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La presentación del X-59 de la NASA personifica la tradición aeronáutica

From studies that seek to understand how the human body adapts to time in space to research on spacesuits and spacecraft, NASA works to ensure the safety of astronauts as they push the boundaries of space exploration.

The Body in Space

Research in space, research on earth, extended stays in space, collaborate with us.

What happens to the human body during spaceflight?

Spaceflight affects bones, muscles, vision, and more. Life on the International Space Station unfolds in close quarters, which could affect astronauts’ moods. Travel to the Moon, Mars, and beyond will require new systems to provide medical care far from Earth. Learn more about the changes humans may undergo during spaceflight, as well as the steps NASA takes to keep astronauts healthy and safe.

Studies on the space station help prepare future crew for trips into deeper space.

NASA will soon send astronauts to the Moon, and will one day send astronauts to Mars. To get mission-ready, NASA seeks to learn all they can about how human physiology and psychology changes while astronauts live and work on the space station. Learn more about how scientists seek to maintain the health and well-being of crew members during and after their missions.

 NASA conducts Earth-bound simulations of life in space.

Simulated space missions conducted on Earth help NASA examine crew health and team dynamics without launching into space. Some simulations happen in closed laboratory settings, others take place in remote regions like Antarctica. Using such missions, scientists can study in detail and in larger populations how humans adapt to challenges astronauts may encounter on missions to the Moon and Mars.

Learn more about the record-holders for the longest continuous spaceflights by U.S. astronauts.

Frank Rubio, Mark Vande Hei, Scott Kelly, Christina Koch, and Peggy Whitson have spent an extended amount of time in space, helping to pave the way for even longer, future exploration missions. Their missions help researchers better understand how the human body adapts to the extreme environment of space for more distant missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Learn how you can help NASA prepare for future spaceflight.

Are you developing innovative ways to keep astronauts healthy and mission-ready as space travel expands to the Moon, Mars, and beyond? Partner with NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP)! Check out information on NSPIRES and internships, and explore our how-to guides for working with us.

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Benefits to Humanity

Space exploration unites the world to inspire the next generation, make ground-breaking discoveries, and create new opportunities.

Technologies and missions we develop for human spaceflight have thousands of applications on Earth, boosting the economy, creating new career paths, and advancing everyday technologies all around us.

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The future of spaceflight—from orbital vacations to humans on Mars

NASA aims to travel to the moon again—and beyond. Here’s a look at the 21st-century race to send humans into space.

Welcome to the 21st-century space race, one that could potentially lead to 10-minute space vacations, orbiting space hotels , and humans on Mars. Now, instead of warring superpowers battling for dominance in orbit, private companies are competing to make space travel easier and more affordable. This year, SpaceX achieved a major milestone— launching humans to the International Space Station (ISS) from the United States —but additional goalposts are on the star-studded horizon.

Private spaceflight

Private spaceflight is not a new concept . In the United States, commercial companies played a role in the aerospace industry right from the start: Since the 1960s, NASA has relied on private contractors to build spacecraft for every major human spaceflight program, starting with Project Mercury and continuing until the present.

Today, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is expanding on the agency’s relationship with private companies. Through it, NASA is relying on SpaceX and Boeing to build spacecraft capable of carrying humans into orbit. Once those vehicles are built, both companies retain ownership and control of the craft, and NASA can send astronauts into space for a fraction of the cost of a seat on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

SpaceX, which established a new paradigm by developing reusable rockets , has been running regular cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station since 2012. And in May 2020, the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft carried NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS , becoming the first crewed mission to launch from the United States in nearly a decade. The mission, called Demo-2, is scheduled to return to Earth in August. Boeing is currently developing its Starliner spacecraft and hopes to begin carrying astronauts to the ISS in 2021.

Other companies, such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic , are specializing in sub-orbital space tourism. Test launch video from inside the cabin of Blue Origin’s New Shepard shows off breathtaking views of our planet and a relatively calm journey for its first passenger, a test dummy cleverly dubbed “Mannequin Skywalker.” Virgin Galactic is running test flights on its sub-orbital spaceplane , which will offer paying customers roughly six minutes of weightlessness during its journey through Earth’s atmosphere.

With these and other spacecraft in the pipeline, countless dreams of zero-gravity somersaults could soon become a reality—at least for passengers able to pay the hefty sums for the experience.

Early U.S. Spaceflight

Looking to the moon

Moon missions are essential to the exploration of more distant worlds. After a long hiatus from the lunar neighborhood, NASA is again setting its sights on Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor with an ambitious plan to place a space station in lunar orbit sometime in the next decade. Sooner, though, the agency’s Artemis program , a sister to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, is aiming to put the first woman (and the next man) on the lunar surface by 2024.

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Extended lunar stays build the experience and expertise needed for the long-term space missions required to visit other planets. As well, the moon may also be used as a forward base of operations from which humans learn how to replenish essential supplies, such as rocket fuel and oxygen, by creating them from local material.

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Such skills are crucial for the future expansion of human presence into deeper space, which demands more independence from Earth-based resources. And although humans have visited the moon before, the cratered sphere still harbors its own scientific mysteries to be explored—including the presence and extent of water ice near the moon's south pole, which is one of the top target destinations for space exploration .

NASA is also enlisting the private sector to help it reach the moon. It has awarded three contracts to private companies working on developing human-rated lunar landers—including both Blue Origin and SpaceX. But the backbone of the Artemis program relies on a brand new, state-of-the-art spacecraft called Orion .

Archival Photos of Spaceflight

Currently being built and tested, Orion—like Crew Dragon and Starliner—is a space capsule similar to the spacecraft of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, as well as Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. But the Orion capsule is larger and can accommodate a four-person crew. And even though it has a somewhat retro design, the capsule concept is considered to be safer and more reliable than NASA’s space shuttle—a revolutionary vehicle for its time, but one that couldn’t fly beyond Earth’s orbit and suffered catastrophic failures.

Capsules, on the other hand, offer launch-abort capabilities that can protect astronauts in case of a rocket malfunction. And, their weight and design mean they can also travel beyond Earth’s immediate neighborhood, potentially ferrying humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

A new era in spaceflight

By moving into orbit with its Commercial Crew Program and partnering with private companies to reach the lunar surface, NASA hopes to change the economics of spaceflight by increasing competition and driving down costs. If space travel truly does become cheaper and more accessible, it’s possible that private citizens will routinely visit space and gaze upon our blue, watery home world—either from space capsules, space stations, or even space hotels like the inflatable habitats Bigelow Aerospace intends to build .

The United States isn’t the only country with its eyes on the sky. Russia regularly launches humans to the International Space Station aboard its Soyuz spacecraft. China is planning a large, multi-module space station capable of housing three taikonauts, and has already launched two orbiting test vehicles—Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2, both of which safely burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere after several years in space.

Now, more than a dozen countries have the ability to launch rockets into Earth orbit. A half-dozen space agencies have designed spacecraft that shed the shackles of Earth’s gravity and traveled to the moon or Mars. And if all goes well, the United Arab Emirates will join that list in the summer of 2020 when its Hope spacecraft heads to the red planet . While there are no plans yet to send humans to Mars, these missions—and the discoveries that will come out of them—may help pave the way.

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Everything you need to know about space travel (almost)

We're a long way from home...

Paul Parsons

When did we first start exploring space?

The first human-made object to go into space was a German V2 missile , launched on a test flight in 1942. Although uncrewed, it reached an altitude of 189km (117 miles).

Former Nazi rocket scientists were later recruited by both America and Russia (often at gunpoint in the latter case), where they were instrumental in developing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) – rockets capable of carrying nuclear weapons from one side of the planet to the other.

It was these super-missiles that formed the basis for the space programmes of both post-war superpowers. As it happened, Russia was the first to reach Earth orbit, when it launched the uncrewed Sputnik 1 in October 1957, followed a month later by Sputnik 2, carrying the dog Laika – the first live animal in space.

The USA sent its first uncrewed satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit soon after, in January 1958. A slew of robotic spaceflights followed, from both sides of the Atlantic, before Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin piloted Vostok 1 into orbit on 12 April 1961, to become the first human being in space . And from there the space race proper began, culminating in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first people to walk on the Moon as part of NASA's Apollo programme .

Why is space travel important?

