Kako astronauti idu u WC u svemiru? :D :D

[Meho Krljic]

Mislim da bi morao da ode mnogo više da bi ušao u orbitu. Daleko više. I valjda bi video u kabini da je u bestežinskom stanju, pa bi znao da treba da se spusti 

[Josephine]

ma nije to, nego što zemljina gravitacija privlači i mesec, i veneru, merkur, mars... komete, meteore... pa što ne bi i felixa na svega 30ak km visine? granica između atmosfere i svemirskog vakuuma je tek na 100km od zemlje...

[mac]

30 kilometara iznad površine Zemlje je još uvek malo u poređenju sa prečnikom Zemlje od [malo guglovanja] 6371 km. Sila gravitacije opada sa kvadratom udaljenosti od centra planete, i nema neke preterane razlike u gravitaciji između 6371 i 6401 kilometara udaljenosti od centra.

[Džek]

Mislim da bi morao da ode mnogo više da bi ušao u orbitu. Daleko više. I valjda bi video u kabini da je u bestežinskom stanju, pa bi znao da treba da se spusti 

Mikrogravitacija (bestežinsko stanje -pogrešan termin) se ne postiže visinom, nego brzinom. No, pošto se Feliks penjao izuzetno malom brzinom, ne bi osetio mikrogravitaciju (orbitu bez intervencija u korekciji iste) ispod 1000 km a da ne piči prvom orbitalnom.

Mikrogravitaciju bi dosegao i na visini od oko 150 km, ali ne zadugo. Gravitacija bi ga vrlo brzo uzela pod svoje.
Već na 250 km bi mogao da "pluta" maksimalno sedam dana, onda bi se sljuštrio nazad, ka zemlji.

ISS svakih mesec dana pali motore i vrši korekciju putanje, iako se nalazi na "samo" 350 km, da bi se otela od ono malo otpora atmosfere što je ostalo na toj visini.

[Ygg]

Феликсе, Србине!!!

http://www.index.hr/black/clanak/sletio-uz-bozju-pomoc-felixa-cuvala-pravoslavna-ikona-majke-bozje-s-hilandara/641908.aspx

[Barbarin]

Felix Baumgartner Stratos JUMP

[Meho Krljic]

The tech behind Felix Baumgartner’s stratospheric skydive 

Sixty five years ago today, Captain Charles Yeager became the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound in his X-1 aircraft. Daredevil Felix Baumgartner just became the first man to accomplish the same feat without a plane — or indeed any assistance at all. In an almost unimaginable stunt, the 43-year old Austrian has jumped from a specially constructed balloon at over 128,000 feet (39km) above the earth, breaking the world record for high-altitude skydives and speeds in free fall. As you would expect, Baumgartner is no stranger to extreme sports. He is an accomplished BASE jumper and, using a carbon wing, was the first to free fall across the English Channel. On this dive he broke not only the previous altitude record of 102,000 feet for a skydive, but likely the speed of sound and the record for fastest free fall during his descent.
The Red Bull Stratos team backing Baumgartner describes their feat as a “mission to the edge of space.” Years in the planning, the team has gone through many iterations of equipment and practice jumps before finally being ready to make the record-setting attempt from Roswell, New Mexico. Capsule damage during a training jump and poor wind conditions took turns delaying the effort, but today, Sunday, October 14th, 2012, Baumgartner was finally able to launch.
Read: The best photos and videos from Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos sky dive
 Getting up there Even getting high enough to make the record jump is a technical challenge. 128,000 feet (over 39,000 meters) is several times higher than the altitudes frequented by commercial jets. It even surpasses world altitude record of 123,520 feet for jet aircraft. So getting there isn’t simply a matter of hitching a ride on a plane. Baumgartner used a specially-designed balloon with a spaceship-sized capsule suspended underneath to make his ascent.
To put this altitude in perspective it is more than three times further than the seven miles James Cameron went below the surface of the ocean to reach the depths of the Mariana trench. Like Cameron’s journey, Baumgartner’s was a solitary one, packed into his one-man capsule suspended under the helium-filled Stratos balloon for his three-hour ride up.
 Surviving in space The journey up was the cushy part of the flight for Baumgartner. His 2,900-pound (1315kg) capsule is fully climate controlled. It was damaged in a hard landing during a test jump in July, which pushed the team’s schedule back to allow for repairs. Similar to Cameron’s sub, the capsule features a pressure sphere, although a six foot one made out of fiberglass and epoxy instead of the four foot version made from metal that Cameron needed. During the ascent, the sphere is pressurized to 8 psi, about the same pressure as the atmosphere at 16,000 feet above sea level.
Much like a race car cockpit, the sphere is surrounded by a cage of chromium-molybdenum (chromoly steel) tubing. An outer insulated shell of fiberglass helps protect the capsule from the -70 degree Fahrenheit (-56.7C) temperatures. An aluminum honeycomb at the bottom of the capsule protects the sphere during landing. Additional, one-time-use crush pads of cell-paper honeycomb can withstand up to 8Gs on impact.

 A lifetime of dry cleaning, all in one bag Red Bull describes its Stratos balloon as a forty-acre dry cleaning bag. Made out of strips of plastic film which are only .0008-inches (0.02mm, 20 micron) thick, the balloon material would cover nearly 2,000,000 square feet (162,000 square meters). Polyester-fiber tape is used to reinforce the material. At launch the helium-filled balloon is 55 stories high, and very thin. As it ascends, the balloon expands, eventually holding a staggering 30,000,000 cubic feet of helium as it becomes nearly round — 334 feet high and 424 feet wide. Two trucks of helium are needed to inflate the balloon, a process taking nearly an hour. The balloon is remotely emptied, returned to earth, and hopefully recovered after a jump. I’m thinking that I wouldn’t want to be standing underneath it when it drifts down.
 Space walking at the speed of sound Baumgartner’s suit is essentially a highly-ruggedized spacesuit. Eight pounds of composite materials provide him with a 3 psi environment for his entire trip down, and protects him from the extreme temperatures he’ll experience. He doesn’t need to try to breathe 3 psi air, as the suit provides him with pure oxygen.
A main and reserve chute are of course essential equipment for Baumgartner. They are only designed to be deployed up to about 172 mph (277 kph), so Baumgartner needs to slow down, by entering the thicker atmosphere closer to earth after about five minutes of free fall, before safely pulling his rip cord. There is a fail-safe which could have deployed the main chute if he had been moving at more than 115 feet (35 meters) per second at 2,000 feet (610 meters) or less altitude. Fifteen more minutes of floating down on his parachute got Baumgartner safely on the ground.
Baumgartner has almost certainly also set a world record for speed, as well as height. During the jump his team measured his top speed at nearly 730 mph, well above the speed of sound and the previous record. His chest pack includes an instrument package that will be used by officials to verify whether he did indeed break the sound barrier during his free fall. If the team’s calculations are correct Baumgartner broke through the speed of sound — approximately 690 miles per hour — within a minute after jumping. Lower-altitude jumps are limited in speed by the drag of the atmosphere, but at over 100,000 feet the air is thin enough to allow much greater speeds.
Amazingly the team kept visual contact with Baumgartner during the jump and was able to transmit live video of the event. For most of the jump, except for a period when he was tumbling, Baumgartner could also be heard speaking with the team, including relaying that his leg was swelling up during the free fall. The only one of the records Baumgartner set out to shatter that didn’t fall was time in free fall. He pulled his rip cord and successfully deployed his main chute about four minutes and 22 seconds after jumping, instead of the over six minutes he had hoped for — probably because his free fall speeds were higher than expected.

 Spinning, and not in a good way We’ve all seen video of airplanes going into a tailspin. Diving from altitude carries the same risk, except magnified because a human body can spin much faster than a plane. The resulting force is enough to cause unconsciousness and potentially a “redout” leading to brain injury. The Red Bull team equipped Baumgartner’s rig with a special drogue chute that could have deployed to stabilize him if a suit-mounted G meter registered over 3.5 Gs for more than six seconds. The closest Baumgartner got to this type of problem was tumbling mid-way through his free fall, which he quickly corrected.
 Covering the jump: Beyond Google Glass Google might have made waves broadcasting a low-altitude jump with Google Glass cameras and special antennas, but this jump required a much more extreme set of cameras and communication technology. The capsule itself featured nine HD cameras and three 4K cameras, along with three more high-resolution digital still cameras. Because of the altitude, critical electronics components are housed in a pressurized “keg” that contains two miles of wires.
Four of the twelve capsule cameras are rated for space and life outside the capsule, while eight of them live in nitrogen-filled housings on the exterior, and three are in the interior. All the cameras are remotely controlled from the ground, and filled three microwave channels with video during the flight. Baumgartner’s suit also had three HD video cameras, one on each thigh and one on his chest.
None of this was enough to get the jump broadcast live. A unique ground system, nicknamed JLAIR for Joint Long-range Aerospace Imaging and Relay, had to be developed to track the capsule and Baumgartner during the flight and dive. Using several massive telescopes and high-powered zoom lenses mounted on a four-ton motorized pedestal the JLAIR kept the broadcast antennas focused on target.
 A link to the past In an unlikely parallel to Cameron’s deep-sea dive, Baumgartner also broke a record that is over fifty years old. In 1960, then Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger sky dived from 102,800 feet, also over New Mexico. Like Don Walsh’s dive to the Challenger Deep of the Mariana trench in the Trieste in 1960, it was done at a time before much of the technology in use today was invented. Kittinger is a consultant to the Red Bull Stratos project, just as Walsh was to Cameron’s effort. Kittinger’s jump was chronicled on film, and has been turned into a YouTube video with a rock sound track. Look for the guy checking the free fall time with a stopwatch:

It’s hard to imagine the feeling of jumping out of a space capsule 22 miles above the earth and simply falling for over four minutes as space turns into sky. Fortunately for Baumgartner he was able to keep his wits together, control his body position, and successfully pull his rip cord to make a great landing — steering his parachute to an open area and walking as he landed. After this, the most awesome of his many feats, he plans to settle down with his family and merely fly helicopter rescue flights for adventure.
 

