little haggard after their 15 years in orbit. Space radiation blackens the transparent glass over the solar cells, blocking some sunlight from entering, and every now and then small bits of space debris take out a string of solar cells.

When the space station was new, its solar arrays produced 220 kilowatts of power. By 2028, Boeing predicts they will only generate 160 kilowatts.

“We think we can get to 2028,” says Cothran, “but it’s something that we’ll have address.”

Even if the solar panels crap out, it wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of the ISS. Boeing has an idea to overlay the old panels with newer, more efficient cells, should the need arise.

“Right now we don’t see any show stoppers.”

Then there’s just the usual problem of technological obsolescence.

“The computers are already kind of outdated,” says Daniel Huot, a NASA public affairs officer. “A lot of people rip on us for still using Windows XP on a couple of things.” But he added that the electronics that the astronauts usually interface with are updated on a semi-regular basis.

The ISS’s Internet connection could also be an annoyance in future.

“The station’s primary objective is to perform science, but if you look at today’s experiments–compared to 15 years ago, and compared to where we’re gonna be in another 15 years–require much more data to come back down to the ground,” says Cothran. “We’re going to need more bandwidth.”

Astronauts have mentioned the moderately slow Internet connection on the ISS. Boeing is working on getting it up to speed, and the will continue to fight to keep up.

“We’re going to need more bandwidth.”

But these are minor points that are relatively easy to fix or replace. In fact, says Cothran, the only thing that would really make the ISS uninhabitable would be if the hull of the space station threatened to breach, exposing astronauts to the deadly, freezing vacuum of space. But so far, so good.

“By 2028, the first elements of the space station will be 30 years old,” says Huot. “[Boeing] just has to do the analysis, and they very well could come back and say more years are possible. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.”

Cothran agrees. “Right now, I don’t see any reason why it can’t keep flying beyond 2028.”

International Space Station, Feb. 2010

A Stepping Stone To Mars

In the ISS’s 15 years of operation, the biggest challenge, says Cothran, has been to maintain the regenerative life systems. Those are the systems that recycle water, provide oxygen for the astronauts to breath, and scrub carbon dioxide out of the air. These critical systems have gone through multiple generations of technology, and as a result of this learning experience, Cothran thinks a manned mission to Mars might actually make it there and back.

Likely the ISS will continue to be an important stepping stone to Mars. Life support systems, potential habitats, and other equipment astronauts might need to survive on Mars could be tested on the International Space Station. From there, the equipment would likely be tested on or in orbit around the Moon, before heading to Mars.

On the other hand, NASA is on a limited budget, and maintaining the space station costs about $3.5 billion per year. That’s a lot of money that could be used to fund other science missions–including investing in technology that could carry humans to Mars.

If NASA decides not to inhabit the ISS beyond 2024, the space station would experience a fiery death as it plunges through the Earth’s atmosphere on a controlled trajectory, to splash down into the ocean

“I hope that doesn’t happen during my lifetime,” says Cothran.

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If you’re a die-hard morning person, don’t start packing your bags for Mars just yet. A recent study suggests that people who prefer to sleep in and stay up late may be better suited for Mars.

Our bodies have internal clocks that tell us how long a day is, and we’re all set to somewhere just around 24 hours. But there’s evidence that early risers’ internal body clocks that run a little faster than average, while night-owls’ clocks run a little slower. And since a day on Mars is about 37 minutes longer than 24 hours, those with a slower body clock (that is, one that takes longer than 24 hours to complete a natural cycle) may find the adjustment to Mars time easier.

Telegraph reporter Sarah Knapton made this connection after seeing the findings from a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article.

The study found that mice whose internal clocks ran faster than Earth’s 24-hour day did not survive and thrive as well as mice whose clocks were synced with the Earth’s rotation. For those mice, it probably felt like Daylight Savings every day–i.e. not very fun–and in fact they died out after a few generations. The study underlines the importance of syncing your body clock with the rotation of the planet you’re on.

Andrew Loudon, one of the study authors, tells Knapton:

Know who else might not be invited to Mars?

Vegans, the gluten-intolerant, and other folks with extreme dietary restrictions. As NASA food scientist Vicky Kloeris told Popular Science earlier this month, it isn’t easy designing the food for Mars.

Assuming NASA can get the food to stay palatable and nutritious after the long journey to Mars, the space agency plans to feed Martians the same stuff that it feeds the astronauts on the International Space Station–which wasn’t designed with any finicky dietary needs in mind.

Designing a balanced and varied diet for a vegan or gluten-intolerant astronaut would mean that Kloeris and her colleagues would have to cook up a whole new menu for that astronaut, as well as run the new food items through various tests to make sure they’ll stay fresh and yummy in space.

“Could it be done?” asks Kloeris. “Yes. But if you were to send a vegan or someone who is gluten-intolerant or severely lactose-intolerant, you would have to make an enormous amount of special accommodations for that person. That would cost a lot of extra money. So that would be a decision that NASA would have to make.”

Considering NASA’s plan to get to Mars is already adding up to be pretty pricey, we wouldn’t count on that. So if you have a peanut allergy or absolutely can’t eat gluten or dairy products, maybe save yourself the trouble of applying to be an astronaut.

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Astronaut Tim Peake filmed this gorgeous view of Earth from space. The short clip shows what the Arabian sea looks like from the International Space Station. If Peake had wanted to record the station’s entire orbit around the Earth, the video would be 90 minutes long–about the same length as a feature-length movie.

Though it might come as a surprise to some people, the video clearly shows that the Earth is, in fact, round.

Astronauts on the space station regularly take pictures and video of their incredible view, including these of the recent blizzard that struck the East Coast.

Peake, a British astronaut, is a little over a month into his six-month scientific mission, a time in which he will be working on 30 experiments for the European Space Agency, and participating in about a dozen other research projects. He’s even planning on running the London Marathon while he’s up there.

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NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian Cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were headed to the International Space Station Thursday morning when the Soyuz rocket carrying them malfunctioned, triggering an abort sequence that sent them on a harrowing but safe journey to the ground.

Hague, a NASA astronaut, was looking forward to his first trip to the ISS. He tweeted yesterday that he couldn’t wait to see the space station in person. Now, he’ll have to wait for a future mission to take him there.

There are currently three crew members on the International Space station. NASA’s Serena Auñón-Chancellor, Roscosmos’ Sergey Prokopyev, and the ESA’s Alexander Gerst were all scheduled to return on December 13, with their eventual replacements launching to the station on December 20. Gerst took command of the ISS last week, when their three companions—Drew Feustel, Ricky Arnold, and Oleg Artemyev—departed back to Earth. Russian News Agency TASS said that the astronauts on board have enough supplies and that their operations will continue as scheduled, a fact that was later confirmed by NASA in a press briefing. But the crew will also have to operate minus two expected crew members. Here’s how today’s events might affect the space station going forward:

Can the astronauts get back to Earth?