Space exploration is the future. It satisfies the human urge to explore and to travel, and in the years and decades to come it could even provide our species with new places to call home – especially relevant now, as Earth becomes increasingly crowded .

Extending our reach into space is also necessary for the advancement of science. Space telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and probes to the distant worlds of the Solar System are continually updating, and occasionally revolutionising, our understanding of astronomy and physics.

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But there are also some very practical reasons, such as mining asteroids for materials that are extremely rare here on Earth.

One example is the huge reserve of the chemical isotope helium-3 thought to be locked away in the soil on the surface of the Moon . This isotope is a potential fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors – power stations that tap into the same source of energy as the Sun. Unlike other fusion fuels, helium-3 gives off no hard-to-contain and deadly neutron radiation.

However, for this to happen the first challenge to overcome is how to build a base on the Moon. In 2019, China's Chang’e 4 mission marked the beginning of a new space race to conquer the Moon, signalling their intent to build a permanent lunar base , while the NASA Artemis mission plans to build a space station, called Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway , providing a platform to ferry astronauts to the Moon's surface.

Could humans travel into interstellar space and how would we get there?

It’s entirely feasible that human explorers will visit the furthest reaches of our Solar System. The stars, however, are another matter. Interstellar space is so vast that it takes light – the fastest thing we know of in the Universe – years, centuries and millennia to traverse it. Faster-than-light travel may be possible one day, but is unlikely to become a reality in our lifetimes.

It’s not impossible that humans might one day cross this cosmic gulf, though it won’t be easy. The combustion-powered rocket engines of today certainly aren’t up to the job – they just don’t use fuel efficiently enough. Instead, interstellar spacecraft may create a rocket-like propulsion jet using electric and magnetic fields. This so-called ‘ ion drive ’ technology has already been tested aboard uncrewed Solar System probes.

Another possibility is to push spacecraft off towards the stars using the light from a high-powered laser . A consortium of scientists calling themselves Breakthrough Starshot is already planning to send a flotilla of tiny robotic probes to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, using just this method.

Though whether human astronauts could survive such punishing acceleration, or the decades-long journey through deep space, remains to be seen.

How do we benefit from space exploration?

Pushing forward the frontiers of science is the stated goal of many space missions . But even the development of space travel technology itself can lead to unintended yet beneficial ‘spin-off’ technologies with some very down-to-earth applications.

Notable spin-offs from the US space programme, NASA, include memory foam mattresses, artificial hearts, and the lubricant spray WD-40. Doubtless, there are many more to come.

Read more about space exploration:

• The next giant leaps: The UK missions getting us to the Moon
• Move over, Mars: why we should look further afield for future human colonies
• Everything you need to know about the Voyager mission
• 6 out-of-this-world experiments recreating space on Earth

Space exploration also instils a sense of wonder, it reminds us that there are issues beyond our humdrum planet and its petty squabbles, and without doubt it helps to inspire each new generation of young scientists. It’s also an insurance policy. We’re now all too aware that global calamities can and do happen – for instance, climate change and the giant asteroid that smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, leading to the total extinction of the dinosaurs .

The lesson for the human species is that we keep all our eggs in one basket at our peril. On the other hand, a healthy space programme, and the means to travel to other worlds, gives us an out.

Is space travel dangerous?

In short, yes – very. Reaching orbit means accelerating up to around 28,000kph (17,000mph, or 22 times the speed of sound ). If anything goes wrong at that speed, it’s seldom good news.

Then there’s the growing cloud of space junk to contend with in Earth's orbit – defunct satellites, discarded rocket stages and other detritus – all moving just as fast. A five-gram bolt hitting at orbital speed packs as much energy as a 200kg weight dropped from the top of an 18-storey building.

And getting to space is just the start of the danger. The principal hazard once there is cancer-producing radiation – the typical dose from one day in space is equivalent to what you’d receive over an entire year back on Earth, thanks to the planet’s atmosphere and protective magnetic field.

Add to that the icy cold airless vacuum , the need to bring all your own food and water, plus the effects of long-duration weightlessness on bone density, the brain and muscular condition – including that of the heart – and it soon becomes clear that venturing into space really isn’t for the faint-hearted.

When will space travel be available to everyone?

It’s already happening – that is, assuming your pockets are deep enough. The first self-funded ‘space tourist’ was US businessman Dennis Tito, who in 2001 spent a week aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for the cool sum of $20m (£15m).

Virgin Galactic has long been promising to take customers on short sub-orbital hops into space – where passengers get to experience rocket propulsion and several minutes of weightlessness, before gliding back to a runway landing on Earth, all for $250k (£190k). In late July 2020, the company unveiled the finished cabin in its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, suggesting that commercial spaceflights may begin shortly.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX , which in May 2020 became the first private company to launch a human crew to Earth orbit aboard the Crew Dragon , plans to offer stays on the ISS for $35k (£27k) per night. SpaceX is now prototyping its huge Starship vehicle , which is designed to take 100 passengers from Earth to as far afield as Mars for around $20k (£15k) per head. Musk stated in January that he hoped to be operating 1,000 Starships by 2050.

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Delta rockets retired with launch of US reconnaissance satellite

The U.S. Space Force and a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture sent a secret reconnaissance payload to orbit on Tuesday atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket, the last flight of a workhorse launch vehicle brand that has logged nearly 400 missions dating back to 1960.

Articles on Space travel

Displaying 1 - 20 of 129 articles.

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Felice Jacka , Deakin University and Dorit Donoviel , Baylor College of Medicine

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Julian Novitz , Swinburne University of Technology

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Steffi Paladini , Birmingham City University

The food systems that will feed Mars are set to transform food on Earth

Lenore Newman , University of The Fraser Valley and Evan Fraser , University of Guelph

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Christopher Newman , Northumbria University, Newcastle and Nick Caplan , Northumbria University, Newcastle

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To the moon and beyond: what 2022 holds for space travel

From lunar missions to anti-asteroid defence systems, there are plenty of exciting scientific developments to look forward to

T his year promises to be an important one for space exploration, with several major programmes reaching the launch pad over the next 12 months. The US is to return to the moon, undertaking a set of missions intended to establish a lunar colony there in a few years. China is expected to complete its Tiangong space station while Europe and Russia will attempt to land spacecraft on Mars, having failed at every previous attempt. India, South Korea and Japan are also scheduled to put a number of missions into space.

Particular interest is going to focus on Nasa’s mighty new space launch system (SLS). This is the most powerful rocket it has ever designed and has been built to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond as part of the agency’s Artemis deep space exploration programme. With these missions, Nasa intends to reopen the solar system to investigation by humans – rather than robot probes – and regularly carry astronauts to the lunar surface.

The programme’s first launch is scheduled for February when an SLS rocket – standing more than 300ft high – will carry an unmanned Orion capsule on a trajectory that will enter a highly elliptical orbit round the moon. At its closest, the spaceship will sweep within 62 miles of the lunar surface before soaring 40,000 miles above it, a distance that will take it further from Earth than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown.

Crucially, Orion – designed to carry between four and six astronauts when fully operational – will be fitted with a European service module that will provide the capsule’s power and propulsion for manoeuvring in orbit. This will give its manufacturer – the European Space Agency – the opportunity to become a key partner in future Artemis missions. If February’s mission succeeds, a crewed trip around the moon will take place in 2024 and this will be followed by a lunar landing in 2025 – a gap of 53 years since Apollo 17, the last crewed moon mission, touched down on the Taurus-Littrow valley in December 1972.

This time the crew will include at least one woman and the mission will mark the beginning of a programme aimed at establishing a lunar colony where astronauts would work on months-long missions and develop technologies that could be used by future colonies on Mars . A prime target for the first lunar outpost is Shackleton crater, near the moon’s south pole, which is believed to hold reservoirs of ice. Water will not only provide precious sustenance for astronauts, it can be exploited as a source of hydrogen and oxygen – by electrolysis – that can be combined as rocket fuel.

As part of its preparations to establish a lunar colony, Nasa will also start a massive programme of robot missions through the agency’s $2.6bn commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative. This will involve sending a flotilla of robot spacecraft to the moon, with the first missions beginning this year. Built by private companies with Nasa backing, these probes will attempt to map underground water deposits, study the moon’s deep interior and release robot rovers to investigate the lunar surface. Fledgling space company Astrobotic will send its newly designed Peregrine lander to Lacus Mortis – “the lake of death” – a plain of basaltic rock in the north-eastern part of the moon. It will carry 11 different payloads of instruments and will be followed by another US company, Intuitive Machines, which is sending a spacecraft carrying six payloads to Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms.