[Barbarin]

Red Bul na Feliksu zaradio 6 milijardi dolara - 12.000%

Dajte meni milijardu skačem sa 60 000 metara 

[mac]

Mnogo je to nula, koji god broj da gledam.

[Meho Krljic]

Felix Baumgartner Space Jump: Unreleased Audio

[Agota]

 

[Barbarin]

http://www.blic.rs/m/Slobodno-vreme/Vesti/350005/Skocite-s-Feliksom-Novi-neverovatni-snimak-Baumgartnerovog-skoka

[Agota]

Procitala sam u BLIC PULSU ,da se povlaci.

[Barbarin]

Pa nema više odakle da skače 

[mac]

Mogao bi da skoči sa Međunarodne svemirske stanice...

[дејан]

пошто је овај топик већ са феликсом отишао дођавола, овде је чланак о валерију розову који је скочио са монт евереста (7720м) (има и снимак)

[Meho Krljic]

Da se vratimo na kosmonaute. Priča o Alekseju Leonovu, prvom kosmonautu koji je "šetao" u svemiru i kako se to maltene završilo katastrofom:

The First Spacewalk: How the first human to take steps in outer space nearly didn't return to Earth

[Meho Krljic]

Gaddemit, a mi mislili Feliks neka šmekerčina:
 
 Direktor "Gugla" skočio sa ivice svemira, novi rekord
 

Direktor Gugla Alen Justas skočio je sa ivice svemira i probio zvučni zid i time oborio rekord koji je pre dve godine postavio Feliks Baumgartner.
 
On je juče u apsolutnoj tajnosti skočio sa visine od skoro 42 kilometra i postavio novi rekord, samo dve godine nakon rekorda Feliksa Baumgartnera, koji je skočio sa visine od 39.044 metra.
 
Justas (57), koji je sam finansirao ovaj poduhvat, skočio je sa neverovatnih 41.842 metara, a skok sa ivice svemira do tla trajao je 15 minuta, javljaju agencije.
 
On je juče ujutro po lokalnom vremenu se balonom napunjenim helijumom iz Novog Meksika popeo do stratosfere, odakle je skočio, a dok je padao kretao se brzinom većom od 1.300 kilometara u sekundi.
 
On je nosio specijalno dizajnirani skafander, dok se Baumgartner peo u kapsuli. Pripreme za ovaj poduhvat trajale su 34 meseca.
 

[Meho Krljic]

Kineska brodica se uspešno vratila s proputovanja oko Meseca:


China completes first mission to moon and back

BEIJING: China completed its first return mission to the moon early Saturday with the successful re-entry and landing of an unmanned probe, state media reported, in the latest step forward for Beijing´s ambitious space programme.

 

The probe landed safely in northern China´s Inner Mongolia region, state news agency Xinhua said, citing the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.

 

Xinhua said the probe took "some incredible pictures" of the Earth and the moon.

 

Prior to re-entering the Earth´s atmosphere, the unnamed probe was travelling at 11.2 kilometres per second (25,000 miles per hour), a speed that can generate temperatures of more than 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,700 degrees Fahrenheit), the news agency reported.

 

To slow it down, scientists let the craft "bounce" off Earth´s atmosphere before re-entering again and landing.

 

The probe´s mission was to travel to the moon, fly around it and head back to Earth, the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) said in a statement at its launch eight days ago.

 

The module would have been 413,000 kilometres from Earth at its furthest point on the mission, SASTIND said at the time.

 

The mission was launched to test technology to be used in the Chang´e-5, China´s fourth lunar probe, which aims to gather samples from the moon´s surface and will be launched around 2017, SASTIND previously said.

 

Beijing sees its multi-billion-dollar space programme as a marker of its rising global stature and mounting technical expertise.

 

The military-run space project, which has plans for a permanent orbiting station by 2020 and eventually to send a human to the moon, is also seen as evidence of the ruling Communist Party´s success in turning around the fortunes of the once poverty-stricken nation.

 

China currently has a rover on the surface of the moon.

 

The craft, called the Jade Rabbit and launched as part of the Chang´e-3 lunar mission late last year, has been declared a success by Chinese authorities, although it has been beset by mechanical troubles. (AFP)

[Meho Krljic]

Imaju i slike i, da, neke od stvari koje su astronauti ostavili na Mesecu uključuju i izmet:
 
 The 8 weirdest things we've left on the moon

[Meho Krljic]

Najveći problem na dugačkim kosmičkim putovanjima je, kako nas je i dosta nauične fantastike podučilo - dugotrajna izolacija. Kako se protiv toga boriti?