There is a Soyuz capsule currently attached to the ISS, so the astronauts aboard do have a way back home. (Yes, it’s the one with a—sealed—hole. No, the hole isn’t in the part of the spacecraft that will re-enter the atmosphere.)

That Soyuz is scheduled to bring the three astronauts back to Earth in December, but if they exit before crewed Soyuz launches start again, they might have to leave the ISS uncrewed. The astronauts are extremely well-provisioned, and could stay on the ISS for slightly longer, but the Soyuz capsule itself is only certified for 200 days (about 6.5 months) in space, a timer which will run out in January.

Can the ISS even operate without a crew?

Yes, the orbiting laboratory can theoretically operate without a crew. And this issue has come up before. In August 2011, after a Soyuz rocket carrying an uncrewed Progress spacecraft crashed, people asked the same question. Luckily, the engineers identified the issue, and while next crewed launch was pushed from September 2011 to November 2011, the ISS was never left uninhabited.

In the event they had to leave, the departing astronauts would make sure that redundant cooling, electrical, and other systems were set up and ready to spring into action, if needed. Ground control would send commands to keep the station’s altitude and trajectory out of the path of space debris and above our atmosphere. Theoretically, astronauts could return to the station and get it back up and running without any trouble.

The problem, then, isn’t with the station, but with ourselves. Or rather, with our goals for the place. In a NASA press conference, International Space Station Operations Integration Manager Kenny Todd said that for crewed missions of the highly anticipated American-made Crew Dragon and Starliner capsules to take place, there would need to be astronauts already onboard the station to monitor he innaugural flight(s).

What will happen to the planned spacewalks?

This is a tricky question. There were originally two spacewalks scheduled for this mission; one on October 19 and one on October 25 to upgrade the Station’s power system. After the hole incident, another spacewalk was tentatively added to the docket for November to investigate the exterior of the Soyuz where the leak occurred.

Unfortunately, of the two scheduled spacewalkers, only one (Alexander Gerst) is on the station. The other, astronaut Nick Hague, was on the launch vehicle this morning. So for now, that schedule is up in the air. “We planned to do a few spacewalks over the next two weeks, and we’ll be taking a hard look at that as one of the EVA spacewalkers is still on the ground,” Todd said in the press conference.

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Astronaut Scott Kelly—twin brother to Mark and current commander of the International Space Station’s Expedition 45 crew—has now spent more than 380 days consecutively in space, and holds the record for most time spent off the planet by an American citizen.

That is a lot of time away from pop culture and the earworms of current radio, so we’ll forgive Kelly if his recently released Spotify playlist, titled ‘Songs of a Year Spent in Space’, skews a bit towards ‘dad rock’ and away from whichever OVO jam debuted on SoundCloud last week.

Kelly’s two-hour-plus mix, though, is catchy! He followed all the rules outlined by High Fidelity‘s Rob Gordon for how to construct the perfect mixtape, which is an art form:

Kelly starts off with a bang with a nod to Rihanna (Jasmine Thompson’s cover of ‘Stay’), Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’, ‘These are the Days’ by 10,000 Maniacs, Coldplay (‘Speed of Sound’), and an appearance by Mr. Worldwide and Xtina with ‘Feel This Moment.’

But just as the tape clears the auditory mesosphere, Kelly shuts off the jets and cools out with some John Lennon (‘Imagine’), Snow Patrol (‘Chasing Cars’), and James Taylor (‘Fire and Rain’, which to be honest, adds a touch of morbidity to the mix). He has essentially turned ISS into a mobile Starbucks.

Kelly also includes a few other ‘dad rock’ touches with Pearl Jam’s ‘Black’, ‘Hotel California’ by the Eagles, Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’, and a back-to-back doozy of Christina Perri (‘A Thousand Years’) and Fleetwood Mac (‘Landslide’). Kelly is understandably busy working, and these are great jams for spacing out and concentrating on harvesting space-grown lettuce and keeping up with social media trends.

Like anyone who spent time making, and remaking, mixtapes, Kelly knows it is important to end with a strong track. Kelly is a born-and-raised Jersey boy, and the final track is perfect: ‘Thunder Road’, the quintessential Bruce Springsteen song. I imagine that as Kelly flies thousands of miles above us, he practices his air saxophone when the Big Man kicks in during the song’s final minute.

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NASA will fire up its latest rocket this April for its first test flight. Ares 1 is designed to haul a 25-ton payload, making it capable of ferrying either six astronauts to the International Space Station or four astronauts to low-Earth orbit, where they can transfer to another vehicle and head to the moon. The rocket contains two stages: a reusable solid rocket booster and an engine powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. If all goes well with Orion, NASA’s planned crew vehicle, Ares 1 will be whisking the first crews into space by 2015.

Read more of Popular Science’s predictions for 2009.

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British astronaut Tim Peake, currently aboard the International Space Station, has been posting some stunning short videos on Instagram and Twitter showing his view of the Earth some 250 miles below.

As he notes in the Instagram post below, it’s amazing to watch lightning and the aurora illuminate the thin bubble of atmosphere around our planet.

Response to Peake’s photos and videos from his followers has been overwhelmingly positive, with parents writing to tell him how much he’s inspired their children, people thanking him for taking pictures of their hometowns, and even a few people writing in with requests to see their home countries from space:

Instagram comments

Some astronauts, like American astronaut and Space Station Commander Scott Kelly, are trained in photography along with other skills as part of their preparations for space. And Popular Science spoke with NASA last year in great detail about the agency’s new and extensive social media training for astronauts.

Peake apparently got a few lessons from Kelly on the space station. Peake launched to the space station last December and is due to return to Earth in June.

Meanwhile, Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko are due to return to Earth in early March after spending over a year aboard the International Space Station, the longest continuous mission of its kind aboard this floating orbital habitat (also the longest continuous stay in space for any American astronaut so far in history).

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Bigelow Aerospace has for years been trying to get the world to take its inflatable space habitats seriously, and while some have regarded the Vegas-based firm’s grand visions for such things as an inflatable orbiting space hotels and manned moon bases with skepticism, NASA has always been willing to listen to Bigelow’s big ideas. And now, the space agency is investing in them. NASA has awarded the private space contractor a $17.8 million contract to develop a new inflatable addition to the International Space Station.

We first heard about this potential partnership almost exactly a year ago, but at that point an actual deal between NASA and Bigelow was anything but certain. Bigelow had previously launched two concept space habitats into orbit (unmanned, of course) demonstrating, at the very least, that they work in prototype. But that’s a far cry from gaining a foothold aboard one of the world’s most expensive science experiments.