A further 12 CLPS missions are scheduled for the next three years, though head of Nasa science, Thomas Zurbuchen, has warned that these privately funded efforts each face a high risk of failure. As many as half could go wrong, he said recently.

For good measure, Russia and India are both planning to launch their own lunar landers next year, while South Korea is scheduled to place a satellite in moon orbit to study its mineral composition.

The hunt for alien life will take a step further this year with the launch of the joint European-Russian ExoMars mission , which will land a robot rover on the Oxia Planum, a 125-mile-wide clay-bearing plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere. The rover – named after Rosalind Franklin, the British chemist and DNA pioneer – will be fitted with a drill capable of probing several feet below the Martian surface, where it is hoped primitive lifeforms may survive or at least the remnants of extinct organisms. The 660lb rover was built by Airbus Defence and Space, at the company’s UK facility in Stevenage. Launch is scheduled for 22 September and touchdown is expected on 10 June 2023.

Hopes of success for the mission are guarded, however, as neither Russia nor Europe has had any luck in landing on Mars. Nineteen Russian and Soviet missions and two European bids to land on the red planet have all failed – including Europe’s Schiaparelli lander , which was intended to be a trial run for the current ExoMars mission but which crashed on the planet in 2016.

Easily the most spectacular mission to the asteroids will be Nasa’s bid to test an anti-asteroid defence system for Earth. Launched last year, the double asteroid redirection test (Dart) spacecraft will crash into the moonlet Dimorphos in September. Hurtling into its target at 15,000mph, the 1,340lb probe – the size of a small car – will try to change the orbit of Dimorphos, a lump of rock the size of a football stadium, around its parent asteroid, Didymos.

If successful, Nasa and other space agencies will be encouraged to follow up the mission by developing craft that could deflect a larger asteroid heading towards Earth – and so avert an Armageddon -style impact, say astronomers. Should an asteroid the size of Dimorphos crash on Earth, it would trigger an explosion equivalent to 400-600 megatonnes of TNT. “A city like Manhattan would be completely obliterated,” Elena Adams, Dart’s systems engineer, told the journal Science . “This is to demonstrate a technique to save the world.”

Nasa has plans for several other asteroid missions next year, including the launch of the probe Psyche. Scheduled for lift-off in August, the spacecraft will visit an asteroid called 16 Psyche that is thought to be the leftover core of a planet. This vast chunk of nickel and iron is the remains of a violent collision with another astronomical object that stripped off the planet’s outer layers and left its metallic innards exposed. Studying 16 Psyche will give scientists an unprecedented opportunity to examine a planetary core. It will also afford them a chance to explore a new type of world – one that is made of metal.

Human spaceflight

Boeing will attempt to get its Starliner crew capsule into orbit so that it can begin to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). A 2019 flight failed to reach the station and another attempt last year was called off at the last minute when fuel valves failed to open. Boeing now plans to launch a crewless Starliner in early 2022, followed by a test flight with astronauts later in the year. The capsule will then be used – along with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship – on a rota to ferry astronauts to the ISS.

For its part, China is expected to complete its space station Tiangong – Heavenly Palace – after launching the first of its three main modules, Tianhe, in April . Modules Mengtian and Wentian will be added this year. China has said it hopes to keep its space station – which is considerably smaller than the ISS – inhabited continuously by three astronauts for at least a decade. A key task for crewmen will be to service the Xuntian space telescope, which will be launched in 2024 and which will orbit in formation with the Tiangong station. Fitted with a mirror roughly the same size as the Hubble space telescope, Xuntian’s tasks will include investigations of dark matter and dark energy as well as galaxy formation and evolution.

Space tourism

Blue Origin (founded by Jeff Bezos) and Virgin Galactic (set up by Richard Branson) both succeeded in launching maiden sub-orbital flights last year and both say they expect to begin regular missions in 2022, offering groups of tourists a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth.

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What’s next in space

The moon, private space travel, and the wider solar system will all have major missions over the next 12 months.

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We’re going back to the moon—again—in 2023. Multiple uncrewed landings are planned for the next 12 months, spurred on by a renewed effort in the US to return humans to the lunar surface later this decade. Both private space companies and national agencies are set to make the 240,000-mile trek to our celestial neighbor, where they will test landing capabilities, look for usable water ice , and more.

Previous years were “all about Mars,” says Jill Stuart, a space policy expert from the London School of Economics in the UK. “Now we’ve shifted back to the moon.”

That is not all 2023 has in store. We’re also likely to see significant strides made in private human spaceflight, including the first-ever commercial spacewalk, compelling missions heading out into—or back from—other solar system destinations, and new rockets set to take flight.

Here’s what the next year has lined up for space.

Moon landings

A lunar lander will already be on its way when 2023 begins. Launched in December on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the private spacecraft Hakuto-R, developed by Japanese firm ispace , is on a four-month journey to reach the moon , where it will deploy rovers built by the space agencies of Japan and the United Arab Emirates, among other goals. If successful, Hakuto-R could become the first private mission to land on the moon in March.

We say “could” because two private landers from the US—one from the firm Astrobotic and the other from Intuitive Machines, called Peregrine and Nova-C, respectively—are also set to reach the moon around the same time. Both are NASA-backed missions with various instruments on board to study the lunar environment, part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, which aims to spur commercial interest in the moon ahead of human missions planned for later this decade under its Artemis program.

The first part of that program, Artemis I, saw an uncrewed Orion spacecraft launch to the moon on NASA’s giant new Space Launch System rocket in November 2022. While the next Artemis mission, a crewed flight around the moon, is not planned until 2024, these next 12 months will lay important groundwork for Artemis by studying the moon’s surface and even looking for water ice that could be a potential target for future human missions, among other goals. “The moon is getting a lot more attention than it has done for many years,” says Jon Cowart, a former NASA human spaceflight manager now at the Aerospace Corporation in the US.

Intuitive Machines has a second lunar landing planned in 2023. Also on the books are landings from the space agencies of India and Japan, with Chandrayaan-3 and SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) , respectively. India hopes to launch in August 2023. It will be the country’s second attempt—the first crash-landed on the moon in 2019. A date for SLIM, which will test precision landing on the moon, has not yet been set. Russia reportedly has plans for the moon in 2023 too with its Luna-25 lander, but the status of the mission is unclear.

Private space travel

Since May 2020, SpaceX has been using its Crew Dragon spacecraft to ferry astronauts to space, some to the International Space Station (ISS) under contract with NASA and others on private missions. But SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission , currently slated for March 2023, will be a big new step.

Four commercial astronauts, including billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is paying for the flight and also funded SpaceX’s first all-private human spaceflight in 2021, will target a maximum orbit of 1,200 kilometers, higher than any human spacecraft since the Apollo missions. And in a first for commercial human spaceflight, the crew will don spacesuits and venture outside the spacecraft.

“Polaris Dawn is really exciting,” says Laura Forczyk from the space consulting firm Astralytical. “My understanding is that the entire vehicle will be evacuated. Everybody is going to at least stick their heads out.”

The mission may help NASA decide whether a future Crew Dragon mission could be used to service the Hubble Space Telescope, a capability that the agency has been investigating with SpaceX. “We’ll have some idea whether it’s feasible,” says Forczyk.

Two more private missions using Crew Dragon—Axiom-2 and Axiom-3—are planned to head for the ISS in 2023, as well as two NASA flights using Crew Dragon. A competing vehicle from the US firm Boeing is also set to launch with crew for the first time in April 2023, following multiple delays .

Meanwhile, we wait to see if Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin will be allowed to launch with humans again. The company has been grounded following an uncrewed launch failure in September 2022. Another private spaceflight pioneer, Virgin Galactic, has been relatively quiet since it launched its founder Sir Richard Branson into space in July 2021. 

All these developments in commercial human spaceflight may be overshadowed by the first orbital flight attempt of SpaceX’s massive and reusable Starship rocket, which was undergoing launchpad tests earlier this month and should launch in 2023, if not by the end of 2022.