Moving to Mars

On a clear, cold day in March, 1898, a converted seal-hunting ship named the Belgica gave up struggling against the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea and resigned itself to the impending Antarctic winter. The ship was carrying a scientific expedition with an international crew, rare in that phase of polar exploration: nine Belgians, six Norwegians, two Poles, a Romanian, and an American, the ship’s doctor. The expedition’s organizer, a Belgian naval lieutenant named Adrien de Gerlache, had handpicked officers and scientists for their expertise; the mariners who slept in the forecastle had been signed up more casually. None had been selected for character, resilience, or survival instinct. The crew had expected the Belgica to winter over in warmer latitudes. No ship had ever spent a winter locked in the Antarctic ice.
An eerie despondency settled over officers and crew as the days grew short and ice groaned against the hull. Low on coal and lacking proper gear, they sewed winter coats out of blankets. Conversation trailed away, and dinners of tinned meat were greeted with derision. Starting in May, the sun disappeared for two months, and the crew gradually fell apart. A young Belgian geophysicist succumbed to a weak heart, and was buried through a hole in the ice. De Gerlache and the ship’s captain, Georges LeCointe, wrote out their wills and retired to their rooms. One crewman, convinced that the others wanted to kill him, hid away at night, while another tried to leave the ship, announcing plans to walk home to Belgium. Even the ship’s cat withdrew and died. The American doctor, Frederick A. Cook, wrote in his journal that a “spell of indifference” had afflicted him and his shipmates. “Around the tables, in the laboratory, and in the forecastle, men are sitting about sad and dejected, lost in dreams of melancholy,” he noted. “We are at this moment as tired of each other’s company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food.”
Cook later became infamous for faking two heroic firsts, the conquest of the North Pole and the ascent of Mt. McKinley. But that winter on the Belgica was an occasion of genuine heroism. Assisted by the ship’s Norwegian first mate, Roald Amundsen, Cook instituted an exercise routine on the ice, walks around the ship known as the “madhouse promenade.” He introduced a “baking treatment” for the men with the lowest morale and the weakest heartbeats, which entailed seating them before the warm glow of the ship’s coal stove. He insisted that the crew start eating the vitamin-rich meat of penguins, which even he described as tasting like a mixture of mammal, fish, and fowl parts, roasted in blood and cod-liver oil. He helped organize entertainments, including a beauty contest among illustrations torn from magazines, with voting categories such as “Alabaster shoulders,” “Supple waist,” and “Irreproachable character.”
With the return of summer, Cook and Amundsen rallied the crew for a monthlong effort to saw a channel to open water. De Gerlache and his men returned to Europe as heroes, and Amundsen—who later achieved renown as a polar explorer—credited the doctor with saving their lives. But the Belgica’s experience became a cautionary tale for the planners of future expeditions to the poles. When Richard Byrd set out, in 1928, to establish a camp in Antarctica, his supplies included two coffins and twelve straitjackets.
A century after the Belgica’s return, a NASA research consultant named Jack Stuster began examining the records of the trip to glean lessons for another kind of expedition: a three-year journey to Mars and back. “Future space expeditions will resemble sea voyages much more than test flights, which have served as the models for all previous space missions,” Stuster wrote in a book, “Bold Endeavors,” which was published in 1996 and quickly became a classic in the space program. A California anthropologist, Stuster had helped design U.S. space stations by studying crew productivity in cases of prolonged isolation and confinement: Antarctic research stations, submarines, the Skylab station. The study of stress in space had never been a big priority at NASA—or of much interest to the stoic astronauts, who worried that psychologists would uncover some hairline crack that might exclude them from future missions. (Russia, by contrast, became the early leader in the field, after being forced to abort several missions because of crew problems.) But in the nineteen-nineties, with planning for the International Space Station nearly complete, NASA scientists turned their attention to journeys deeper into space, and they found questions that had no answers. “That kind of challenging mission was way out of our comfortable low-earth-orbit neighborhood,” Lauren Leveton, the lead scientist of NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance program, said. Astronauts would be a hundred million miles from home, no longer in close contact with mission control. Staring into the night for eight monotonous months, how would they keep their focus? How would they avoid rancor or debilitating melancholy?
 Stuster began studying voyages of discovery—starting with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, whose deployment, he observed, anticipated the NASA-favored principle of “triple redundancy.” Crews united by a special “spirit of the expedition” excelled. He praised the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen’s three-year journey into the Arctic, launched in 1893, for its planning, its crew selection, and its morale. One icebound Christmas, after a feast of reindeer meat and cranberry jam, Nansen wrote in his journal that people back home were probably worried. “I am afraid their compassion would cool if they could look upon us, hear the merriment that goes on, and see all our comforts and good cheer.” Stuster found that careful attention to habitat design and crew compatibility could avoid psychological and interpersonal problems. He called for windows in spacecraft, noting studies of submarine crewmen who developed temporarily crossed eyes on long missions. (The problem was uncovered when they had an unusual number of automobile accidents on their first days back in port.) He wrote about remote-duty Antarctic posts suffering a kind of insomnia called “polar big eye,” which could be addressed by artificially imposing a diurnal cycle of light and darkness.
“Bold Endeavors” was a hit with astronauts, who carried photocopied pages into space, bearing Stuster’s recommendations on workload, cognitive impairment, and special celebration days. (He nominated the birthday of Jules Verne, whose fictional explorers headed to the moon with fifty gallons of brandy and a “vigorous Newfoundland.”) But historical analogies could take NASA only so far, Stuster argued. Before humans went to Mars, a final test should run astronauts through “high-fidelity mission simulations.” To the extent possible, these tests should be carried out in some remote environment, whose extreme isolation would bring to bear the stress and confinement of a journey to outer space.
One morning in February, I was lurching through lava fields in a white Dodge Ram truck, halfway up Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. Holding tight to the steering wheel, the driver, a University of Hawaii computer-science professor named Kim Binsted, told me that we were climbing the second-biggest mountain in the solar system. Mauna Loa is slightly shorter than its island neighbor Mauna Kea, but it is far more massive, rising gradually from deep below the surface of the Pacific to thirteen thousand six hundred and eighty feet above sea level. Binsted, who had a long side career in improvisational comedy, was soon quibbling with herself about the solar-system ranking—how to score the huge peaks in the Tharsis region of Mars?—but Mauna Loa’s claim is clearly impressive: if Earth were as dry as Mars, the mountain would rise nearly six miles from foot to summit. It is a slow-oozing shield volcano, like its Martian rivals, and the bleak terrain near the summit looks a lot like photographs of rough landscapes beamed from robotic rovers. The Johnson Space Center, in Houston, uses pulverized lava from its slopes to study potential agriculture in space colonies; its iron-rich basalt is a close analogue to the soil on Mars. As Binsted’s mentor, the NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay, put it, “Mauna Loa is our Martian mountain.”
Binsted stopped the truck where a chain blocked the red-cinder road and climbed out to open the lock. A sign said, “Isolation study in progress, please do not enter this area, or interact with the crew . . . Mahalo!” Beyond a rocky parapet near the eight-thousand-foot elevation, a two-story white vinyl geodesic dome came into view, perched on the mountainside like a gigantic golf ball sliced high into the rocks from a Kona resort. Multicolored lava fields fell toward the valley, where a thread of highway could barely be seen. Binsted asked me to whisper. Inside the dome, six volunteers were mimicking the life of astronauts on Mars for a NASA-funded test of team dynamics in space. They had been in the dome since October and would remain until June; at the moment, they were just a few days away from setting a North American record for a study of the effects of isolation and confinement.
Binsted wore a red polo shirt with the project’s logo: HI-SEAS, for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. Her short brown hair was barely cinched in a ponytail. As the principal investigator for the study, which is being run by the University of Hawaii, she had recruited and trained three men and three women, ranging in age from twenty-six to thirty-eight, preparing them for the austerities of travel to another planet. The dome is twelve hundred square feet, divided into a kitchen, an exercise area, and pie-slice sleeping quarters upstairs. Water is doled out as if it were being squeezed from the atmosphere by robots; each person is allowed eight minutes of shower time a week. The six crew members keep in touch with mission control only by computer, with a twenty-minute lag in each direction to simulate communication from Mars, and they leave the dome only on E.V.A.—extra-vehicular activity—wearing Velcro-sealed approximations of spacesuits. The crew members are engaged in small personal research projects and in team projects, mapping nearby geological features. All the while, they are themselves the subjects of the real research.