For now, it appears the deal is going forward, though neither NASA nor Bigelow has released the details of the agreement (the two are holding a presser on Wednesday). Will the module actually be used as additional laboratory or living space for the astronauts aboard the ISS, or is it itself an experiment to see how inflatable space habitat technology might be deployed in future missions (or both)? More details on this when they become available.

NASA

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Of all of the sophisticated technology powering the International Space Station, nothing brings the frustration of modern living back home to those of us on Earth more than a report of a broken toilet. Only the astronauts can’t make an after-work run to the home repair store; they have to devise creative solutions while they wait for Saturday’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery to bring them repair parts.

In the gravity-free environment of the ISS, the waste collection system uses fans to push excrement and urine into storage containers. The fan for the solid waste collector is fine, but the liquid waste fan has given up the ghost with “a loud noise.” After an unsuccessful attempt at replacing particular devices in the system, the crew was told by Russian mission control to use the toilet in the Soyuz capsule, which is docked at the ISS as an escape pod. But like an RV in the driveway, it has a limited capacity.

In the meantime, NASA is reporting that the crew is “bypassing the troublesome hardware” with a “special receptacle” attached to the toilet. For those of us who have jury-rigged our own home repairs, we know there’s no shame in having to go in plastic bags until the plumber finally shows up.

[Via NYTimes]

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We showed you what it looks like when astronauts dissolve an antacid tablet in a floating ball of water.

Now, they’ve taken it a step further, making life on the station a bit more colorful by adding food coloring to their otherwise bland floating balls of clear water. If the water and antacid reaction looked like a small cratered moon, these dyed orbs look like brightly colored planets, floating sedately through the weightless environment (the green ‘planet’ gets a bit of a cratered look when an astronaut adds an antacid tablets to the orb).

The astronauts weren’t just doing this for fun (though it is a fantastic side benefit). The videos demonstrate the usefulness of the Epic Dragon high-resolution camera, the same model of camera that was used to shoot the Hobbit films in incredible detail. Being able to capture detailed images of experiments in space allows scientists to get an even more detailed view of the processes going on in this weightless environment. These videos of bubbly colored water are a way for researchers to put the camera through its paces before setting it to monitor other, more intensive experiments.

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This is the Aurora Borealis as Scott Kelly sees it from the International Space Station. It’s breathtaking, inspiring–and perfect for Instagram.

That’s why Kelly posted it there. It was a huge hit, with over 19,300 likes at the time of this article. NASA has only been on Instagram since September 2013, but it has amassed over 4.6 million followers on its flagship account, in a little over two years. With images like the one above, it isn’t hard to see why.

“Space is interesting to lots of different people, for lots of different reasons,” says NASA Press Secretary Lauren B. Worley, “Interest in space is something that doesn’t go away.”

Those 4.6 million Instagrammers may certainly be interested in space, but the real connection between them and NASA is the perspective of space in those pictures. They’re first-person, taken by the people who are actually seeing all of the wonders of the universe up close: the astronauts.

Astronauts’ social media posts are a big part of why NASA attracts so many followers. They’re the only human beings seeing the wonders of space firsthand.

Step One: Making Time

Yet, astronauts aren’t being sent into space to rack up social media followers; they’ve got plenty to do on the space station or in orbit without snapping pictures “We don’t have any time scheduled in our day for social media, and our off time is actually very limited on the space station,” NASA astronaut Reid Weisman tells Popular Science. “We generally work about a 12-hour day.”

Participation in social media is entirely voluntary for astronauts. They may prep for a mission knowing very little about social media, but by and large they feel almost obligated to participate.

“I feel a responsibility to it,” admits Weisman, who knew nothing about Twitter before being prepped at NASA. “We sneak off and take a few pictures out the window of the Earth. I mean, you gotta share that. It’s so beautiful.”

Astronaut Reid Weisman on the International Space Station

And how, exactly, do astronauts share those beautiful pictures of Earth? With the help of Social Media Specialists like Crag Bernard, who helped Reid’s Twitter feed earn over 382,000 followers.

“I brief them on the existing social media guidance,” Bernard says, “It’s suggestions more than requirements. There’s no distinction between social media and any other way we communicate with the public.”

The fun part is helping astronauts figuring out what to share, says Bernard. “When we first talked, [Weisman] was like, ‘I want to do things on the World Cup, #spotthestation, and looping videos,’” Bernard recalls. “From that, we decided on the [social] platform selection and the mechanics.”

There was also the consideration of what Weisman could offer that no other astronaut had at the time – which, given the launch of Vine, was looping video. “I was first drawn to the looping videos because I’d followed a ton of guys and girls who have gone into space, and the pictures were always amazing,” Weisman says. “But there wasn’t really a platform that just threw the video on a feed.”

Thankfully for Weisman, Vine had just come out when he was about to go into orbit, and it became the perfect platform for adding live looping video to his Twitter feed.

After clarifying a social media strategy, all the astronauts had to do was supply the content. “I would develop the content, attach a picture or Vine video [to an email], or tell [Craig] where to go to find the Vine video, and I’d downlink,“ says Weisman. “Then Craig would blast that out onto Twitter.”

Step Two: Posting From Space Ain’t Easy

That sounds simple, but sharing pictures or video from space isn’t as easy as logging onto the local Wi-Fi. On the ISS, the technical difficulties involved in using the internet increased exponentially, as Weisman discovered:

Thankfully, NASA figured out a solution. As Weisman recalls:

The whole process is collaborative, with a bit of back and forth to maximize the content’s reach on its given platform.

“A lot of times [astronauts] will reach out to me and want to brainstorm on things,” Bernard says. “That’s when I’ll look at current activities, hashtags, what’s trending, and offer suggestions back to them. The key, when [Weisman] sends me something, is to make sure it’s factually correct…I almost felt like Siri there, for a little while,” Bernard adds, chuckling.

After fact-checking and doing due diligence on anything the astronaut may have asked about, the astronaut’s content is posted live on social media.

The process doesn’t always run that smoothly, though. For one thing, even NASA has to fend off trolls.

“Anytime you post a picture there’s always a chance of someone saying ‘Hey! I see a UFO!’ or ‘I don’t think this is real!’ You’re always going to get that kind of thing,” Bernard says.

For another, astronauts don’t always get the platform they ask for. According to Jason Townsend, NASA’s social media manager and the person in charge of NASA’s organizational accounts, the choice of platforms is a “multi-factored” discussion. He rattles off a list of questions that he and his colleagues ask when helping astronauts post to social media: “Do we have the capacity for that? Is it bringing a new audience, or a new way of displaying content? Do we have somebody we could reach on there that we couldn’t reach elsewhere?”

Townsend and his two-person team are responsible for answering all of those questions, building relationships with all the platforms, and – yes – deciding if and how NASA will use them. It’s a big job, and it all boils down to one big goal: relevance. “We do things all the time to try to make NASA relevant,” says John Yembrick, another social media manager behind NASA’s flagship accounts. “Inject NASA where it makes sense. If something’s trending – like Leonard Nimoy’s passing, or National Doughnut Day, or that One Direction video – and if it makes sense for us to be there, we will be.”