If successful, the rocket, which would surpass NASA’s Space Launch System as the largest rocket to make it to orbit, could transform our exploration of space . “The ability to take more mass up opens up new opportunities,” says Uma Bruegman, an expert in space strategies at the Aerospace Corporation. That could include, one day, human missions to Mars—or beyond. But there’s a long way to go yet. “It’s definitely an important year [for Starship],” says Cowart. “They’ve got a lot to do.” One of its nearer-term goals will be preparing for the moon—NASA chose Starship’s upper stage as the initial lunar lander for the Artemis program.

Into the solar system

Moons of the solar system’s biggest planet are also on the agenda next year. April 2023 will see a gripping new mission launch from the European Space Agency (ESA) called JUICE, for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer.” Scheduled to arrive in orbit at Jupiter in 2031, the spacecraft will perform detailed studies of the Jovian moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, all of which are thought to harbor oceans that could contain life beneath their icy surfaces.

“It’s the first mission that’s fundamentally focused on the icy moons,” says Mark McCaughrean, senior advisor for science and exploration at ESA. “We now know these icy moons have very deep water oceans, and they could have the conditions for life to have developed.”

JUICE will map these oceans with radar instruments, but McCaughrean says it will also be able to look for possible biosignatures on the surface of Europa’s ice, which could rain down from plumes ejected into space from its subsurface ocean.

Later in 2023, ESA is scheduled to see another major mission launch: its Euclid telescope, which was switched from a Russian rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The telescope will probe the “dark universe,” observing billions of galaxies over a third of the sky to better understand dark matter and dark energy in the cosmos.

In October, NASA should launch a significant science mission of its own when Psyche takes flight following a delay from 2022. The spacecraft will head to 16 Psyche, an unusual metal-rich asteroid that has never been seen up close.

A number of other intriguing developments are expected in 2023. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to return to Earth in September with pieces of an asteroid called Bennu, which could offer new insight into the structure and formation of the solar system. Amazon aims to send up the first satellites for Project Kuiper in early 2023, the start of a 3,000-satellite orbiting communications network it hopes will rival SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. And several new rockets are set to launch, including the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket (it will carry Astrobotic’s moon lander and some of Amazon's satellites) and possibly Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket. Both are heavy-lift rockets that could take many satellites into space.

“There’s a huge swathe of activity,” says Cowart. “I’m very excited about this year.”

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Human Exploration of Space: why, where, what for?

"Man must rise above Earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will he fully understand the world in which he lives" – Socrates (469-399 BC). The basic driving rationales for human space flight (HSF) are rooted in age-old and persisting dreams. Fascination with the idea of people going into the sky for adventures in other worlds goes back to ancient myths. This paper sheds light onto criticisms of HSF programs, by revisiting their scientific grounds and associated benefits, along with the different types of emerging commercial enterprise. Research from space has lead to a wealth of commercial and societal applications on Earth, building up the case for the so-called "Space Applications Market".

On the 50 th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik on October 4 th , 1957, the Soviet Union rocketed into leadership in this new technological frontier. It is said that the west was caught by surprise with Pravda's headline, "World's First Artificial Satellite of Earth Created in Soviet Union." The leader of the Sputnik project was Sergei Korolev who remained anonymous until his death nine years later. It should not come as a surprise to anyone who had watched German progress during World War II in the field of ballistic missiles with the V-2 bombers. These same German scientists and engineers joined the space programs in the USA and the Soviet Union after the war. A month later Sputnik II was launched. Warm air was piped into the capsule to keep the dog Laika comfortable amid the surrounding freezing temperatures, but rising temperatures due to thermal control problems killed Laika on the fourth day of the mission.

On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to be launched into space from Baikonur. He completed a single orbit of the Earth thereby firmly establishing the Soviet Unions leadership in space. The Space Race had started. The USA followed very soon with the Mercury, Gemini and the Apollo programs. But the race that Korolev had wanted to win most passionately was won by the USA, when on July 20 th , 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the Moon.

This, and the crash on the Moon of an unmanned Soviet spacecraft, led the Russians to withdraw from the race to the Moon. However, the start of a long and fruitful collaborative relationship developed instead between the scientists of these two competing powers. It continues to this day on the International Space Station (ISS).

Fifty years later, there are 43 countries who own satellites of various types in space while France, Russia, China, Japan and India are displacing the US from the commercial satellite launch market. Many countries have sent humans in space either on the US Shuttle or the Russian Soyuz. China launched its first human, Yang Liwei, in 2003. China is planning human lunar missions in the next decade. Today's leaders are those with heavy launch capabilities as the next prize is once more the Moon. Mars is a longer term exploration target. France, China and Russia currently possess such heavy launch capability. The US is working on replacing the aging Shuttle with solid-booster rocket Aries 1 and crew module Orion to get back into the lunar race by 2020, this time with longer stays in mind. In the meantime, Japanese, Selene, and Chinese, Chang-1, spacecraft are circling the Moon to acquire detailed mapping of its surface. European and US lunar satellites are also planned as well as landing robotic missions. Fifty years after Sputnik, The Space Race is of a very different nature.

Another commercial facet of the race is private commercial space travel. There have been about 29 non-career astronauts and cosmonauts who flew on the Shuttle and on Mir, and more recently paying space tourists – Tito, Olsen, Shuttleworth, Ansari, Symonyi – spent 7- 10 days each on the ISS after selection and training by the Russian space program. Otherwise, experience of microgravity is currently limited to parabolic flights, but will soon include sub-orbital travel when the appropriate transportation systems are developed and tested. Tickets are already on sale.

The basic driving rationales for human space flight (HSF) are rooted in age-old and persisting dreams. Fascination with the idea of people going into the sky for adventures in other worlds goes back to ancient myths. It has been a major theme in science fiction from Jules Vernes From the Earth to the Moon to the present day. Its wide and enduring appeal has been evident in the popularity of comic strips like Buck Rogers and Asterix, movies like 2001 and TV programs like Star Trek.

The development of rocketry that could place artificial satellites in orbit brought with it for the first time the possibility of attempting the realization of these dreams.

Criticisms of Human Space Flight

Over the years criticisms of HSF focused on expense because it is perceived as the costliest space activity diverting critical funds from social needs. The perception also is that it produces the fewest tangible benefits. Perhaps, the strongest criticisms of the benefits of HSF are the low value critics place on the scientific and other activities humans conduct in space.

One argument is that humans are not needed in space because the same or better work could be done with unmanned, robotic spacecraft. A more fundamental criticism is that laboratory experiments in space add little of scientific significance to what can be learned on the ground.

Those who defend HSF disagree. They point to the shuttle astronauts' repair of the crippled unmanned Hubble Space Telescope and the later upgrading of its instruments which made possible its great successes. They point to the long series of Shuttle flights on Spacelab built by the European Space Agency that made possible the transformation of the Shuttle from merely a transport system to a valuable laboratory. They stress particularly the possibilities they see in medical and physiological research conducted by humans, in both humans and other organisms that is expected to generate new science now not foreseen. Such research depends greatly on the availability of a well-equipped laboratory in space such as Skylab was in the early 1970s and whose research data still serves as the golden standard to this day. Soon the International Space Station (ISS) when complete with the addition of ESA's Columbus module and the Japanese Experimental Module (JEM) should provide the opportunity to fulfill this promise.

There are more arguments for HSF. No exploration dream beyond earth, whether it be lunar bases or a voyage to Mars or beyond, will be possible without first gathering crucial knowledge and testing new technologies in microgravity. Fast-growing commercial space travel ventures will depend on expertise gained from the experience of HSF to assure the safety and provide support to private space adventure travelers.

Furthermore, intelligent, skilled humans available onboard will be able to tend or trouble-shoot technologies and experiments in physical, chemical, biological and biomedical sciences and test new exploration hardware. What is adequate and reliable in situations that can readily be accessed from earth for repair is wholly unacceptable on missions that could last up to three years with communication delays of 20 minutes or more. Nor will, for example, tweaking existing technology concepts for life support systems transform them into reliable, closed planetary standard hardware.

Completely new thinking and technical approaches that have as yet to be conceived, not to mention designed or tested, are required. For example, the proposed lunar space suit is an adaptation of the existing Extravehicular Activity (EVA) and Apollo suits and is probably no more comfortable to work in than those were. It may work fine for short stays on the Moon but certainly not for the proposed long habitation and surface exploration where pre-breathe and existing gloves, despite all costly efforts, continue to be painful to work in. The energy expenditure of astronauts in these suits is huge while tears or lunar or Martian dust may cripple a mission 1 . New revolutionary concepts such as that proposed by Professor Newman at MIT using pressure instead of vacuum in a skin-tight suit that can be easily repaired with a patch is an excellent example of the kind of thinking required 2 . And it is not an either/or issue. As is happening with the re-visitation of the Moon today, robotic missions are inexorably tied with HSF. They must proceed to systematically map and gain as much knowledge as possible of the Moon by setting the scene and subsequently supporting humans after they land and settle.