 Binsted, five feet six and briskly friendly, speaks with the intensity of someone who drinks a lot of Diet Coke. She was born in New Jersey and grew up near Vancouver in the nineteen-eighties, during the post-Apollo period, when public interest in space travel had abated. She studied artificial intelligence and got a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, where she performed in her spare time with a troupe called the Improverts. For her thesis, in computational linguistics, she developed software that generated puns. (“What do you call a Martian who drinks beer? An ale-ien.”) Even then, she thought of her work as a way to connect to a longtime side interest in space. A friend of hers, the writer Sarah Rose, said, “The first time I met Kim, twenty years ago, she told me, ‘When the aliens come, I want to be the first person they call.’ ” Binsted noted, “ ‘They’ was the researchers, not the aliens. I just want to point that out.” A marathon runner, she applied five times to NASA’s astronaut-selection program and once to Canada’s (she holds dual citizenship), each time making it past the medical exams and reference checks and into the “highly qualified” pool. On her most recent attempt, in 2013, eight new astronauts were chosen from a field of sixty-three hundred, and Binsted was not among them. At the age of forty-three, she figured that she had finally aged out. “I stopped exercising the next day,” she says ruefully.
 The dome has a porthole, looking across the saddle at Mauna Kea—a legacy of the first study there, during which the benefit of a windowless exterior (protection from radiation) was found to be less significant than the drawback (the crew hated it). For our visit, the porthole had been covered over to keep the crew’s isolation complete. Quiet as parents on Christmas Eve, we ferried tubs of rice cakes and wet wipes from Costco into a back entry porch. Menus had been worked up during two previous missions in the dome, lasting four months each, during which food cooked ad libitum, even from reconstituted ingredients, rated much higher than the kind of meals-in-a-pouch necessary during zero-gravity travel. Back into the truck went black plastic bags of trash and boxes of saltines that had passed their shelf date. “ ‘Principal investigator’ sounds pretty glamorous,” Binsted said, as she climbed behind the wheel. “But a lot of what I do is space janitor.”
For years, NASA has run experiments replicating the environments of space and alien planets. Rovers and robotics have been tested in the Arizona desert and in the Canadian Arctic. “Human factor” studies in preparation for space-station duties have been carried out in a capsule at the Johnson Space Center and in an underwater lab off Key Largo. These days, the International Space Station provides an analogue for future long-duration missions; the astronaut Scott Kelly, who has just begun the first full year for an American in orbit, is the subject of psychological as well as physical tests. The Hawaii project represents another step for NASA: a test of group dynamics and morale to help design systems that will send a team into deep space.
Binsted and her colleagues sorted through seven hundred applications, winnowing them to a hundred and fifty serious candidates, many of them fit, well educated, and spunky—younger versions of Binsted. All six chosen for this round are aspiring astronauts, which makes them ideal subjects, Binsted said. They think more like modern space voyagers than did the sailors in earlier studies of isolation, but they are less wary and reticent than real astronauts tend to be. She wasn’t looking for volatile personalities, in the way of a reality-television producer; it was more like finding roommates to share an apartment. Astronauts tend to be resilient, low-drama types. On top of these qualities, she wanted sociability—a thick skin, a long fuse, an optimistic outlook, and a tolerance for low stimulation. The HI-SEAS crew includes an Iraq War veteran and microbiologist, a NASA aerospace engineer born in Azerbaijan, and a robotics graduate student who finished her degree and was named to Forbes’s “30 Under 30” in science while cooped up in the dome. In addition to their duties on sMars, as they sometimes call the simulation, they communicate with the outside world by blogging and posting photographs and videos. They are ferociously motivated, having already managed to cut their weekly shower allotment down to six minutes. The first time I e-mailed Martha Lenio, a thirty-four-year-old Canadian engineer who serves as commander, she mentioned in her reply, forty minutes later, that they wished they could get more feedback, even though it might undermine the study: “It’s a bit frustrating because we’re highly competitive and want to be the best crew.”
 The volunteers perched in the lava fields of Mauna Loa are as close as earthlings will get to Mars in the foreseeable future. In 2010, President Obama gave the mission a push, predicting that the nation would have a human in Mars orbit sometime in the twenty-thirties. There was something familiar about the upbeat rhetoric: since the nineteen-sixties, the schedule for a trip to Mars has been a shimmering, receding horizon, always a few decades away. Daunting technological, physiological, and political obstacles stand in the way of a project still so undefined that no real dollar figures are attached to it, although the figure of a hundred billion dollars is sometimes used to start a conversation. The National Research Council concluded last year that, without a focussed commitment, the U.S. has “no viable pathways to Mars,” and Congress is a difficult launching pad these days for major national initiatives. Contracts for commercial companies like SpaceX and Boeing to carry astronauts into orbit will help. On the other hand, the outlandish promises of private groups like the Netherlands-based Mars One—which has offered a one-way ticket to Mars for a bucket-shop rate, underwritten by a reality television show—may just feed the image of space exploration as a teen-age fantasy.
Yet the U.S. is actually somewhat closer to a Mars mission than it’s ever been. NASA is testing a new capsule and a new heavy-lift rocket. A robotic rover planned for 2020 will test technology for extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. As John Logsdon, an emeritus professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, pointed out, “We’ve never cut hardware before.” A few weeks ago, Logsdon helped to convene a Washington, D.C., conference of scientists, industry representatives, and NASA staff which presented a “minimalist” plan, calling for a thirty-month human orbital mission to Mars in 2033, followed by a landing in 2039. It could be done, according to an advocacy group called the Planetary Society, at the current NASA funding level of eighteen billion dollars a year, growing with inflation—provided that funding is shifted to Mars from the International Space Station in the twenty-twenties.
 But, even in the best case, a human mission will be dauntingly expensive and dangerous—and once the astronauts sail past the moon they won’t even be able to talk to mission control in real time. Why not program robots to handle the whole job? Chris Kraft, NASA’s retired but still legendary cigar-clenching flight director, argued in a recent interview that the long delay in communication between Earth and Mars makes a human mission impractical. “As an operator, damned if I like that. If I’m on the moon, I’ve got a three-second turnaround. Everything I go to do on Mars I’ve got to prepare to do in an automatic mode. That’s not very smart. Pretty much everything we need to do on Mars can be done robotically.”
Proponents see it the other way around. Alain Berinstain, the former director of planetary exploration for the Canadian Space Agency and an adviser to Binsted, told me that the time lag was an argument against robots: “By the time you see that cliff coming, you’ve driven over it twenty minutes ago.” In contrast, an astronaut trained in geology can step onto the surface of Mars, look around, and pick up the one rock that makes a difference—and twenty minutes later ground control will hear about what she found. “It’s hard to say when, but we will go with humans to Mars,” Berinstain said. “It’s like humans exploring parts of the earth we didn’t know. We’re made that way.”
Some traditional ways of thinking about ground control and astronaut training will have to change. “With the Apollo program, every time a light went off you had a team of fifteen controllers telling you, ‘That light just went off, ignore it,’ ” McKay, the astrobiologist, told me. “When you go to Mars, the laws of physics just do not allow that. The ‘right stuff’ now is what’s required for a crew to work well in isolation. It’s a different set of skills. Some people won’t get it until we’re actually doing the mission. But there’s no way around it, unless they can change the speed of light.”
 The two most recent astronaut classes, in 2009 and 2013, were the first ones chosen explicitly with long-duration space missions in mind. The emphasis on more autonomy for crews has prompted a search for “different competencies,” NASA says. The best astronauts from the cool-test-pilot days of the Mercury program do not necessarily make the best crew for exploring deep space. But, with the right crew selection and planning, the thinking goes, the first step for man on Mars could turn out to be a giant group hug for mankind.
On Sophie Milam’s first E.V.A. in Hawaii, she had a panic attack. She is twenty-six, the youngest crew member, a former astronomy and physics student at the University of Hawaii campus in nearby Hilo. The task that day was to map a volcanic structure that might hold underground lava tubes. On Mars, such caverns could be useful for shelter in radiation storms. Crew members always wear fake spacesuits on E.V.A.s—mostly yellow hazmat suits that they consider “janky”—but Milam was wearing the good one, with a bubble helmet and fans inside. The suit weighs forty pounds, and Milam labored up a slope of crumbling lava, counting each step. Her teammate Jocelyn Dunn, a doctoral student from Purdue, said that spacesuits provide a pleasant singing-in-the-shower remove from the world. But Milam was thinking about how damp and warm it was inside and, as she wrote later on her blog, how the fans didn’t seem to be working:

Wait, I should feel wind on my face . . .
WHERE IS MY AIR?
stopStopSTOP
>calm down . . .
I can hear that nice calm voice but only barely over the overwhelming sound of PANIC
NO​AIRNOAIRNOAIR​GETTHISHELMET​OFFYOUCAN’T​GETOUTOFTHIS​SUITON​YOUROWN . . .

Milam had wanted to be an astronaut since she was five. She thought about that—“If you freak out too much they won’t let you go back out in this suit”—as she tried to relax and let the fans catch up. In her ear was the voice of her team partner Allen Mirkadyrov. She told him that she needed a minute to rest. She told herself that the air inside the suit was supposed to be different from the air outside: after all, they were on Mars.
Back inside the dome, after the mapping was completed, she was met by concerned teammates, who had heard heavy breathing on her voice-activated mike. They found a loose electrical connection in the air-intake system and fixed it. A few days later, she went back out in the suit, and soon was the team’s most eager volunteer for trips out of the dome. “Sometimes a girl just needs a spacesuit to feel like a real astronaut,” she wrote me.
“She was sort of getting back on the horse,” Martha Lenio, the group’s commander, said. Lenio grew up with the nickname Mars, but dropped it in the dome, because she kept thinking that people were talking to her. In real life, she is a renewable-energy consultant and has made it to the second round of the Canadian astronaut-selection process. One of the most satisfying parts of dome life, she told me, has been fixing things. The crew members devise projects, such as recycling dishwater through a filter of volcanic soil. They dub funny music into science-outreach videos for school groups. Milam, who was honored by Forbes for her work in nested-tetrahedron tensegrity robots, built a new spacesuit helmet out of duct tape, a pool noodle, and Bubble Wrap. She wrote on her blog, “When you’re trapped in a dome on the side of a volcano with five other nerds, you’d be surprised at how excited people get when you propose a fancy tinfoil hat.”
 Thus pass the weeks. The six compete to assemble “from-scratch” meals with freeze-dried ingredients, serving pho, sushi, gumbo, ravioli, and falafel. Exercise is built into their routine, as it would be for astronauts trying to maintain muscle mass in low gravity (Mars has three-eighths the gravity of Earth), and the chatty exhortations of Tony Horton, the self-described “fitness clown” who devised the P90X workout routine, permeate their conversations. The communication lag means no surfing the Internet, but Zak Wilson, who is twenty-eight, speculated that e-mail, even if it’s time-delayed, will help astronauts feel less isolated than old-time sailors trapped in the Antarctic ice. Wilson brought a 3-D printer, and as he finds himself casting about for useful items to make—iPad wall mounts, a Scotch-tape dispenser—he concedes that watching the extruder swing back and forth, depositing tiny bits of material with each pass, is “maybe not a terrible analogy for our stay here.”
 Eight months is a long time in a dome, but on a real voyage that’s when the crew might just be reaching its destination. The trip home could be significantly longer. Mars takes about twice as long as Earth to complete an orbit of the sun, and, as the orbits go out of phase, the distance between the planets ranges from thirty-five million miles to more than two hundred million. The designers of a mission face a difficult choice: stay on Mars for a year and a half, waiting for the planets to draw close enough for a quick trip home, or make a sixty-day stopover, which could mean a homeward journey of more than a year—drawing heavily on whatever stores of rocket fuel and human patience remain.
The HI-SEAS crew members have not been immune to homesickness, or to the pressures of monotony and enclosed space. Sometimes one will schedule an E.V.A. just to take a walk outside, or will sneak into the attached supply container to record a private voice mail. The days proceed with little variety apart from the sound of wind or rain on the dome. After passing the midway point, the crew started joking self-consciously about what researchers call the “third-quarter phenomenon,” when energy sometimes flags. Monotony and boredom can be a threat to any expedition’s well-being, as Jack Stuster documented with the Belgica. The mind grows stressed, and makes mistakes, as it searches for new stimulus. In the longest-ever space simulation, a five-hundred-and-twenty-day project in a Moscow warehouse that finished in 2011, lethargy caused withdrawal and perturbed sleep in some participants. The dangers of boredom can be especially acute during the long months of automated travel between planets—the narrative lull that drives screenwriters to do fantastical things with suspended animation and wormholes.
A little more boredom would have been welcome during an analogue study conducted in 1999 by the Institute of Biomedical Problems, in Moscow. A month in, on New Year’s Eve, a fistfight between two Russians left blood splattered on the walls. Minutes later, the crew commander forcibly kissed a female volunteer, a Canadian with a doctorate in health sciences. When she protested, she later recalled, the Russian scientific coördinator reported that she was ruining the atmosphere in the test module. Then she got head lice. A Japanese participant quit in protest. A decade later, when Russia launched its five-hundred-and-twenty-day study, to simulate a trip to Mars and back, all six participants were men. “I guess their solution to the problem of sexual assault was to not have women,” Binsted said.
None of the HI-SEAS crew saw anything surprising about mixing men and women on the crew. In space, women astronauts may have advantages. Kate Greene, a San Francisco writer who took part in an earlier HI-SEAS study, centered on food, mused on Slate about the possibility of an all-woman space crew, arguing that women tend to make a lighter load and to burn fewer calories for the same amount of work. Some researchers in Moscow’s 1999 study insisted that the problems came more from mixing nationalities than from mixing the sexes. But international mixing is likely to become even more common, given the need to share costs of travelling to deep space. Some planners have suggested running teams through remote analogues like the Mauna Loa habitat as a final test.
The only international tension reported in the dome this winter was over Allen Mirkadyrov’s preparation of khingal, served with a creamy dill sauce, which he assured his teammates was nearly as good as the version at the main Azerbaijani bus terminal. (Mirkadyrov, a naturalized U.S. citizen and Air Force veteran who works on orbital-launch vehicles at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan.) For the most part, the crew insists, time is passing quickly, with plenty of the morale-building activity recommended by Fridtjof Nansen: taco nights, competitive board games, group viewings of “Game of Thrones.” On Thanksgiving, the crew members lit up their biometric “actigraphy monitors” with two-step lessons.
Their persistently cheery e-mail updates raise a question: Does a happy crew tell NASA anything useful? Binsted argues that upbeat blog posts don’t always tell the whole story. Small gripes often emerge in the post-study interviews, when subjects know that their replies will be kept anonymous. It was only at the end of one of the four-month food studies in the dome, for instance, that Binsted heard from everyone about the “Nutella incident,” in which a crew member arrogantly finished off the group’s monthly ration, reasoning that the team was scheduled to open a new bin the next day. Stuster’s work with isolated crews found many examples of trivial annoyances growing unbearable, such as complaints from one of Byrd’s Antarctic crewmen about another man’s “way of breathing, his belief in dreams, and his frequent use of the phrase ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Stuster’s latest study for NASA, on private journals kept by astronauts, fairly hisses in places with steam let off by astronauts irritated by overscheduling, by patronizing requests, and by pointless-seeming tasks coming from ground control, such as recording serial numbers on items of trash. In the Mauna Loa dome, crew members simply roll their eyes when Binsted’s far-flung volunteer assistants do something lame, like expecting an immediate response to an e-mail sent when everyone is still asleep, because the sender forgot that sMars, like Hawaii, is not on daylight-saving time. Binsted calls it “crew-ground disconnect,” and deals with the problem in ways that are summarized by her use of the term “mission support,” rather than “mission control.” Her approach has worked, she said, “but we’ve kind of done it on the fly. We need to develop a flow chart and some acronyms, so that NASA can use it.”
 Even in a low-drama group, she says, there are bound to be moments: attacks of claustrophobia or arguments over dessert. “We know a lot about how to build bad teams and how to break good teams. Here we try to build the best teams we can, and support them as best we can, and find out when that’s not good enough.” How will such moments affect team performance? In space, a team that’s falling apart will probably be less effective. A team with too much cohesion might be prone to ignoring orders. Sometimes, Binsted will crank up the stress herself, as when she declared the approach of a radiation storm, forcing the crew to evacuate into a lava tube.
Measuring performance is relatively easy. It’s more challenging to find ways to measure, from a distance, how people are getting along. The crew members say that the worst part of the study is having to endure the stress and boredom of answering surveys—about forty each week—asking if they’re feeling stressed or bored. The fishbowl existence of their pet betta fish, Blastoff McRocketboots, seems carefree by comparison. The results from these surveys, along with cognitive tests and exit interviews, will be measured against data collected from biometric monitors and other devices worn by the volunteers. Readouts note the participants’ heart rates, voice levels, and even their proximity to one another. NASA hopes that the data from these and other high-tech mood rings will prove a reliable way to track how astronaut teams are doing without having to rely on self-reporting or on reading between the lines of an e-mail. The essence of the Hawaii experiment may be to make NASA more comfortable with sending crews out of close reach: if humans in space could be monitored a bit more like robots, mission control could spot an emotional cliff coming before the astronauts stumble over it. “Of course,” Binsted said, “there’s still the question of what interventions are actually available when your crew is on Mars.”
Two decades might seem like a long wait between a dress rehearsal and the performance. That’s what Chris McKay thought when he first heard about team-cohesion studies. For years, McKay led an informal national organization known as the Mars Underground, to keep conversation and research going when human deep-space voyages fell into disfavor. “At meetings, you would be ridiculed if you talked about searching for life on Mars. They would ask me, ‘Are you going to bring your butterfly net?’ ” He remains a leading astrobiologist at NASA, and he knows all the obstacles to getting to Mars. Sorting out crew issues didn’t sound like a big priority.
The earliest remote team tests seemed more about engaging the public than about testing systems for Mars. In 1997, a planetary scientist named Pascal Lee argued that his research camp in a vast meteorite crater on Northern Canada’s Devon Island—the largest uninhabited island in the world—would be an ideal place for NASA to model an expeditionary camp. In the end, two research stations operated on Devon Island: one for NASA-funded geological research and tests of spacesuits and rovers, and one for a nonprofit advocacy group called the Mars Society, which invited the Discovery Channel along. The Mars Society later started a second site, in the Utah desert—more accessible to the public and to the media. The desert simulations are short, and their contributions to space science have not been extensive. But, the Mars Society says, more than nine hundred people have taken part.
 One of those drawn to the Mars Society projects was Kim Binsted. In 2007, she signed on as the chief scientist for a four-month study on Devon Island—at the time, the longest Mars-analogue mission yet attempted. She was living in Hawaii, having moved there to teach after she launched and crashed a dot-com business in Tokyo. “In terms of stress, startups in Japan and academia in Hawaii pretty much define the spectrum,” she said. She figured that taking part in the analogue project might help her chance of becoming an astronaut.
The Mars Society habitat was not an exact replica of life on Mars, she found. When the crew went on E.V.A.s, one member armed with a rifle had to stay out of a spacesuit to watch for polar bears. Nor did it seem that enough thought had been given to crew compatibility. An expert on human performance in extreme environments who studied Binsted’s group reported that when conflicts arose the women tended to respond with “task coping” (finding a way to deal with the problem) while the men often reverted to “avoidance coping” (ignoring the problem “in favor of pursuing prolonged exploration while on E.V.A.s”). The study also cited reports of “unreciprocated sexual interest” expressed by a person of authority, and resentment from a French-Canadian participant who, forced by the group to sit through the television series “Lost,” complained that the plot was incomprehensible.
 Binsted enjoyed the experience, but figured that she could sharpen the concept. In addition to the “geologically relevant” red cinder, Hawaii’s lava beds would not require the down time of the Arctic in winter or the desert in summer. Experiments could be run sequentially, and rely less on anecdote. “The very nature of analogues is that they tend to be one-offs,” she said. “So if we see some things three times in a row we can say, Yeah, this is a thing.”
In 2012, Binsted and her colleagues received half a million dollars from NASA’s human-research program for the first, food-centered study in the dome. Since then, Binsted said, she has encountered occasional wariness from federal officials who are worried that they’ll be accused of encouraging Hawaiian junkets. The former Oklahoma Republican senator Tom Coburn included the food study in the 2012 edition of his government “Wastebook,” mocking the development of “out of this world” recipes for a mission that was decades away.
The project’s biggest obstacle came right at the start, when NASA informed Binsted that the grant could not be used for construction. Suddenly, she was two hundred thousand dollars short. When she went to the University of Hawaii looking for the sum, she found that the university had just lost exactly two hundred thousand dollars, to a sham promoter who pretended that he could bring Stevie Wonder to Honolulu for a concert. Binsted reached out instead to the only millionaire she knew who might care: Henk Rogers, who made a fortune in computer gaming—he holds licensing rights for the game Tetris—and once hosted a weekend gathering for space experts at his Big Island ranch. Rogers agreed to build the dome, and the food study got under way. A second NASA grant, for $1.2 million, followed, in 2013, calling for a series of three studies. The current one is the second; the crew’s record will fall when a twelve-month study follows theirs.
Pascal Lee, who is now drawing up plans for a NASA mission to the Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos, remains a little skeptical of team analogues that lack the stress and danger of a real mission. But he says that they serve an important secondary purpose: they inspire students, which he sees as essential to maintaining America’s leadership among the world’s spacefaring nations. “China landed a space rover on the moon, and within a decade will probably land a human being on the moon,” Lee said. “We pooh-poohed what China is doing. But we’re missing what that program is doing to science education in China. By the time we’re ready to go to Mars, our kids are going to be faced with this space superpower.”
McKay is now a believer for the same reason. “I have the zeal of the converted,” he said. In addition to providing an evangelizing tool, he thinks, the studies have raised useful questions, and this is a good time to ask them. “The technology is going to change,” he said, but “they’ll be the same humans as we have now.”
One evening in March, not long after the crew passed the four-month mark, Martha Lenio checked a wall-mounted iPad in the dome and saw an ominous descending line: the batteries were draining power instead of charging. Solar power is always scarce in the dome; to retain enough battery life for a normal night, the crew members cook dinner while the sun is still up. That week, through several days of rain and clouds, they’d been bundling up for warmth, boiling quick freeze-dried meals, and skipping movies at night. Even so, they’d run through their backup hydrogen cells, and they couldn’t get more gasoline for their generator—Binsted’s truck had broken down on her way back from a David Sedaris talk in Hilo—so they were running on their last jerrican. The triple-redundant system was failing. On Mars, such a scenario would put their life support at risk. The team made some emergency calculations. In a matter of hours, they would lose the fan on their composting toilet.
 Two crew members put on hazmat suits and went out with flashlights, waiting three minutes in the entry to simulate pressurization, but could find no problem. They went “out of sim” briefly, texting a mission-support technician for help troubleshooting, with no luck. So the crew came up with a plan. They shut off the lights in the dome and turned off the heat. They ran basic telemetry off the batteries and plugged an extension cord from the generator into their three highest priorities: the toilet fan, the refrigerator holding four months’ worth of frozen urine and saliva samples for NASA, and the tank heater for Blastoff McRocketboots.
In the morning, a technician drove up the mountain and fixed the generator. The crew remained inside, still buzzing from the change to their routine. “It was cold and dark, but it was also kind of fun to have a real challenge to step up to,” Lenio wrote on her blog.
Binsted told me that the crew members seemed to have performed well under pressure. “There was a lot of potential for crew-ground disconnect, and, although I’m sure they felt some frustration with mission support, they kept communications constructive and professional. They also managed to do a lot of troubleshooting and fallback planning on their own, which was impressive.” Given the difficulties of monitoring team dynamics from a distance, she said, she looked forward to seeing the data. “Maybe my perception is completely off!”
 A few days later, Lenio sent me a voice message. I had asked if she thought that people in her generation would ever walk on Mars. She told me that she thought they had a shot—or at least a shot at being alive when it happened. She pictured a crew like theirs, working under a red sky, building a habitat with very little margin for error. When she was a graduate student in Australia, she said, she got disoriented at night, because there was no Big Dipper and the moon was upside down. “I think those kinds of moments would happen to you all the time on Mars,” she said. “When you looked out the window, the sky wouldn’t be blue. You’d get that sense of awe all the time—new surprises every day.” In Hawaii, they were isolated and alone, on the side of an active volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But, as the power failure showed, it will be very different for the first settlers in outer space. “If life support goes down here, we’re not going to freeze to death, or we’re not going to lose all our oxygen. O.K., yeah, the habitat smells like crap, and the situation really sucks. But at the end of the day we don’t die.”

[scallop]

Meni je i putovanje kroz ovaj link dugačko.


A kako se boriti protiv izolacije? Ponešto se može naći i u mojoj kratkoj priči "Zunzara u uhu".