Lastly, social media has a bit of a learning curve, even for NASA. “There was a test firing of a rocket engine,” says Yembrick, “we did an 8-minute video and it bombed online. We pulled out a 45-second bit for social and it did great.”

“Social media is really eye-opening,” adds Townsend. “When [we] started, it was a great learning tool. Retweeting taught us how to recompose tweets.” “Every day you learn something new,” admits Yembrick. “Framing content and seeing how people respond to it-–sharing with friends and followers-–is one of my favorite parts [of the job].”

A post from NASA Europa’s Instagram

Step Three: Connecting With Followers IRL

NASA has a wealth of content from which to build a social media platform, from astronaut’s social media feeds to image galleries, TV stations, and patents. NASA rightfully sees all of that content as a goldmine, and is doing everything it can to share it. Social media gives them an effective way to do so, and allows them to do what they do best: inspire.

“Imagine if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had had social media when they were on the moon,” says Weisman. “It would be a totally different experience for everybody.”

That push to inspire has been a core part of NASA’s strategy ever since it started using social media in 2009. After Mike Massamino’s first tweet from space that year, NASA has since held regular social media events, fittingly called, “Socials,” in which the agency has invited over 6,500 social media followers behind the scenes of launches.

At these events, followers are allowed to see launches up close and share them with their own friends online in real time, with “no conditions on what they can say, other than stuff that’s off-limits for security reasons,” says Worley.

With 10 communication centers distributing content across 13 platforms, NASA’s doing everything it can to both support and embrace its increasingly loyal followers. And the strategy seems to be paying off: NASA has embraced social media like the best major brands do. Certainly more than any other government agency.

It’s a marked contrast to NASA’s communication style with the public during the beginnings of the space program. According to Yembrick, who worked in space operations at NASA prior to social media, it all comes down to one major difference: access. “NASA’s always been doing amazing things,” he says, “but the public didn’t know it was happening.”

Back at the beginning of the space program, the public primarily learned about NASA via the major news media. There were dedicated reporters who covered launch-related events and other space news. These reporters had access to all of NASA’s information, and as such that’s whom NASA geared their information towards.

In order for the general public to learn more, they had to dig the information up themselves, and only the die-hard space geeks did that. But now, public information is much more accessible. “Our job as communication specialists is to not just share, but put the information in plain English,” says Yembrick. “We don’t need to create these big news products. We need to create social friendly content. People aren’t just observers. Nowadays, people can participate with NASA.”

And participate they do.

“During the government shutdown [in 2013], for 17 days, we were all furloughed,” recalls Yembrick. “We couldn’t do anything, even though we wanted to!”

During that time, Yembrick says, the community stepped up and shared tweets using the hashtag, #thingsNASAmighttweet. They went from being armchair observers who knew what the astronauts would do and cover to actually being the ones that got that information out to the media.

NASA’s social media followers will even take down the trolls for them: “You’ll see the social media community kind of take on those battles for you,” Bernard says.

But perhaps the strongest testament to NASA sharing its content so freely is how inspired they feel because of their followers.

“I put a picture of this atoll on the Pacific Ocean,” shares Weisman, “and one guy wrote back: “Dude! I was born there!” I’ve actually struck up a relationship with this guy, and I would love to go see his little atoll in the Pacific. I mean, it is 1,000 miles from absolutely any other landmass and I didn’t know any other human beings lived there, and here we are on Twitter and this guy responds that he lived there.”

“I was in Addis Ababba, Ethiopia, which is 180 degrees different than what you and I know here in the US,” shares Worley. “These kids barely have shoes on their feet. But, it was incredible how inspired they are by the space program. They know about the Curiosity Rover! There was a 14-year-old kid who built a robot out of LEGOs to help aid workers in case Ebola came to his country. I mean, how can you NOT be inspired by that?!”

With all this inspiration, what’s the next step for NASA on social? “Oh I don’t even think I can answer that question,” admits Weisman, but he sees the potential for platforms like Yahoo’s new messaging service and Periscope that offer instantaneous live-video feeds. “If a user wants to go in and see what’s going on through my perspective in space… to me, that would be the end game, where they could absolutely come along for the experience if they wanted to.”

Giving the average Joe a front seat to the wonders of the universe? It’s one small step for NASA, one giant leap for mankind.

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No one ever said rocket science was easy. In October 2014, a routine delivery to the International Space Station of a few thousand pounds of science equipment and foods blew up just after launch. The explosion occurred just 15 seconds after launch, and the hazard area stretched for 1,400 square miles.

There weren’t any injuries, but the accident has kept the Antares rocket—and its makers, Orbital ATK—grounded for a year and a half.

A faulty turbopump in one of the main AJ-26 engines was to blame, so the company gave Antares a whole new engine, the RD-181. When the Antares 230 rises from the ashes in May 2016, it’ll be more powerful than ever, capable of carrying an extra 1,300 pounds of cargo.

This article was originally published in the March/April 2016 issue of Popular Science.

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A gorilla got loose on the International Space Station, escaping from its containment unit and chasing after astronaut Tim Peake. At least, that’s what it looks like.

Mark Kelly, brother of fellow astronaut Scott Kelly posted the short and fun video on Twitter earlier today, showing the gorilla’s hijinks set to the tune of Yakety Sax.

Mark Kelly couldn’t resist ribbing his twin brother, who is about to complete his year-long stay on the International Space Station. Tech Insider reports that the gorilla suit was a gift from Mark to Scott, part of a care package sent to the space station during one of the re-supply missions to the space station.

Scott Kelly later posted a different, slightly longer version to his own Twitter account:

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Kjell Lindgren enjoys a hot cup of coffee in space

Of sacred morning routines, few stack up to the ritual of rolling out of bed and sipping that first sweet, sweet cup of steaming coffee. Unless you’re an astronaut on the International Space Station. One of the small yet significant personal sacrifices they make for space is: there’s no steaming mug up there.

Technically, there is coffee on board the station, but it’s made by squeezing hot water into a pouch of custom blended, freeze-dried coffee, and sipped through a straw. It only barely clears the bar for being a comforting drink, and no savory coffee smell makes it through that bag, either.

But thanks to a new version of a specially designed cup sent to ISS last year, astronauts now have the ability to brew a fresh cup of coffee.

Astronaut Kjell Lindgren demonstrated space’s first “pour-over-style” coffee in a video uploaded Friday by NASA. Drew Wollman, a materials and mechanical engineer at Portland State University and IRPI, LLC, along with IRPI senior scientist Mark Weislogel, designed and produced the brewer in only one week last April after he met up with Lindgren in Houston and learned how to use the space cup. Lindgren inquired whether there was any way to brew a drink directly into the cup, rather than squeeze it in from a pouch.