Science and Benefits

Expectations initially conceived of HSF as providing the human-tended, microgravity environment to develop new technologies and products that complete industrial manufacturing plants would soon appear orbiting around Earth have not materialized. Though this may happen one day it does not appear likely to happen soon. The main reason, of course, is the reality of problems accessing space platforms like the ISS. The low number of flight opportunities, the high costs and the long intervals associated with performing experiments in space leads reduces the chances of any commercial product going to market within acceptable time limits. Questions about the quality of the research came from the inability to design, repeat or confirm experiments in ideally controlled conditions to draw sound conclusions. As in any new field, those scientists who persisted produced the observations and data that intrigued and enticed others. But research suffered as early projections of up to 60 Shuttle launches per year remained a fantasy and with them ambitions for the industrialization of space.

A different type of commercial enterprise emerged than was originally envisioned. Research from space is leading to a wealth of commercial and societal applications on Earth.

The Case for the Space Applications Market

The applications of technologies developed for use in space have been around for many years and are well known. One of my earliest experiences came from our life support research program in 1967 and involved applying a very thin polymer film on the visor of the space suit to protect it from scratching and from the sun's glare. This technology was picked up 10 years later by Foster Grant, a company that manufactures all types of eyeglasses. Now every pair of glasses in the world is dipped in such a protective coating. Another need was the requirement to miniaturize, automate and remotely operate technologies in space. Doctors monitoring the health of astronauts on Skylab in 1973-1979 requested several blood samples throughout the mission which spanned 28-84 days, each requiring at least 60ml of blood drawn. The information they required was impossible to obtain and the samples were too bulky to store and bring back until a huge effort was started to develop analytical procedures for hormones, electrolytes and other blood constituents to reduce by at least ten times the amount of blood needed to be drawn. No such requirement existed in hospitals and medical practice. Today, hospitals and clinics can run comprehensive medical profiles on a few drops of blood.

The need to monitor the health of astronauts at a distance gave birth to the field of telemedicine. Today, medical care in rural and other remote communities is supported with access to experts in a distant country. This also includes intricate surgery. Technologies to monitor astronaut health during space missions helped create implantable medical devices used to monitor in utero through telemetry, the heart of fetuses that might be in distress. Converging advances in miniaturization, automation, and remotely operated technologies have for some time been revolutionizing medicine, bioinformatics, biosensors, nanotechnology and more. The demanding technology of space compelled us to push the limits of human science and engineering achievements which, in turn, is pushing technology on Earth further. Without the innovation that spaceflight demands, we would not have this technology for improved environmental monitoring, defense or the health of individuals. For example, sensors encoded with genetic information of any genetically sequenced pathogen can now detect its presence even in minute concentrations. These can be used in air and water purification systems.

There are clear economic and social benefits as well. Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS) used to monitor astronaut health and activities is a technology whose current applications include accelerometers, pressure, chemical and flow sensors, micro-optics, optical scanners and fluid pumps. The MEMS industry has a projected 10-20% annual growth rate.

Mammography used Hubble digital imaging system for greater diagnostic precision. Working with the National Cancer Institute and General Electric, we applied this enhanced precision and the technique for breast biopsy to outpatients and increased the accuracy of breast cancer diagnostic procedures.

Tissue engineering for repairing damaged organs has endless applications. It came from biological research designed to understand the effects of gravity and microgravity on human tissue. In Earth's gravity a cell culture grows in two dimensions, flat on a plate. In space, without gravity, it grows three-dimensionally more like human tissue looks. Three-dimensional tissue was generated on the ground in a bioreactor at NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center in 1987. A slowly rotating vessel neutralizes the pull of gravity on the cells allowing them to remain suspended as they do in space. The bioreactor has become the 'industry standard' for culturing a number of medically important types of cells on Earth like collagen, skin cells and kidney cells that might in the near future be used in organ repair.

Cells multiply faster in space. The virulence of salmonella increases in microgravity as do viruses like herpes. The sensitivity of salmonella to antibiotics decreases. The immune system is depressed in astronauts. A 200% increase in the formation by microbial fermentation of the antibiotics Monorden and Actinomycin D was found even after a few days on a Shuttle flight. The pharmaceutical industry uses this production process in the formation of antibiotics. Even a small increase in the operational efficiency of Earth-based processes could provide substantial economic and health application gains. The composite knowledge from these space observations is invaluable in determining ways gravity, activity and the environment play in health and the spread and control of infectious disease.

Protein crystallography is yet another success story 3 , 4 . In 1995, Dr. Herbert A Hauptman, winner of the1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, commented in a letter to the US Congress: "I was initially skeptical about the possible benefits that might come from these efforts but I have clearly seen the advantages that this unique environment – space – has to offer in the area of protein crystallography" 3 . Protein crystallography is a tool used to determine the three-dimensional structures of proteins. Once a pharmaceutical company has this information, it is able to tailor drugs to target specific proteins, as for example in interfering with the function of such proteins in Alzheimer's Disease or infectious agents like tuberculosis 5 . Obtaining crystals of sufficient size and purity on Earth is a slow and tedious process with a success rate of 6 to 33% depending on the prior purification steps. This implies that the majority of crystals obtained in this way are not of sufficient quality to result in a structural solution. In the microgravity of space, crystals grow more slowly and yield larger crystals of significantly greater purity.

Astronauts and cosmonauts return from space showing a set of symptoms that taken together are those associated with aging. This has been known since the beginning of the space program and especially emphasized by the biomedical data from Skylab and the Russian Salyut longer missions 6 .

It, therefore, became necessary to find a way to induce these symptoms in healthy volunteers on the ground to identify the mechanisms by which those changes were produced so that appropriate countermeasures could be found. The model of choice to enable the study on the ground of changes produced in astronauts in space has been bed-rest – lying in bed continuously for days at a time, especially with the head lower than the feet at -6 0 (HDBR). Since it is impossible to escape the force of gravity on earth for any length of time, what this position essentially does is minimize its effectiveness by pulling across the chest (Gx ) instead of from head-to-toe as in the upright position (Gz ) 7 . From the beginning of the space era even up to and including the publication of Inactivity: Physiological Effects in 1986 8 , the general assumption was that these changes were exclusively due to the inactivity and immobilization inherent in lying in bed or secondary to living without gravity. Therefore, the search for countermeasures to maintain astronaut health centered on exercise. However, in the last 20 years 7 it became apparent that even intensive exercise was only partially helpful as a countermeasure. Efforts took a more basic approach to identify the nature and variety in which the gravity stimulus acts on the human body and the way in which humans physiologically sense and respond to gravity stimuli. One of the outcomes from space with broadest applications for the health and quality of life of humans on earth has come from this research.

Like space, lying continuously in bed telescopes in healthy young individuals what happens to all on earth over many, many years. For instance the normal average rate of loss of bone density on earth is about 1% per year, whereas in space it is 0.4-1% a week and in bed-rest it is about 1-1.5% a month. This approach allows over a relatively short period of time the study of the development and progression of these changes. They are considered reversible in healthy adults recovering from 6 months in space or lying in bed for up to 3 months. However, they have generally been presumed to be irreversible with age. A sedentary lifestyle is now known to lead in the long run to common medical conditions like, for example. a prediabetic state leading to Type-II diabetes, heart disease, stroke, deep vein thrombosis and balance and coordination disorders 9 .

As the value of research from bed-rest studies gains acceptance, many more such studies are being conducted around the world. They are being used as a tool in understanding human physiology in the elderly as well as in clinical and nursing conditions. Health insurance companies have seen economic gain in encouraging patients to reduce hospital stays from the application of results of such studies that show recovery is accelerated after surgery if patients are treated as outpatients or are encouraged to get out of bed and move about as soon as possible. The development of countermeasures for the purpose of preserving the health of space travelers are directly relevant to protecting the health and strength of all of us living on earth. More immediately, such data are directly applicable to prevent the inactivity-related diseases of today and accelerate recovery and rehabilitation of the sick, the elderly, the injured and the disabled here on earth.