[Meho Krljic]

Former NASA chief on US space policy: “No vision, no plan, no budget”
 

During a congressional hearing Thursday, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin had harsh words for the space agency—and the space policy crafted by President Obama's administration. Under the Obama administration's guidance, NASA has established Mars as a goal for human spaceflight and said that astronauts will visit the red planet by the 2030s. However, a growing number of critics say the agency’s approach is neither affordable nor sustainable.
On Thursday, Griffin, administrator of NASA from 2005 to 2009, joined those critics. The United States has not had a serious discussion about space policy, he testified, and as a result, the space agency is making little discernible progress. NASA simply cannot justify its claims of being on a credible path toward Mars, he added.
“To quote my friend and colleague Jim Albaugh, the now-retired CEO of Boeing Commercial Aircraft, the current administration’s view of our nation’s future in space offers ‘no dream, no vision, no plan, no budget, and no remorse,’” Griffin said during a hearing of the House Science Committee. “We must remedy this matter with all deliberate speed.”
The Republican chairman of the Science Committee, Lamar Smith of Texas, echoed those concerns in his comments, saying that under President Obama, NASA does not seem to be taking a serious approach to human exploration. The hearing comes at a critical time for NASA, now two months into the last year of President Obama’s second term and with a new administrator likely to replace Charles Bolden in 2017. Republicans in Congress have made it clear they do not favor the president’s plan to send astronauts to visit a fragment of an asteroid near the Moon and an eventual journey to Mars.
In fact, legislators appear to support returning to the Moon as a stepping stone en route to exploration deeper into the solar system. That was evident by the choice of witnesses for the hearing, including Griffin, who strongly called for a US-led international partnership to develop a permanent human presence on the Moon.
Another witness, retired astronaut Eileen Collins, echoed what most current and former astronauts also appear to believe: that the Moon is a good training ground for missions deeper into space. As a pilot and commander of multiple space shuttle missions, she said most of her colleagues favor such an incremental approach. “When asked about how best to prepare for a successful Mars mission, as a crew member, I certainly would like to see the hardware tested on the Moon’s surface first,” Collins testified. “This is part of a test plan’s build-up approach. Policy leaders are asking astronauts to risk their lives on space journeys, and it is our experience that testing in similar environments will minimize risk.”
The overall purpose of Thursday’s hearing was to discuss leadership and stability at NASA, which often sees a policy whiplash every four to eight years when a new president comes into the White House. That certainly was the case in 2009, when President Obama turned NASA away from Griffin's choice of the Moon toward the asteroid belt and an eventual Mars mission.
However NASA’s partners on the International Space Station have been slow to embrace this move. During the last year, European Space Agency Director General Johann-Dietrich Wörner has in fact broken from NASA by speaking of establishing a “Moon Village.” A growing number of US companies are interested in supplying such an effort and using a lunar base to mine for ice and other resources. These resources might then serve as a cache of fuel and other supplies for exploration to Mars.
To bring stability, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), has proposed legislation (
HR 2093
) that he says would make NASA more professional and less political. The bill would appoint a NASA administrator for 10 years instead of having him or her serving at the behest of the president. It would also reduce the influence of the White House Office of Management and Budget on space policy by having NASA’s board of directors submit a budget request directly to Congress.
During the hearing on Thursday, Culberson noted that NASA has spent $20 billion on canceled spaceflight programs and that this has proved very damaging to morale at Johnson Space Center in Houston as well as other field centers. “We need to ensure that we take the politics out of science and provide NASA with clear direction and guidance that outlasts the political whims of any one presidential administration—and the political whims of Congress,” Culberson said.
Culberson’s predecessor as chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee with oversight of NASA’s budget, Frank Wolf, also proposed similar legislation before. It did not advance. The new bill may suffer the same fate, but Thursday’s hearing clearly demonstrated Congressional dissatisfaction with NASA’s current human spaceflight efforts.
Although space has not been an issue during the presidential primary process and is unlikely to bubble up during the general election, it seems that the next president and an unhappy Congress will have quite a bit to say about the direction NASA takes in 2017. At this point, that direction looks to include a more serious reassessment of the Moon as a proving ground for deeper exploration.
 

[Meho Krljic]

A year in space really messed up astronaut Scott Kelly
 

Space does not necessarily do a body good.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who will complete a 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station Tuesday night, is expected to be scrawnier, weaker, and have worse eyesight than when he lifted off, scientists predict.
The 52-year-old spaceman from New Jersey will undergo a series of physical and medical tests as soon as the Soviet-designed Soyuz spacecraft carrying him lands in Kazakhstan on Tuesday around 11:27 p.m. Eastern time, according to The Verge.
Kelly is the first American to spend more than 11 months in microgravity, and once hes lands safely, scientists will focus on its effects on the human body.
The most obvious and expected change that officials believe they will see is a significant loss of muscle mass and bone density, since Kelly’s body did not have to work against gravity while aboard the space station.
NASA also expects Kelly to experience extreme dizziness, and even fainting, upon his return — due to the fact that blood and other fluids will collect in the upper body during extended stays in space and rush back down to the legs once back down on Earth.
Another side effect will be altered vision and poorer eyesight, something Kelly noted in a recent press call from space, the site reported.
Astronauts returning home will often have swelling behind their eyes — which may be caused by a buildup of fluid in the head, according to Jennifer Fogarty, who is chief of NASA’s Space Life Sciences program.
In addition, NASA predicts that Kelly will suffer from drastic changes to his immune response and digestive system — since he’s been eating nothing but space food for the last year.
Officials expect his gut microbiome to be altered completely when he arrives back on Earth — and research shows that living on the ISS may have even changed how the bacteria in Kelly’s stomach express RNA, the genetic messengers that control the behavior of cells.
“Some bacteria may become more potent when they’re in space,” National Space Biomedical Research Institute vice president Graham Scott told the Verge.
Once Kelly is back home, scientists will take samples of his blood, fecal matter, urine and saliva and compare them to samples from his identical twin brother, Mark, who is also an astronaut.
The agency will analyze the samples closely and try to determine which of Kelly’s health changes were a result of living in space and which were induced by genetic predisposition.
Over the next few months, they will also take a close look at Kelly’s mental state, which Fogarty says has so far been great.
The whole purpose of NASA’s “One-Year Mission” was to help experts better understand the side effects of living in space, so they can start prepping crews for missions to Mars one day.
NASA says Kelly’s test results may take up to six years to be published.
Once the agency stops performing tests on him, Kelly said that one of the first things he plans to do is go home and jump in his pool.
 

[džin tonik]

Citam sinoc vijest oko povratka, gledam, interes covjecanstva od nula do minus 278. Koji razvoj od prvog covjeka u svemiru...
Trebalo bi konacno poslati u svemir a) prostitutku da dijeli selfije i caska b) kuhara koji bi prezentirao spejs-food, moze sharene tabletice, uz postapalicu loodilo brate! c) Vucica da u sklopu razvoja infrastrukture svecano otvori maketu crne rupe
Kakav blizanac... boring.

[Meho Krljic]

Pa, to, ako ne skaču sa padobranom iz orbite uz RedBull sponzoraj, kosmonauti su očigledno nezanimljivi modernom čoveku 

[džin tonik]

izvedeno: interes za sf/f je mrtav. sasvim prirodan razvoj dekadencije. tako je propao i rim; narod vishe nije zanimalo sta se krije iza velike bare, tek prostitutke, kuhari i klauni. vidim crno...

[Meho Krljic]

Još malo o Skotu Keliju (strašno da o njemu kopiram vesti iz NY posta koji je njujorška verzija Alo!-a al šta da se radi...):
 
 
 
 For Scott Kelly, being back on Earth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
 

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Fresh from a year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly said Friday his muscles and joints ache. His skin is so sensitive it burns when he sits or walks. And he can’t sink a basketball shot.
He’s surprised — not necessarily about his basketball skills, but everything else. After his previous half-year space station mission five years ago, he wasn’t nearly this tired or sore.
“Adjusting to space is easier than adjusting to Earth for me,” he said at his first postflight news conference Friday.
Like other astronauts, he got taller in space. He said he gained 1½ inches. But he lost it almost as soon as he stood on solid ground.
Kelly returned from the International Space Station on Wednesday, ending a 340-day mission that set a U.S. record. It took him a full day to get back home from the landing site in Kazakhstan to Houston. That’s when the aches and pains set in — this from the guy who hopped out of his space capsule and later promptly jumped into his backyard pool.
Initially, he felt better than last time, but that quickly changed.
The 52-year-old astronaut said because his skin hasn’t had significant contact with anything for so long — in space, clothes just float around you — “it’s very, very sensitive. It’s almost like a burning feeling wherever I like sit or lie or walk. I’m not wearing these shoes all the time,” he said, kicking up his right foot, which sported a shiny black dress shoe. “I just wore them for you guys.”
Thick running shoes are his preference these days; they make his feet “feel a little bit better.”
As for the culture shock of being back on Earth, Kelly expects that will hit soon. “From having so little on the space station and so few choices about what you’re going to do every day, what’s available to you, to basically having just about anything,” he told reporters.
His first food back on Earth? A banana he found on his bed aboard the plane. He didn’t realize the irony until he ate half of it; he cavorted around the space station a few weeks ago in a gorilla suit, a gag gift from his identical twin, Mark, a retired astronaut.
The genetic doubles — one in space, one on the ground — took part in medical studies throughout the flight. NASA wants to know how the body and mind adjust to long periods in space before sending astronauts to Mars; expeditions are planned for the 2030s.
NASA’s chief space station scientist, Julie Robinson, said she’d ideally like 10 or 12 astronauts to spend extra-long periods in space to know what all the risks might be.
Johnson Space Center physiologist Dr. John Charles said he was impressed Kelly managed to complete all his physical exercises — standing up suddenly, walking heel-to-toe, navigating an obstacle course — immediately after touchdown. He’d likely fare well on Mars, scrambling to get out of a spacecraft on his own, taking a fast spacewalk and settling in, according to Charles and Mark Kelly.
“He’d be a good example of somebody who could probably make that trip to Mars for six months and then in a short period of time, do some reasonable work,” observed Mark Kelly. Round trip, a Mars mission would last 2½ years.
Kelly’s companion for the entire space journey, cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, 55, is back home in Star City, Russia, dealing with his own adjustments to gravity.
Many of their blood, urine and saliva samples are still up on the space station, frozen. NASA must wait until its commercial shipper SpaceX is delivering back and forth again — following a launch accident last summer — to get the scientific treasure trove, hopefully in May. Charles expects it will take the next year to analyze all the data.
During his year in space, Kelly sent back dazzling photos of Earth and chronicled his space days on Twitter, attracting more than 1 million followers. He partnered with his girlfriend, Amiko Kauderer, a public affairs representative at Johnson, to set social media ablaze.
Kelly holds the U.S. record for total days in space — 520 days over four missions. He doubts he’ll fly again for NASA. But perhaps in the next 20 years, “you’ll be able to just buy a cheap ticket, go for a little visit.”
“I’ll never be done with space,” he said. “I will always be involved.”
 