“We said we’d see what we could do, but when you make a promise to an astronaut you have to keep it,” Wollman said.

Brewer

Speaking from Houston, Lindgren said coffee is very important to him. He brought up a stash of single-serve coffee pods when he went to the Space Station, in anticipation of receiving the modified space cup in his personal items package. While he waited, he experimented with injecting hot water directly into the pods and then into the cup, which wasn’t great.

“It’s great to be home and to be able to use our home coffee maker, but I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I miss the coffee the food lab made for me in space,” Lindgren laughed. “The smell of coffee is one of the most enjoyable things about it. Getting to experience fresh coffee was a big deal.”

The cup keeps liquids from floating away, via the design of its narrow-angled sipping side and pot-bellied bottom. Take a little sip at the spout, where fluids creep up through a combination of microgravity and capillary forces, and the drink flows itself into your mouth. And with your nose positioned right over the top of the cup, you’re able to smell what you drink.

Along with the cup, which was first used last year to demonstrate the capillary action of liquids inside that container while in true microgravity, astronauts also enjoyed brew from the ISSpresso. That machine is specially designed to brew espresso coffee with fresh grounds in space — albeit into the ubiquitous consumables pouches.

Wollman’s modification adds an attachment to the bottom of the cup designed to hold a single-serve coffee capsule. Screw on a large syringe filled with hot water, force the water over the grounds and through a filter, and fresh coffee flows directly into the cup.

Unless you’re Lindgren, whose experiment with the technique almost resulted in free-floating space coffee.

“He was brewing it too fast. You have to go slow,” Wollman said. “Think how long it takes on Earth for coffee to filter through grounds. It shows the everyday things we take for granted when you don’t have gravity to think about.”

Lindgren finally got his cup brewed only six hours before he was scheduled to return to Earth.

Lindgren had good reason to be in a bit of a rush: the cup made it just in time. After first being destroyed aboard SpaceX’s CRS-7 mission, delayed again on the CRS-8, Lindgren’s package finally made it to the ISS on Cygnus. Lindgren demonstrated the device only six hours before he was scheduled to return to Earth on Soyuz.

“I wanted to honor [Drew and Mark’s] work by being able to use it,” Lindgren said of his last-minute demonstration. “Part of why we fly is to take time to think about how to do things differently. It’s part of the adaptation process to making us a space-faring species.”

Lindgren left the cup behind, along with his cache of coffee pods, for his crewmates to take advantage of.

Next time the aroma of fresh coffee draws you out first thing in the morning, think about its true power: it’s so compelling that one of the last things an astronaut made time for in space before coming home was to brew himself fresh, hot coffee—in a cup.

Hot Coffee

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After a record-breaking stint in space, astronaut Scott Kelly is finally coming home tomorrow.

Kelly and his Russian counterpart, Mikhail Kornienko, have spent nearly a year living in the International Space Station. Scott now holds the U.S. record for longest time in space (he’s logged over 500 days in total), and NASA’s hoping his long-term stay could shed light on what will happen when they send astronauts to Mars–a journey that could take 2 or 3 years, round-trip. Specifically, they’re hoping to learn how space affects a person’s eyesight, immune system, stomach bacteria, bone and muscle loss, mental health, and more.

Although other astronauts and cosmonauts have spent a full year in space before now, Kelly’s case is unique in that he has an identical twin brother remaining on the ground, making it easier for scientists to look for changes induced by the space environment.

The experiment isn’t over yet–doctors and scientists plan to do a lot more testing on the twins–but Scott Kelly’s trip is. On Tuesday evening he’ll return to Earth from the International Space Station, and you can watch it here:

Here’s the tentative schedule of livestream events, according to NASA:

• 4:15 PM Eastern: Kelly and Kornienko say goodbye to the space station and settle into the Soyuz capsule that will carry them home. The hatch closes at 4:40PM.

• 7:45 PM: The astronauts prepare to undock from the space station.

• 8:05 PM: The Soyuz capsule undocks.

• 10:15 PM: The spacecraft begins to leave orbit, entering the Earth’s atmosphere and landing at 11:27 PM.

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Air slowly seeped out of a hole aboard a Russian vessel connected to the International Space Station last week. Astronauts quickly found and plugged the hole, but its origins are under investigation. The head of Russian space agency Roscosmos has publically raised the possibility that the hole was made by human actions, either on the ground or, more inconceivably, in space. Luckily, the astronauts on board are not in danger. Here’s how this space opera is unfolding:

The leak

On Thursday, while the six astronauts on the ISS were asleep, flight controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center noticed that the air pressure on the space station had dropped. The difference was tiny, so they didn’t rouse the astronauts from their slumber. But finding the leak was at the top of their to-do list the next morning.

Eventually, the crew found the hole. It was tiny—just two millimeters wide in the orbital module of a Soyuz spaceship docked with the ISS. The ship had just brought three members of the crew up into orbit June. German astronaut Alexander Gerst covered the hole with his finger briefly before the team applied some heavy duty tape (Kapton tape, not duct tape). Eventually, Soyuz commander Sergey Prokopyev used epoxy and a gauze wipe to plug the hole more completely.

The astronauts were never in any danger, and the area where the hole was found was part of the spaceship that is only used in orbit, not the segment that would carry astronauts back to Earth. But despite the quick fix, questions still remain as to where the leak came from in the first place.

Debris, or ‘deliberate interference’?

Initially, it seemed that the leak was caused by a micrometeoroid impact, something small hurtling through space that just happened to hit the Soyuz. That made sense. Debris has hit the ISS before, including an impact in 2016 that caused a seven-millimeter wide dent in a window. Other strikes have also left damage on the ISS and shuttle over the years. It’s a dangerous and pervasive enough hazard that the engineers who work on spacecraft are ready for it.

“The space station is the most heavily shielded spacecraft ever flown. Critical components, e.g., habitable compartments and high-pressure tanks, will normally be able to withstand the impact of debris as large as 1 cm in diameter,” Stephanie Schierholz, a Public Affairs Officer with NASA, said in an email. Spacecraft that dock with the ISS, she noted, have the same protection. Such vessels are often struck by very small debris and micrometeoroids, she said, with “little or no effect.”

But apparently, not everyone buys the space junk theory. On Tuesday, the AFP reported that Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin, head of Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, claimed to have ruled out meteorites as a cause. In fact, he said, he suspected the hole came from something quite terrestrial in origin—a drill.

“What is this: a production defect or some premeditated actions?” The AFP quoted Rogozin as saying. “We are checking the Earth version. But there is another version that we do not rule out: deliberate interference in space.” In other words, the agency is checking for possible engineering faults that might have left the vessel vulnerable, or perhaps a production mistake that created a hole before the spacecraft even launched. But they also speculate that someone in orbit might have gone out of their way to create the hole.