These are just a few examples of the benefits to date from space research – a whole new and exciting world of exploration lies ahead.

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Science News

Tardigrades could teach us how to handle the rigors of space travel.

These tiny eight-legged creatures are an inspiration

Tardigrades (one shown) are found in moist, green places, hence the fitting nicknames water bear and moss piglet.

Eye of Science/Science Source

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By Douglas Fox

July 13, 2022 at 7:00 am

No beast on Earth is tougher than the tiny tardigrade. It can survive being frozen at -272° Celsius, being exposed to the vacuum of outer space and even being blasted with 500 times the dose of X-rays that would kill a human.

In other words, the creature can endure conditions that don’t even exist on Earth. This otherworldly resilience, combined with their endearing looks, has made tardigrades a favorite of animal lovers. But beyond that, researchers are looking to the microscopic animals, about the size of a dust mite, to learn how to prepare humans and crops to handle the rigors of space travel.

The tardigrade’s indestructibility stems from its adaptations to its environment — which may seem surprising, since it lives in seemingly cushy places, like the cool, wet clumps of moss that dot a garden wall. In homage to such habitats, along with a pudgy appearance, some people call tardigrades water bears or, adorably, moss piglets.

But it turns out that a tardigrade’s damp, mossy home can dry out many times each year. Drying is pretty catastrophic for most living things. It damages cells in some of the same ways that freezing, vacuum and radiation do.

For one thing, drying leads to high levels of peroxides and other reactive oxygen species. These toxic molecules chisel a cell’s DNA into short fragments — just as radiation does. Drying also causes cell membranes to wrinkle and crack. And it can lead delicate proteins to unfold, rendering them as useless as crumpled paper airplanes. Tardigrades have evolved special strategies for dealing with these kinds of damage.

As a tardigrade dries out, its cells gush out several strange proteins that are unlike anything found in other animals. In water, the proteins are floppy and shapeless. But as water disappears, the proteins self-assemble into long, crisscrossing fibers that fill the cell’s interior. Like Styrofoam packing peanuts, the fibers support the cell’s membranes and proteins , preventing them from breaking or unfolding.

At least two species of tardigrade also produce another protein found in no other animal on Earth. This protein, dubbed Dsup , short for “damage suppressor,” binds to DNA and may physically shield it from reactive forms of oxygen.

Emulating tardigrades could one day help humans colonize outer space. Food crops, yeast and insects could be engineered to produce tardigrade proteins, allowing these organisms to grow more efficiently on spacecraft where levels of radiation are elevated compared with on Earth.

Scientists have already inserted the gene for the Dsup protein into human cells in the lab. Many of those modified cells survived levels of X-rays or peroxide chemicals that kill ordinary cells ( SN: 11/9/19, p. 13 ). And when inserted into tobacco plants — an experimental model for food crops — the gene for Dsup seemed to protect the plants from exposure to a DNA-damaging chemical called ethyl methanesulfonate. Plants with the extra gene grew more quickly than those without it. Plants with Dsup also incurred less DNA damage when exposed to ultraviolet radiation.

Tardigrades’ “packing peanut” proteins show early signs of being protective for humans. When modified to produce those proteins , human cells became resistant to camptothecin, a cell-killing chemotherapy agent, researchers reported in the March 18 ACS Synthetic Biology . The tardigrade proteins did this by inhibiting apoptosis, a cellular self-destruct program that is often triggered by exposure to harmful chemicals or radiation.

So if humans ever succeed in reaching the stars, they may accomplish this feat, in part, by standing on the shoulders of the tiny eight-legged endurance specialists in your backyard.

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NASA releases free e-book on Hubble space mysteries

Since 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has offered scientists an incredible view of the universe. It has provided well over 1 million observations.

Now, NASA has released “ Hubble Focus: The Dark Universe ,” a free e-book that explores what the Hubble mission has taught scientists about dark matter and dark energy — and how those lessons are shaking up long-standing theories.

We can’t see it, but dark matter is thought to make up most of the mass of the universe. Unlike normal matter, which has mass, takes up space and is visible either by the human eye or through a telescope that shows other wavelengths, dark matter is invisible and mostly undetectable.

For years, researchers have been teasing out its role in the universe, and astronomers now believe dark matter makes up 27 percent of the universe. Dark energy, which is thought to be responsible for the expansion of our universe, is thought to make up 68 percent.

The massive instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, which has orbited Earth for decades, detect objects the human eye can’t see. The data has enabled scientists to better understand the invisible universe, although it sometimes poses a challenge to the cosmological model that scientists use to explain how the universe works.

The free book goes over some of the discoveries enabled by the Hubble mission and breaks down the mysteries it has uncovered in plain English. It is also packed with photos from the mission and quotes from experts, and contains links to videos that dive further into such topics as the Hubble constant , the rate at which the universe is expanding.

“Much remains to be done, but this book will give you a front row seat to what’s been happening in this quest,” Hubble operations project scientist Ken Carpenter said in a news release . The book is the fifth in a series of similar volumes about the Hubble mission and its discoveries.

Ready to learn more about the mysterious forces around you? You can download the book in PDF or EPUB format at bit.ly/hubblebook

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See the Total Solar Eclipse’s Shadow From Space

Satellite images from NASA and NOAA showed the moon’s shadow moving across North America.

By K.K. Rebecca Lai and William B. Davis

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April 12, 2024

Suspected Space-Junk Strike in Florida Signals New Era of Orbital Debris

Three years ago astronauts threw out the largest piece of trash ever tossed from the International Space Station. Now some of it seems to have punched a hole through a house in Naples, Fla.

By Leonard David

A heavy pallet filled with tons of spent nickel-hydrogen batteries drifts above the Earth in March 2021, shortly after being discarded from the International Space Station. A nearly two-pound metallic cylinder that recently struck a house in Florida may be debris from the pallet’s uncontrolled atmospheric reentry.

In what may be judged as a bizarre and twisted case of “breaking and entering,” last month a plummeting cylindrical object weighing nearly two pounds hit the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home in Naples, Fla., smashed through a ceiling and punched through a floor.

Although yet to be officially verified as such, the most likely explanation for this high-speed home invader appears to be that it’s a piece of space junk cast off from the International Space Station (ISS) in low-Earth orbit. As the latest close encounter with clutter from the cosmos, the space junk strike has already sparked technical and legal banter about the worrisome escalation of Earth-circling, human-made refuse.

As the saying goes, timing is everything. This event appears to have been years in the making, however.

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Taking Out the Trash

Back in March 2021 astronauts onboard the ISS used a Canada-supplied robotic arm to tip an abnormally hefty hunk of refuse into space—the heaviest object ever jettisoned from the space station, in fact. NASA explained at the time that the trash, called Exposed Pallet 9 (EP9), had the approximate mass of a large SUV “and is safely moving away from the station and will orbit Earth between two to four years before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere.”

After being ferried to the ISS via a Japanese cargo ship the previous year, EP9 had been filled with 5,800 pounds of spent nickel-hydrogen batteries. But a series of logistical complications—chief among them the fact that the battery pallet could only fit in Japan’s cargo ships, of which there were no more to fly—left EP9 stranded, taking up precious space on the ISS. So NASA decided to throw it overboard. After a few years of drifting aimlessly through space, EP9 finally met its fiery fate on March 8 when its decaying orbit sent it nose-diving into Earth’s atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico.

The European Space Agency’s Space Debris and Independent Safety Offices closely monitored the reentry of the pallet of used ISS batteries. These batteries were to undergo “a natural reentry,” said ESA in a pre-reentry communiqué, using a twist on the term for an uncontrolled plunge from space.

“The total mass of the batteries is estimated at 2.6 metric tonnes, most of which may burn up during the reentry,” ESA stated. “While some parts may reach the ground, the casualty risk—the likelihood of a person being hit—is very low.”

A Serious Candidate

Marco Langbroek, a devoted satellite tracker and a faculty member in aerospace engineering at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, says it certainly does look possible that the object in Florida stems from the reentry of the EP9 battery pack.

Langbroek has reviewed EP9’s ground track as well as the reported timing and trajectory of its reentry. Handily, there’s also a time-stamped security video and sound clip of the object that pierced the homeowner’s roof.