[Meho Krljic]

NASA examines options and flight paths for SLS EM-2 mission

As NASA and its contracted partner agencies press forward toward the debut launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket in 2018, the U.S. space agency is beginning to look toward preliminary planning and test objectives for the EM-2 mission of the SLS Program, which is expected to take place sometime in the opening half of the 2020 decade.
The road to EM-2
As originally conceived in the opening years of the SLS program, the EM-2 mission was to be the first crewed flight of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle that would take astronauts on a multi-day circumlunar mission.




However, the feasibility of this mission being one to carry crew was called into question as the EM-2 launch date slipped beyond the opening of the 2020 decade and NASA began investigating the potential advancement of the introduction of the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) from the third to the second EM flight of SLS. 
Originally, with timelines indicating that EM-2 would follow a couple years after EM-1, it was understood that EM-2 would make use of the same Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) as EM-1- with one key difference: The ICPS would be human rated for EM-2.
The feasibility of this was quickly challenged as the ICPS’ human rating would cost millions of dollars (USD) for a single-mission event before the switch to the EUS on EM-3 and all subsequent SLS flights.
Nonetheless, the human-rated ICPS for EM-2 would satisfy the requirement from the astronaut office that no crew fly on any variant of the SLS rocket when a major propulsion element was being used for the first time in flight.
However, NASA’s decision to advance the introduction of the EUS to EM-2 created a conflict with that rule – as EM-2 was viewed in its initial conception as the second flight of SLS, thus leaving no room between the EM-1 and EM-2 missions of SLS to test the EUS in flight.
The FY 2016 U.S. federal budget
However, following a protracted budget battle – which has become all too usual for the U.S. Congress – the final FY 2016 federal budget included language specifically addressing the Europa Clipper Mission and the vehicle upon which it would launch.




Originally, the notional mission to Europa was tentatively penciled in for launch aboard an Atlas V 551 variant from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. 
However, the FY 2016 U.S. federal budget for NASA specifically directed funding “for the Jupiter Europa clipper mission and clarifies that this mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept with a target launch date of 2022.”
More surprisingly, the FY 2016 federal budget language also specifically mandated the vehicle upon which Europa Clipper will launch.




“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall use the Space Launch System as the launch vehicle for the Jupiter Europa mission, plan for a launch no later than 2022, and include in the fiscal year 2017 budget the 5-year funding profile necessary to achieve these goals.”
With SLS now legally mandated as the launch vehicle for Europa Clipper, the issue of testing the EUS in-flight prior to EM-2 could be rectified if SLS launches the Europa Clipper mission in 2022 ahead of EM-2.
This would place the EM-2 mission firmly in the No Earlier Than 2023 timeframe, approximately five years after the EM-1 mission, currently on track to launch by “No Later Than November 2018,” according to the Exploration Systems Development (ESD) presentation to the NASA Advisory Council Meeting on 2 March 2016.
EM-2 planning begins:
Despite uncertainty to the exact timeframe of EM-2, NASA has begun formal planning operations for the flight.




“Mission planning for EM-2 and beyond including on-ramp for low-cost opportunities for development tech objectives and capability enhancements” are underway, notes the ESD presentation.
Moreover, a dedicated mission planning team has been established, co-manifest payload options are being evaluated, and a mission planning resources watch item list is being created.
Critically, on-orbit Micro-Meteoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) risk exposure and related mission profile/trajectory planning efforts for the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion are in the initial phases of study, as are the precise objectives the EM-2 crew will achieve during their multi-day flight around the moon.



According to the ESD presentation, “With the selection of the EM-1 Mission being a DRO (Distant Retrograde Orbit) mission the goal of EM-2 is [to] complete residual FTOs (Flight Test Objectives) not accomplished on EM-1 [and] accomplish risk reduction activities for future more complex missions for EM-3+.”
(A DRO is a highly stable orbit that exists due to the interaction between the Earth and Moon’s gravity.)
Notably, the ESD presentation notes that EM-1 and EM-2 “should include capabilities relevant to potential near term deep-space missions.”
To this end, both EM-1 and EM-2 are classified as Design Reference Missions (DRMs), intended to be “design driving cases … to maintain current SLS/Orion FTOs while demonstrating as many Exploration Objectives as cost, schedule and risk allows.”
EM-2 flight options, in-flight abort requirements:
Presently, EM-2 is baselined as a High Lunar Orbit (HLO) mission.
Of particular note and importance for EM-2 is the fact that the vehicle will carry, at every point in its mission, the ability to directly return its crew to Earth within five days should such an emergency situation arise.



Additionally, according to the “Evolution of Orion Mission Design for Exploration Missions 1 and 2” report, Orion and its crew, through the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) burn, will be placed into a free return trajectory to a nominal Earth Entry Interface condition. 
This specific free return trajectory will allow the crew to safely return to Earth in the event the Service Module’s (SM’s) engine fails to ignite post-TLI.
In this case, in a free return trajectory, a minimal series of thruster burns can accomplish precise positioning of Orion to allow for a passive swing and gravity assist maneuver around the Moon to slingshot the vehicle and crew back toward a landing point on Earth without any major burns.
Baselined HLO mission:
Under this profile, Orion and the EM-2 crew would launch aboard SLS and complete one full orbit of Earth before the TLI burn on the second orbit would propel them toward the Moon.
After jettisoning the EUS, the SM would perform the Outbound Trajectory Adjust (OTA) burn to lower the lunar flyby altitude to 100 km (62.13 miles).




Orion and its crew would then coast through the void between the Earth and the Moon before swinging around the backside of the Moon.
This baseline would see the crew and vehicle perform a Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) burn at an altitude of 100km above the lunar surface to enter a 100 x 10,000 km (62.13 x 6,213.712 miles) HLO trajectory.
After three days in lunar orbit, the Trans-Earth Injection (TEI) burn would propel Orion and its EM-2 crew into a return trajectory back to Earth to wrap up an approximate 9-13 day mission.
However, NASA is also evaluating two other options for the flight path and trajectory the EM-2 flight could take.
EM-2 Option 1 – DRO/NRO
Under this option, the EUS stage would be used to deliver Orion and a four-person crew into a DRO DRM flight.
In this manner, EM-2 would repeat the EM-1 DRO trajectory, only this time it would carry a crew through those maneuvers and flight path.




Additionally, NASA could also choose to send EM-2 to other destination orbits such as the L2 Halo, a Near Rectilinear halo Orbit (NRO), or a high-energy cislunar orbit that long-duration habitat missions might experience. 
Under this mission option, the “Evolution of Orion Mission Design for Exploration Missions 1 and 2” report states that the increased performance gained from the use of an EUS on EM-2 could allowed for a co-manifested payload in the form of additional consumables to allow Orion and its four person crew to perform a mission greater than the 21 day limit currently afforded to the spacecraft.
This kind of DRO mission would result in a total mission duration of 25-26 days, so additional consumables would be needed assuming NASA opted to go with a maximum crew size of four.
EM-2 Option 2: Hybrid
However, since EM-2 will be the first Orion mission to carry people, the “Orion Mission Design” report notes that “the Orion Program and NASA may choose to fly a mission that is less risky in some aspects.”



The exact meaning of “less risky” could range from a desire to fly a path that conserves propellant for contingency abort cases to opting to fly a trajectory that avoids HLO and allows the crew to return to Earth faster than an HLO flight path would permit.
Under this consideration, a hybrid mission for EM-2 would preserve some elements of an HLO DRM flight and reject others.
This kind of mission would see the crew launch into three different Earth elliptical orbits.
The first orbit would be close-range, with a first-orbit-complete-perigee engine firing from the EUS to raise the craft’s orbit to 391 x 71,333 km (242.9 x 44,324.3 miles).




After this burn, Orion and its SM would separate from the EUS.
This second orbit of Earth would carry a total orbital period of 24 hours and would allow the EM-2 crew to fully vet and check their spacecraft and its systems before committing to the swing around the moon.
During this 24 hour orbit, if a system does not check out, Orion and EM-2 can remain in this orbit until the situation is resolved.
Conversely, if a serious issue develops while in this 24 hour orbit, Orion can return the EM-2 crew to Earth within 12 hours.
However, if all systems check out, Orion’s SM engine would, at a perigee of 391 km, fire for the TLI burn and propel EM-2 toward the moon.
This TLI would put Orion and EM-2 on a “near-free return trajectory,” notes the “Orion Mission Design” report, and would result in a swing through the lunar L2 point.