Speaking with Russian news agency TASS, Russian cosmonaut expert Alexander Zheleznyakov expressed disbelief at the idea that anyone on the ISS could have drilled the hole, which he noted was in a hard-to-reach spot. He suggested that it was more likely the hole had been made on Earth, then patched with something that managed to get through ground testing, but not the harsh environment of space.

Roscosmos is convening an inquiry to look into the nature of the leak and name the person or person’s responsible, should they find the hole was caused by human action.

NASA deferred questions about the Soyuz and the State Commission’s analysis to Roscosmos.

Roscosmos confirmed that they are convening a commission to investigate RSC Energia, the corporation that develops and builds the Soyuz. A statement released by Roscosmos says: “The investigatory commission plans to finish its work in mid-September. All conclusions and decisions will be announced after the commission’s work is completed.”

Update 9/5/2018: This story has been updated to include comment from Roscosmos.

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Virtual reality is all the rage, but Microsoft’s HoloLens is a $3,000 headset that lets you see in augmented reality — it puts digital pictures and information over your view of the world. The first versions are just beginning to make their way to people outside the company this month, but astronauts in outer space got to try it out before almost anyone.

Late last year, Microsoft stashed two of the headsets aboard a rocket capsule headed for the International Space Station. NASA published a video on YouTube showing just how these HoloLens headsets are being used. Former space station commander Scott Kelly, for one, seemed to enjoy the experience:

So far, that’s mainly been through “Project Sidekick,” an effort that lets ground controllers see from an astronaut’s point-of-view and send them drawings and other visual instructions on how to complete tasks. Countdown until it’s used for space graffiti in 3, 2, 1…

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Look out! says NASA. Three crew members evacuated the International Space Station earlier today. What could have caused such action? Garbage. A 13-centimeter-wide piece of space junk was projected to come within 4.5 kilometers of the space station. Not willing to take any risks, NASA told the crew to jump ship.
The crew members: Mike Fincke, Yury Lonchakov and Sandra Magnus took shelter in the Soyuz, a Russian spaceship docked with the space station. In the event of a collision, the Soyuz could bring the crew back home, safe and sound. Normally the station will simply maneuver around such debris, but today there was not enough time, prompting NASA to order the evacuation. The debris, part of an old satellite motor, was not related to February’s satellite crash.
Only six minutes after the crew left the station, NASA gave the all clear signal and ordered the crew to get back to work. All’s well that ends well.

Via: NewScientist

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During an update to flight computers earlier this morning, the International Space Station lost communications with ground controllers in Houston, but now everything is back up, according to NASA. The blackout lasted about three hours, during which time the station was able to communicate with ground control in Moscow.

Flight controllers were updating the station’s flight software Tuesday morning when the ISS’ data relay stations malfunctioned around 9:45 a.m. Eastern time. While the station flew above Russia about an hour later, mission control in Houston was able to check on the crew–they’re fine–and instruct them to connect a backup computer to restore communications. That happened around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, NASA said.

The problem stemmed from a computer that would not let the station talk to NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellites. The ISS does have a ham radio on board for emergency communications, but that wasn’t necessary today.

Commander Chris Hadfield apparently may have seen this whole thing coming. The best news is that now he can start tweeting again.

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NASA astronaut Scott Kelly recently returned to Earth after spending almost a full year in space aboard the International Space Station, and while his social media accounts are sadly no longer filled with incredible shots of our planet from orbit, he’s still putting up lots of awesome images on Instagram.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that following Kelly’s Instagram has become even more interesting and poignant now that he’s back on Earth, even compared to when he was in space. Looking at Kelly’s posts now is to see the Earth anew, through the eyes of a long-term space traveler — one of only a handful of such people in history so far (though we hope many more are to come). What Kelly chooses to share on Instagram reminds us about what makes life on our planet special. Also, his posts show us just how long and painstaking the process of doing science can be.

Check out this recent shot of Kelly undergoing ultrasound scans to detect how his bodily fluids shifted in orbit, one of many tests he’ll be subjected to over the course of the year. The astronaut, who announced he will be retiring from NASA next month, looks so serene but also badass, and vaguely Borg-like.

In this sped-up timelapse Instagram video, Kelly is suiting up to undergo tests of how well he can move after spending a year in microgravity (the ultra-low gravity of orbit).

This next one may be a little gory to some: Kelly’s shot of himself receiving a spinal tap. Notably, he calls out his twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, who is undergoing the same set of tests having spent the last year on Earth, thereby acting as the “control” in this experiment, or point-of-comparison for Kelly’s own vitals and results. As he writes: “Post #YearInSpace spinal tap yesterday for @ISS research. Your turn, @shuttlecdrkelly! “

It’s not all science and tests, though: Kelly has also highlighted some of his newfound appreciation for Earthly delights like this flower:

Like many of us who haven’t traveled to space, Kelly enjoys Instagramming pictures of his food. But for him, the meals — and even the simple act of sitting around a dining table with other people and using a full set of free-standing cutlery, neither of which he could do on the International Space Station — are imbued with newfound significance.

Kelly also suffers from some of the same problems as the rest of us: namely, getting his view blocked by new construction. As he writes of this next shot: “I used to have a better view of #sunset. Then a house was built in my backyard while I was in space. But I’m outside which is great!”

If you aren’t already, you should really start following Scott Kelly on Instagram now.

Read More: How NASA Turned Astronauts Into Social Media Superstars

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NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka are scheduled to blast off from Kazakhstan on Friday at 5:26 pm Eastern.

The three space men will ride to the International Space Station in the Soyuz capsule. The craft will begin docking with the station around 10:30 pm, and by 12:55 am, the hatch will open and the three newcomers will officially be onboard the ISS. They’ll join NASA’s Tim Kopra, ESA’s Tim Peake, and Yuri Malenchenko from Roscosmos, who are already onboard.

Williams will live in the space station for six months. Combined with his previous trips to space, it’ll make Williams the American record-holder for most cumulative days spent in space, at 534. (A Russian cosmonaut holds the world record, at 879 days.) He’ll beat out astronaut Scott Kelly, who just completed NASA’s year in space experiment.

Watch the launch live, right here, beginning at 4:30 pm. Then come back at 10:30 pm for the docking, and 12:30 pm for the hatch opening.

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BEAM Me Up

The first astronauts on Mars probably won’t live in a tin can like the International Space Station. Big, heavy structures are expensive to launch, and aren’t great at protecting against the radiation they’d be pummeled with on Mars. Instead, the first Martians might live in something like a pop-up tent.

Bigelow Aerospace designs inflatable space habitats–lightweight modules that ride compacted in the trunk of a spacecraft, then expand to a much larger size in space. In a launch scheduled for April 8, the company is sending one of its modules up to the International Space Station for testing.