After entering the atmosphere and losing much of its speed, the debris piece probably spent a couple of minutes in subsonic free fall, Langbroek says.

“Reentries take multiple minutes, with the object fragmenting and the reentering fragments spreading along the trajectory over a stretch that can be hundreds of miles long,” he adds. “Given the force of impact, I think this is a serious candidate for potential debris from this [EP9] reentry. It might well be a part of one of the nickel-hydrogen battery cells.”

There’s not much guesswork here, says Tobias Lips, managing director of satellite aerodynamics company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany. As a specialist in reentry analysis, he robustly simulated the fall of the ISS pallet of batteries days before the actual event occurred using “moderately conservative” rather than “worst-case” assumptions. Even so, his results suggested more than 130 fragments would survive to reach the surface. That’s “about 10 times more than for a typical reentry object of this size and mass,” he says.

Most of those predicted fragments, Lips says, would be cylinders made of Inconel—a high-strength nickel-chromium superalloy often used in aerospace applications. Nearly 350 such cylinders were in the EP9 pallet’s payload of spent batteries, where they served as power cells. “The fragment found in Naples, Florida, is most likely one of these cylinders,” Lips says.

“The recovered fragment was reported to be about two pounds in weight. Thirty-eight percent of my [simulation’s] surviving fragments are within this mass class,” he explains. “I would be very surprised if investigations of this fragment don’t confirm it being a battery cell from the ISS.”

Ongoing Analysis

Whatever it is, the Florida object in question was handed over to NASA’s neighboring Kennedy Space Center. NASA spokesperson Joshua Finch tells Scientific American that in cooperation with Otero, the agency collected the item for deeper study to determine its origin. “More information will be available once the analysis is complete,” Finch says.

NASA’s analysis will likely begin with a rigorous examination of the object’s trajectory—as well as that of EP9—tracked against the locations of any other recovered debris, says Mike Weaver, a space debris expert at the Aerospace Corporation.

“In this case, the location of the object in Naples, Florida, appears to be consistent with the timing and the location of the ISS battery pallet reentry,” Weaver says. “However, this is not sufficient to positively identify an object.”

Alongside the trajectory work, scrutinizing the candidate chunk of space junk for signs of scorching, melting and other effects of reentry heating would be desirable, Weaver says. Metallurgical analysis to determine its composition could be useful as well.

Sometimes serial numbers or part numbers can be found on an object, Weaver notes, which would rapidly simplify things.

What Goes up Must Come Down

Threats from incoming orbital rubbish are real and set to grow, says Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a commercial provider of space domain awareness services, based in Menlo Park, Calif. As more space systems are deployed in low-Earth orbit, the old adage applies: what goes up must come down.

The vexing nub of the problem is that removing ever proliferating small pieces of orbital debris is vital for maintaining a safe space environment—and uncontrolled atmospheric reentry is by far the easiest way to do it. In fact, this happens automatically for objects in low-Earth orbit, which begin to fall as they bleed off momentum against the outer edges of our planet’s atmosphere. Yet the hands-off nature of this process means any sizable piece of unguided debris has a large swath of the planet upon which it or its fragments might fall, potentially constituting a low but real risk to multiple aviation corridors and population centers.

“The issue of aviation and ground hazard from space operations is a problem that will not go away any time soon,” McKnight says.

Legal Liability

If the downed debris in question is confirmed as coming from the ISS, a dialogue about liability would likely begin, says Joanne Gabrynowicz, a professor emerita of space law at the University of Mississippi and editor in chief emerita of the Journal of Space Law .

Some of the provisions of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty and its Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, as well as the ISS International Governmental Agreement (IGA), could be relevant, Gabrynowicz says.

An analysis of various provisions in these sources and how they interrelate would probably be necessary, Gabrynowicz says, including Article II of the U.N.’s Liability Convention. Article II states that any country launching anything into space shall be responsible for damage any associated space objects may cause back on Earth’s surface.

In the case of an object striking a house, the launching nation would, at minimum, be liable for funding requisite structural repairs. Gabrynowicz adds, however, that while this protocol is simple in principle, its translation to reality can become extremely complex. Things get murky, for instance, if the errant object that struck Otero’s house is proved to be part of the spent batteries from EP9’s reentry: the batteries are NASA’s property, but they were attached to EP9—a payload launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

“That could be complicated, requiring analysis of various contracts, treaties, insurance policies and the IGA. Of course, the entities involved can also agree as to how to resolve the situation,” Gabrynowicz concludes.

An Act of Abandonment

“NASA will want to minimize this by saying chucking stuff off the ISS is rare and this isn’t a satellite or rocket body ... and therefore is disconnected to increasing launch rates,” says Ewan Wright, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia and a junior fellow of the Outer Space Institute.

“But clearly there is an issue here that uncontrolled reentries are fairly accepted, and nobody thought to look into it much further,” Wright says. One reason for laxity, he notes, is that the risks from uncontrolled space debris reentry are literally and figuratively dumped in the ocean, which covers most of Earth’s surface. But treating Earth’s seas as a space junkyard is unlikely to be sustainable forever.

“There are over 50,000 ships in the ocean at any given time and hundreds of thousands of smaller boats. The chance of a ship being hit by space debris is likely to be small, but it’s growing, and we don’t know the number for sure,” Wright says. “A cruise ship being hit by uncontrolled space debris may not kill someone, but it would raise serious questions about our continued abandonment of space debris in orbit. And the launching state would be liable to pay damages.”

Many aerospace companies employ an ethos of “design for demise” for their space-bound components to try to ensure that if the parts do reenter, they reliably burn up at high altitude. Yet even leaving aside growing concerns about the resulting contamination of Earth’s upper atmosphere with heavy metals and other pollutants, some experts consider the practice ill-advised at best.

Moriba Jah, an expert in space debris tracking and management at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-founder and chief scientist at Privateer Space, a group focused on space sustainability issues headquartered on the island of Maui in Hawaii, is one such critic.

Jah emphasizes that discarding our detritus in low-Earth orbit in hopes that this material will “naturally reenter” the atmosphere “is not a responsible disposal method but rather an act of abandonment.” Even if not legally classified as such, uncontrolled reentry “is inherently irresponsible due to the potential risks it poses to life and property on Earth,” Jah says.

In some sense, the unlikely intersection of a probable piece of orbital debris with a home could ultimately prove to be a good thing: it could provide another wake-up call to policymakers, major aerospace players and the public at large that when it comes to space junk in low-Earth orbit, the sky really is falling.

The April 8 Total Solar Eclipse: Through the Eyes of NASA

On April 8, 2024, the Moon’s shadow swept across North America, treating millions to a breathtaking view of a total solar eclipse. As the Moon passed in front of the Sun, it revealed the Sun’s wispy white outer atmosphere — the corona.

Pictures of total solar eclipses are beautiful — they capture a moment happening so far away, yet feels so close at the same time. But being there in person, you experience it in 3D. The eclipse doesn’t just appear in the sky. You feel it all around you. The light slowly dims, then suddenly engulfs you in darkness from every angle, while the Sun’s corona emerges in the sky.

Although you know totality is coming, its arrival can still be overwhelming. For some people, their hearts race or their eyes well up with tears. You try to absorb everything you can in those minutes: from the corona, to the planets peeking out around the eclipse, to the temperature drop, to cheers of excitement from the community around you, even changes in animal behaviors.

For years, people have reported how animals behave differently during eclipses. Birds may return to their nests, thinking it’s nighttime, or nocturnal animals begin to wake up. A NASA-funded project called Eclipse Soundscapes collected data from participants across the path who recorded the reactions of wildlife before, during, and after this celestial event.

Total solar eclipses are a great reminder that humans are animals — we, too, feel the strangeness that causes other animals to have unusual behaviors. When experiencing the sudden change to darkness, and the sudden restoration of light, it can feel eerie and special. The world returns to normal around you, but those minutes of totality were anything but.

On April 8, millions of people gathered across the path of totality, including at 14 NASA “SunSpot” locations where attendees could speak to NASA experts and engage in educational activities. At many locations, visitors set up blankets, lawn chairs, and picnics as they prepared to watch the Sun turn into a crescent until its bright face completely disappeared.

During totality, viewers could spot planets. In this view from Dallas, Venus and Jupiter were very bright. Their brief appearance in the middle of the day were reminders of Earth’s place in the solar system.