Concretely, it would result in Orion and EM-2 performing a lunar flyby at the L2 point at a distance of 61,548 km (38,244.15 miles) from the lunar surface.
At this point, Orion’s SM engine would perform the Return Trajectory Adjust (RTA) burn with a deltaV of 77 m/s (253 f/s) to aim the craft for the location Earth will be at for Entry Interface and landing.
This Hybrid mission would last approximately 15-16 days and would carry an added risk of radiation and MMOD as Orion would make multiple passes through the Van Allen Radiation Belts and Earth proximity space.
However, the “Orion Mission Design” report notes that the “radiation dosage to the crew for two revolutions in the intermediate orbit is roughly equivalent to a six-month stay on the ISS.”
Images: NASA and L2 – including renders from L2 artist Nathan Koga – The full gallery of Nathan’s (SpaceX Dragon to MCT, SLS, Commercial Crew and more) L2 images can be *found here*)

[Meho Krljic]

The Ultimate List of Weapons Astronauts Have Carried Into Orbit

[Meho Krljic]

Stephen Hawking and a Russian Billionaire Want to Build an Interstellar Starship

[Meho Krljic]

SpaceX Delivers World's 1st Inflatable Room for Astronauts

SpaceX has made good on a high-priority delivery: the world's first inflatable room for astronauts.
 A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, two days after launching from Cape Canaveral. Station astronauts used a robot arm to capture the Dragon, orbiting 250 miles above Earth.
 The Dragon holds 7,000 pounds of freight, including the soft-sided compartment built by Bigelow Aerospace. The pioneering pod — packed tightly for launch — should swell to the size of a small bedroom once filled with air next month.
 It will be attached to the space station this Saturday, but won't be inflated until the end of May. The technology could change the way astronauts live in space: NASA envisions inflatable habitats in a couple decades at Mars, while Bigelow Aerospace aims to launch a pair of inflatable space stations in just four years for commercial lease.
 For now, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module — BEAM for short — will remain mostly off-limits to the six-man station crew. NASA wants to see how the experimental chamber functions, so the hatch will stay sealed except when astronauts enter a few times a year to collect measurements and swap out sensors.
 This is SpaceX's first delivery for NASA in a year. A launch accident last June put shipments on hold.
 SpaceX flight controllers at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, applauded when the hefty station arm plucked Dragon from orbit. A few hours later, the capsule was bolted securely into place.
 "It looks like we caught a Dragon," announced British astronaut Timothy Peake, who made the grab. "There are smiles all around here," NASA's Mission Control replied. "Nice job capturing that Dragon."
 SpaceX is still reveling in the success of Friday's booster landing at sea.
 For the first time, a leftover booster came to a solid vertical touchdown on a floating platform. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk wants to reuse boosters to save money, a process that he says will open access to space for more people in more places, like Mars. His ambition is to establish a city on Mars.
 NASA also has Mars in its sights and looks to send astronauts there in the 2030s. In order to focus on that objective, the space agency has hired U.S. companies like SpaceX to deliver cargo and, as early as next year, astronauts to the space station. U.S. astronauts currently have to hitch rides on Russian rockets.
 In a sign of these new commercial space times, a Dragon capsule is sharing the station for the first time with Orbital ATK's supply ship named Cygnus, already parked there two weeks. This is also the first time in five years that the compound has six docking ports occupied: Dragon, Cygnus, two Russian Progress freighters and two Russian Soyuz crew capsules.
 The Dragon will remain at the station for a month before returning to Earth with science samples, many of them from one-year spaceman Scott Kelly. He ended his historic mission last month. Cygnus will stick around a little longer.

[Meho Krljic]

Space Race: Astronaut Runs London Marathon — From ISS

British astronaut Tim Peake became the first man to complete a marathon in space on Sunday, running the classic 26.2 mile distance while strapped to a treadmill aboard the International Space Station.
 As part of the London Marathon, Britain's biggest mass participation race, the 44-year-old spaceman saw London's roads under his feet in real time on an iPad as, 250 miles below him, more than 37,000 runners simultaneously pounded the streets.
 Peake covered the distance in three hours 35 minutes 21 seconds, which was a world away from the time recorded by the real race winner, Kenya's Eliud Kipchoge, whose 2:03:05 was the second fastest ever recorded.
 Peake's zero gravity effort, while out of this world, was still more than a quarter of an hour slower than the 3:18:50 he had clocked on earth as a keen, ultra-fit fun runner back in 1999.
 On a six-month stint on the ISS, the astronaut had been the official starter too, sending the runners a good luck video message from the station in the 10-second countdown to the race that concluded: "I hope to see you all at the finish line."
 He also tweeted a photograph of England's capital from space accompanied by the message: "Hello #London! Fancy a run? ".
 Then, it was down to business, using elastic straps over his shoulders and around his waist to keep him in contact with the running belt in weightless conditions as he ran.

[Meho Krljic]

NASA awards companies $65 million to develop habitats for deep space 
 

NASA is serious about going to Mars, and not just for a quick visit, either. It just committed $65 million, spread over two years and six companies, for the purpose of developing and testing deep-space habitats that could be used on the way to — and on the surface of — the Red Planet.
It’s part of the organization’s NEXTStep (not to be confused with the NeXTSTEP OS), an ongoing partnership program under NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems that funds private research into technology for space exploration.
Last year’s NEXTStep contracts were for a variety of things, but this year they’re all on the same track: “deep space habitats where humans will live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth.” We’re talking spaceships here — big ones.
The numbers are bigger, too: the previous year’s contracts amounted to a total of perhaps $15 million divided 10 ways — $65 million 6 ways is, it hardly needs saying, a much more considerable investment.
The lucky companies are all taking slightly different approaches to the problem of deep space habitation.
 
Bigelow is a name you may already be familiar with: the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module was recently attached to the International Space Station and is currently undergoing testing. The company plans to develop one about 20 times larger (330 vs 16 cubic feet) that they call the Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement, or XBASE. There are advantages to being able to pack your modules tightly and expand them later, but the BEAM’s troubled deployment shows there are challenges as well. Of course, that’s what testing is for.
Lockheed Martin doesn’t want to let good space gear go to waste, either; its plan is to refurbish one of the cargo modules carried by the Space Shuttles into a livable multi-purpose environment. The idea is, essentially, to use proven equipment as a base to test future developments, like data and crew transfer between the module and, say, the Orion spacecraft.
Another avid recycler is NanoRacks, whose commercial experimentation platform outside the ISS just went live yesterday. Nanoracks has a rather crazy idea: convert the final rocket stage, with its spacious fuel compartment, into a habitable space. It’s working with Space Systems Loral and the United Launch Alliance to see if this is crazy enough to work — or just plain crazy.
Sierra Nevada (specifically its subsidiary Space Systems) has perhaps the most ambitious plan. Over four commercial launches, the company wants to build on one of its Dream Chaser cargo modules, adding a propulsion system, an expandable environment, and life support. Taking it in stages means better risk management.
Boeing and Orbital ATK didn’t provide many details: the former just says it’s building a full-scale prototype for extensive testing, and the latter is adapting one of its Cygnus spacecraft to the purpose.
It’s all very early, of course, and these projects, among others, are for exploring possibilities and finding potential problems, not actually producing something we can send to Mars or beyond. The technology investigated by these companies will have to prove itself on the ground first, then in orbit, and eventually in cislunar space — the “proving ground” for long term mission hardware.
NASA didn’t specify how much each project was receiving, or the exact timelines or deliverables expected from each — although results are certainly expected by the time the contracts’ 24 months are up. I contacted NASA for more details and will update this post if I hear back.
 

[Meho Krljic]

China's Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission

China has launched two men into orbit in a project designed to develop its ability to explore space.
The astronauts took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northern China.
They will dock with the experimental Tiangong 2 space lab and spend 30 days there, the longest stay in space by Chinese astronauts.
This and previous launches are seen as pointers to possible crewed missions to the Moon or Mars.
An earlier Tiangong - or Heavenly Palace - space station was decommissioned earlier this year after docking with three rockets.
The astronauts on this latest mission were Jing Haipeng, 49, who has already been to space twice, and 37-year-old Chen Dong.

[Meho Krljic]

World's Largest Space Telescope Is Complete, Expected to Launch in 2018

[Meho Krljic]

SpaceX just landed the 12th Falcon 9 rocket of 2017

[Meho Krljic]

 


This week’s failed Russian rocket had a pretty bad programming error

[Meho Krljic]

Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

[Meho Krljic]

NASA astronaut, 1st to fly untethered in space, dies at 80

[Meho Krljic]

 Year in space put US astronaut’s disease defenses on alert 
 

Nearly a year in space put astronaut Scott Kelly’s immune system on high alert and changed the activity of some of his genes compared to his Earth-bound identical twin, researchers said Friday.

[Meho Krljic]

Nasa astronaut 'accessed ex-partner's bank account from space station'
 

Case appears to be first allegation of a crime committed in low Earth orbit

[Meho Krljic]

Lajv strim prvog ekskluzivno ženskog šetkanja po svemiru u režiji NASA-e:
 
 
https://youtu.be/2Raovt-4HNc

[Meho Krljic]

The International Space Station is getting a new toilet this year

Ovo je BAŠ on topik 

[Meho Krljic]

Džef Bezos je u svemiru, za sada:
 
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1MnxnlkkzWNGO

[tomat]

Šta bi da onom peticijom da se ne vrati iz svemira?

[Meho Krljic]

Isto što i sa sindikalnim organizovanjem Amazonovih zaposlenih...

[tomat]

Pa nije da nisu imali prilike, eto čovek je bio u kosmosu 10 minuta i 10 sekundi, trebali su to iskoristiti.

[Meho Krljic]

  How do astronauts go to the bathroom in space?

[mac]

Danas se lansira Artemis I ka Mesecu. Vreme lansiranja je otprilike u 19:45. Evo prenosa uživo

NASA Launches Artemis I to the Moon Aboard SLS