The module had previously been scheduled to launch in the fall of 2015, but after SpaceX suffered a rocket explosion in June, its missions to the ISS have been grounded.

Next month, after SpaceX’s Dragon capsule docks with the space station, one of the station’s robotic arms will unload the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, from the Dragon’s trunk, and then install it to the station itself. Then the module will inflate to about 13 feet long and 10 and a half feet in diameter.

Here’s a video of the unloading process, from Bigelow’s website:

On the ISS, astronauts will monitor BEAM’s pressure, temperature, and ability to deflect radiation and debris. The module will be closed off from the rest of the space station for most of the time, but occasionally astronauts will enter the BEAM to take measurements.

Bigelow has tested other small-scale versions in orbit, unmanned. Genesis I and II launched in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and are still helping the company assess the long-term safety of the design.

The BEAM module launching in April weighs 1,400 pounds. That may sound like a lot, but it beats the space station by a long shot. Whereas BEAM weighs an average of 5.46 pounds per cubic foot of space it provides, the ISS weighs 28.6 pounds per cubic foot.

Bigelow’s design stems from NASA’s TransHab design, which stalled in the 1990s due to budget constraints. It uses a material called Vectran, which is said to be twice as strong as Kevlar. Because the material is flexible, the inflatable habitats are expected to be better than metal at protecting against radiation and micro-meteorite strikes. They’ll absorb hits, rather than shattering on impact or scattering radiation like metal does.

If the BEAM module performs well on the ISS, Bigelow hopes to launch a larger version within the next few years. Their pill-shaped BA-330 will be 45 feet long and 22 feet in diameter, and the modules can link together to form an even larger habitat.

The company envisions using the habitats to build private space stations and space hotels in orbit. And eventually, the inflatable domiciles could provide a home for astronauts colonizing the moon and Mars. BEAM us up, Bigelow!

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Astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams, who just took command of the International Space Station over the weekend, likes to break records. (She is only the second woman ever to command the ISS, by the way.) She holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, spending 195 consecutive days on the ISS. Now she’s finished the first-ever space triathlon spaceathlon.

Williams, 46, competed in the Malibu triathlon using equipment on board the ISS. She used the station’s exercise bike, treadmill and a resistive exercise machine, which basically works like a weight-lifting machine but in weightlessness. This helped her simulate the type of workout she’d get in a half-mile ocean swim, according to Florida Today.

“My watch says 1:48:43 for the three events and the transitions,” Williams told Mission Control after her workouts.

Williams, 46, is a captain in the U.S. Navy and first launched into space in 2007. On that trip, she ran the Boston Marathon in space, while spending 195 consecutive days on the ISS. That’s still a record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a female astronaut. On Saturday, she relieved station commander Gennady Padalk, a cosmonaut who returned to Earth Sunday with co-crew members Sergei Revin and Joe Acaba.

Williams also holds the women’s world records for the most spacewalks, at 6, and the most spacewalking time, at 44 hours and two minutes, Florida Today says.

One more milestone is still to come on this trip: On Wednesday (Sept. 19), she’ll celebrate her birthday. Watch her in action below, courtesy of NASA TV.

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An ambitious effort to broadcast real-time streaming video of Earth from space is closer to reality, after a new influx of cash and some new partnerships. By spring 2013, everyone on Earth will be able to watch the planet from the most unique vantage point ever built, the International Space Station.

We first told you about the Canadian startup UrtheCast (pronounced Earth-cast) last year, and the first cameras were supposed to launch in 2012. But the company has been raising money and working on its two high-definition cameras, while cosmonauts are in training to move the cameras from the cargo ferry to the station’s underside. The cameras are due to be finished in the next few months, according to the BBC. Meanwhile, the company, which is based in Calgary, said it plans to go public later this fall.

One camera will be fixed and the other will swivel around, according to Ian Tosh, an engineer at camera-builder RAL Space near Oxford, England. He told the BBC the images would be about a meter (3.3 feet) per pixel. That’s about the same as Google Earth’s satellite images of your house, where you can definitely see features like your car in the driveway.

“You won’t quite see the tiles, but you’ll see all the detail in the garden,” Tosh told the BBC. Except that it’ll be live. Users anywhere in the world will be able to log in to a free site and see real-time (or maybe a very short delay) video. It’s easy to find out where and when the ISS will fly over your area, so UrtheCast aims to help people plan events around ISS coverage. You could get wedding pictures from space!

The ISS already has cameras, but they’re used for specific purposes, like monitoring crops. With UrtheCast, anyone can see anything he or she wants. The company plans to release its code and allow developers to build apps that use its video for a variety of purposes. Already, the United Nations wants to use it to monitor humanitarian emergencies. You could have an app that monitors crop growth, urbanization, pollution in cities, light distribution, and so on. Imagine the game possibilities, too! You can read more about UrtheCast here.

BBC

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A giant barrelful of goodies is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station tonight. In the belly of Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft, 7,900 pounds of food, clothing, spare parts, and science experiments will make its way to the ISS. Cygnus and its cargo will ride into orbit on an Atlas V rocket.

So far, the weather is holding and it looks like there’s a good chance that the spacecraft will take off on schedule–but rockets can be very touchy, so you never know.

The launch window opens at 11:05PM, but livestream coverage, above, starts around 10PM.

Cygnus will rendezvous with the ISS at around 6AM on March 26. After the fresh supplies are unloaded (and the astronauts’ space waste gets put onboard), the spacecraft will depart from the space station. But its mission won’t be over yet.

Before it burns up in the atmosphere, Cygnus will launch five LEMUR-2 CubeSats–mini satellites that will track ship movements as well as take atmospheric measurements. The CubeSat deployment will be a first for the spacecraft.

Cygnus

Then, Cygnus will host the largest fire experiment attempted in a spacecraft. A box inside the spacecraft will contain a fire that’s about a meter long, shedding some light on what to expect if a spacecraft in microgravity were to accidentally catch fire. Let’s hope that never happens, though.

Finally, even as Cygnus burns up from the friction of entering Earth’s atmosphere, it will still be collecting data. The Reentry Breakup Recorder ” will measure and record the dynamics of Cygnus’ breakup” during reentry, according to an Orbital ATK press release.

“This is a NASA test with the goal of understand the effects on re-entering vehicle of the actual re-entry and breakup,” Frank DeMauro, Orbital ATK’s VP of Advance Programs for Space Systems Group, told Popular Science in an email. “It will help validate and improve the spacecraft breakup models we use in our design process that help us make sure the vehicles do breakup upon re-entry.”

That fiery re-entry won’t occur for a while yet. But in the meantime, there should be plenty of flames shooting out the backside of the Atlas V rocket this evening. Tune in to the livestream above for the launch at11:05PM!