Viewers could also see bright pink prominences flowing out from the Sun. Prominences are unstable clouds of plasma suspended above the Sun by strong magnetic forces. The prominences spotted during the eclipse were many times larger than Earth itself. It’s rare to be able to spot prominences from the ground unaided by a telescope, so seeing these prominences with just your eyes was a unique opportunity for those on the ground.

While we were watching the eclipse from the ground, a NASA spacecraft was watching from above. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of the Sun a few minutes before totality in Dallas at 1:37 p.m. CDT (18:37 UTC). From SDO’s position in space, the Sun was completely visible, while for people on Earth, the Sun was blocked by the Moon. The prominences seen in this image were what viewers on the ground were able to see with the naked eye.

Astronauts on the International Space Station also had an exclusive view of the eclipse from 261 miles above Earth. Due to their place in space, they could see the Moon’s shadow travel across Earth. While those of us on Earth watched the Moon pass in front of the Sun, astronauts on the International Space Station watched its shadow pass over Earth.

NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) imager on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured these views of Earth between 12:02 and 4:32 p.m. EDT (16:02 and 20:32 UTC) from about 1 million miles from Earth. DSCOVR is a joint NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and U.S. Air Force satellite.

Much closer to Earth, pilots aboard NASA’s WB-57 jets flew at 50,000 feet, chasing the Moon’s shadow briefly to extend the time scientific experiments could study the eclipse. This research will help contribute to scientists’ understanding of the Sun’s corona and Earth’s atmosphere.

From the ground, in Earth’s atmosphere, and in space, the total solar eclipse was a breathtaking experience for millions of people. The effects of the total solar eclipse on Earth and on us will be remembered by many for years to come.

While the eclipse is a powerful reminder of our place in the universe, it also reminds us of our place in our communities. During the alignment of the Sun, Moon, and Earth, people across North America also aligned with families, friends, classes, colleagues, and even strangers as they took in this celestial event in the sky and all around them.

By Abbey Interrante and Joy Ng NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Related Terms

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• The Sun & Solar Physics

2024 eclipse one of many reasons flat Earth claims are nonsense | Fact check roundup

Tens of millions of Americans will watch as the moon passes between the sun and the Earth on April 8, completely blocking out daylight for minutes for those in the path of totality . The celestial show has launched a frenzy of paper glasses purchases and hotel reservations , and it serves as a perfect case-in-point for how scientists know the Earth, moon and sun move through space.

But it hasn't stopped some skeptics from continuing to believe the Earth is flat, a conspiracy theory experts say dangerously feeds into paranoia and spurs an unhealthy skepticism of all science and credible authorities.

The USA TODAY Fact-Check Team has debunked an array of flat Earth-related claims, including that Antarctica is really an ice wall around a flat Earth and the related conspiracy theory that space – and space travel – isn't real.

More: Surreal April 2024 total solar eclipse renews debunked flat Earth conspiracy theories

More : The 2024 total solar eclipse is in less than a week: How to get glasses; cloud forecast

The claim: NASA admits the Earth is flat and non-rotating

Our rating: False

NASA has consistently said the Earth is a round, rotating globe, and the documents referenced don't prove otherwise. The "flat, non-rotating earth" model is a common technique used to generalize mathematic equations, experts said.  Read more

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The claim: Antarctica is an ice wall that surrounds the flat Earth

Antarctica is a continent in the Southern Hemisphere. Satellite data from NASA and independent companies shows the land mass as an island with a definitive end. Read more

The claim: Pictures show the Earth is flat, and sea levels haven’t changed

Scientists have ample evidence the Earth is curved, including images of the planet taken from outer space. And long-term tide gauge data shows that sea levels have risen in Sydney Harbor over the past century and continue to rise. Read more

The claim: Moon visible in the daytime proves Earth is flat

The Earth is not flat, it's spherical, as proven by photos from space and an array of observations and calculations that can be done from Earth. Planetary scientists say the visibility of the moon and sun during the daytime doesn't prove a flat Earth – it is in fact a reflection of the motion of the sun, moon and Earth in space, along with the Earth's rotation. The moon also does not emit its own light.  Read more

The claim: Radar technology wouldn’t work if the Earth was a globe

Scientists say that radar technologies account for the Earth’s curvature. Furthermore, the curvature of the Earth plays into some of the limitations of radar technology. An abundance of evidence demonstrates the Earth is spherical in shape – including images of the planet taken from outer space. Read more

The claim: Celestial navigation would be impossible if Earth is globe-shaped and orbits the sun

Celestial navigation is a technique still used to determine location based on the positions of celestial objects. Because the Earth and other celestial bodies are in motion, the apparent position of stars, planets and the sun in the sky changes. These changes must be taken into account for successful celestial navigation. Read more

The claim: Operation Highjump was a mission to find out what was beyond the 'ice wall' of Antarctica

Historical records show Operation Highjump was a naval operation conducted to establish a base in Antarctica. There is no evidence it was sent to investigate an "ice wall." There’s overwhelming evidence that Antarctica is a continent, not an ice wall. Read more

The claim: Post implies moon missions impossible because of Earth's atmospheric temperatures

Our rating: Missing context

The implied claim is wrong. Thermospheric temperatures do not melt spacecraft. While this layer of the atmosphere does technically reach the temperatures stated in the post, there are not enough air molecules in the thermosphere to transfer significant amounts of this heat to an object, according to researchers. Read more

The claim: Post implies Apollo missions didn't happen because lunar module can't travel between Earth and the moon

The implied claim is wrong. The Apollo 11 lunar module traveled through space after being propelled toward the moon by a powerful rocket. Astronauts made the journey in a different, attached module − called the command module. Astronauts only used the lunar module for transport between the moon and the orbiting command module. Read more

The claim: Post implies NASA space shuttle can't travel faster than jet due to its design

The implied claim is wrong. The NASA space shuttle travels much faster at top speeds than the SR-71. The space shuttle is launched with the aid of huge rocket boosters not shown in the photo and only reaches top speeds at elevations where there is virtually no air resistance. The SR-71 jet moves more slowly because it must reach its top speeds under its own power and against the friction of Earth's atmosphere. Read more

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Russia aborts planned test launch of new heavy-lift space rocket

In this photo released by Roscosmos space corporation on Wednesday, April 3, 2024 an Angara-A5 rocket is seen during preparation for the launch at Vostochny space launch facility outside the city of Tsiolkovsky, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region, Russia. The Angara-A5 is a new heavy-lift rocket developed in Russia. (Roscosmos space corporation via AP)

In this photo taken from video released by Roscosmos space corporation on Tuesday, April 9, 2024 an Angara-A5 rocket is seen prior to the launch at Vostochny space launch facility outside the city of Tsiolkovsky, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region, Russia. The first test launch of the new Angara-A5 rocket was aborted Tuesday just moments before the scheduled liftoff. The Angara-A5 is a new heavy-lift rocket developed in Russia.(Roscosmos space corporation via AP)

In this photo released by Roscosmos space corporation on Monday, April 8, 2024 an Angara-A5 rocket is seen during preparation for the launch at Vostochny space launch facility outside the city of Tsiolkovsky, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region, Russia. The Angara-A5 is a new heavy-lift rocket developed in Russia.(Roscosmos space corporation via AP)

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MOSCOW (AP) — Russian space officials on Tuesday aborted the test launch of a new heavy-lift rocket from its far-eastern launch pad.

The Angara-A5 rocket was scheduled to lift off from the Vostochny space launch facility at 0900 GMT Tuesday, but the launch was aborted two minutes before.

Yuri Borisov, head of Roscosmos state space corporation, said the automatic safety system canceled the launch after registering a flaw in the oxidizer tank pressurization system.

He said the next launch attempt was set for Wednesday.

Tuesday’s launch was to be the fourth for the Angara-A5, a heavy-lift version of the new Angara family of rockets that has been developed to replace the Soviet-designed Proton rockets.

The previous three launches were carried out from the Plesetsk launchpad in northwestern Russia.

After the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia leased the Baikonur Cosmodrome from Kazakhstan and continued to use it for most of its space launches. The agreement with Kazakhstan allows Russia to keep leasing Baikonur for $115 million a year through 2050.

While Roscosmos has continued to rely on Baikonur, Russian authorities have developed Vostochny as the facility of choice for Angara launches. The construction of the new spaceport has dragged on for longer than planned and it has seen only limited use so far.