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When the shuttle retires in 2010, as many as 8,000 NASA contractors could lose their jobs. After a request from lawmakers, NASA released these numbers yesterday, but added that this could be a worst case scenario. The Kennedy Space Center would suffer the biggest losses, with 80 percent of its contract workers losing their jobs by 2011.

The agency will be switching over to the Constellation program, which is developing a whole new set of spacecraft and rockets designed for getting to the International Space Station, the Moon, and even Mars. The good news is that this program could soak up some of those who lose their shuttle-related work. NASA also added that about 25 percent of the potentially endangered workforce is eligible for retirement.

Via NY Times

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Astronauts get to see Earth from a rarely seen and beautiful perspective, and since the earliest days of humans traveling into space it has been important to capture images of our planet.

This responsibility isn’t lost on retired astronaut Chris Hadfield—who estimates he took nearly 45,000 photographs during the three space flights of his career.

“The world is a very generous photography subject and you have the best tripod in existence,” he says in a new video from Big Think.

Hadfield says he was trained by top photographers before his missions to space and while living on the ISS he shot on Hasselblads, Linhof cameras and IMAX cameras.

“It’s beautiful, it’s just raw, constantly changing beauty pouring by around you,” he says. “And it’s instructional, you learn so much about the world.”

Astronauts go through years of training and according to Hadfield when you are living on the ISS your time is meticulously scheduled. “But nowhere does it ever say–go look out the window, but you just can’t help yourself,” Hadfield says.

Editing 45,000 photos down to a reasonable number is obviously no easy task. How did Hadfield go about it?

“I thought if someone was floating next to me at the window of the spaceship what would I want to show them,” he says. “Trying to distill this whole planet down to 150 pictures is crazy. It’s an insult to the world, but it was the best I could do let people actually see what the world looks like.”

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On September 11th, 2001, there was only one American on the International Space Station: Expedition Three Commander Frank L. Culbertson. That morning, after a physical examination of the other astronauts, command on the ground told Culbertson what had happened. Culbertson grabbed a camera as the ISS passed over North America and took the photo above, from two or three hundred miles up. NASA has the letters Culbertson wrote about his feelings–check them out here. [via The Atlantic]

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Japan’s space agency gave it the OK. A famous astronaut says he’d get involved. They even tested a prototype in a wind tunnel. Still, it does sound nearly too off-the-wall to be true: Japanese scientists have teamed up with origami experts to design a paper airplane that could withstand re-entry and make its way from space back to Earth.

The idea is to use the super-paper-plane to learn more about designing a re-entry craft or atmospheric explorers. And while it sounds impossible, a prototype ,made of paper with a heat-resistant coating, has already been tested. It successfully drifted in both temperatures of up to 446 degrees Fahrenheit and tremendous winds.

Thanks to that test, the Japanese space agency says it will fund the project for three years. Eventually, the idea would be to toss a few of them out of the International Space Station. The hitch right now is figuring out how to track them once they’re released.

Via SiliconValley.com

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Mary, Mary, quite interplanetary, how do your hair follicles grow?

Slowly, it would seem. A small preliminary study published in PLOS One today suggests that spending time in space may inhibit hair growth.

A lot of things happen to astronauts who spend a lot of time in space. Not all of them good things. Yes, you may come back with an enlightened worldview, but the space environment also weakens muscles and bones, slows the heart, and impairs the immune system. It may also change the way our genes get expressed.

That’s why a team of researchers in Japan is analyzing astronauts’ hair samples. Hair is an easy sample to collect, compared to drawing blood, and the cells at the base of the hair contain clues about what’s going on in an astronaut’s genes.

The scientists analyzed hair strands plucked from 10 astronauts before, during, and after a 6-month stay on the ISS. RNA inside the hair follicle cells told the researchers which genes were active, and how strongly.

The results were somewhat mixed, with lots of variation between astronauts, but overall the data seemed to indicate that spaceflight favors the genes that inhibit hair growth. The findings corroborate mouse studies that indicate hair growth is disrupted in space.

However, if you dream of one day becoming a barber on the moon, no need to give up your dream yet. The study was small and only looked at a handful of genes that might be relevant to hair growth, and this research is only just beginning. A better way to strategy would be to actually measure the hair’s growth rate in space versus on Earth. Too bad that twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly are bald.

As an aside, astronauts sometimes do need haircuts on the International Space Station. They use a set of clippers attached to a vacuum device that sucks up trimmed hairs so they don’t fly all over the space station.

Haircut In Space

More than just weighing in on astronaut hairstyles, understanding hair growth in space is important because it could be an indicator of an astronaut’s overall health. Changes in your hair’s growth rate may be a sign of vitamin deficiencies, increased stress, or, in some cases, diabetes or a thyroid disease.

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A space research company called NanoRacks approached Scottish whisky distillery Ardbeg to participate in a very special expedition. In 2011, the two companies sent un-aged whisky to the International Space Station in MixStix—which work almost like glow sticks. When the tubes are cracked by an astronaut, the distilled liquid inside mixes with charred wood shavings. At the same time, the company kept a sample in the distillery on Earth as a control. The goal was to test how the microgravity of space affects terpenes, which are compounds that have an effect on whisky’s flavor.

The samples returned back to Earth in September 2014, and the company just released its findings in a white paper. They performed three different analyses: gas chromatography, high-pressure liquid chromatography, and organoleptic assessment (a.k.a. tasting it).

Gas chromatography found no significant differences between the volatile congeners (which are produced during fermentation) in the earthbound sample and the microgravity sample, which is perhaps to be expected.

Then there was the high-pressure liquid chromatography. This analysis looked at the compounds extracted from the wood. In space, charred wood shavings that mingled with the distilled liquid were meant to mimic the way whisky is aged in wood barrels on Earth. Since the surface area to volume ratios weren’t an exact match to normal Earth conditions, there were a few anomalies. Beyond that, though, there were a couple of interesting differences between the ISS sample and the control. Here’s what director of distilling at Ardbeg, Bill Lumsden, writes in the white paper:

This is all intriguing, to be sure. But, what about the taste? Well, it turns out a majority of tasters were able to determine the difference between the space whisky and the regular old earth whisky. And the tasting notes are rather different as well, for what that’s worth. From the white paper, again:

While I can’t say that I’d love to drink something that has hints of “antiseptic lozenges and rubbery smoke,” it is notable how different the tasters perceived the two samples. Ardbeg says that this could impact future flavor creations, and it seems to have sparked a trend: Japanese whisky distillery, Suntory announced this summer they’re sending their own samples to the ISS to study how flavor mellows as it ages in space. And perhaps once the intrepid whisky scientists have perfected the microgravity booze-making processes, astronauts will be able to enjoy it neat with their own classy cups.

[Via BBC]

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