Tag: Life in Space

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Space settlement vision updated after 50 years

Von Braun Rotating Space Station illustration
The Gateway Foundation’s Von Braun Rotating Space Station would take advantage of a ring structure to create artificial gravity. (Gateway Foundation Illustration)

Fifty years ago, a Princeton physicist named Gerard O’Neill asked his students to help him come up with a plan for setting up settlements in space.

Just a few years later, O’Neill published the resulting vision for freestanding space colonies as a book titled “The High Frontier” — a book that helped inspire Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ vision of having millions of people living and working in space.

Now the keepers of the “High Frontier” flame at the California-based Space Studies Institute are revisiting O’Neill’s original vision, with an eye toward updating it for the 21st century.

“The fact is, a lot has changed in the last half-century,” Edward Wright, a senior researcher at the Space Studies Institute, said today at the start of a two-day conference presented by the institute at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

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AI (and a few jokes) will keep crews sane on Mars

Daedalus crew on "Mars"
A crew touches down on the Red Planet in “Mars,” a National Geographic miniseries that delves into the dynamics of future Mars crews. (Credit: National Geographic Channels)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When the first human explorers head for Mars, they’re likely to have a non-human judging their performance and tweaking their interpersonal relationships when necessary.

NASA and outside researchers are already working on artificial intelligence agents to monitor how future long-duration space crews interact, sort of like the holographic doctor on “Star Trek: Voyager.” But there’ll also be a need for the human touch — in the form of crew members who could serve the roles of social directors or easygoing jokesters.

That’s the upshot of research initiatives discussed over the weekend here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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NASA follows up on twin-astronaut tests

Scott Kelly
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly gives himself a flu shot in 2015 during his nearly yearlong stay on the International Space Station. (NASA Photo)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Almost three years after NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned from spending nearly a year in orbit, researchers are still poring over the data collected during an unprecedented study comparing his health with that of his earthbound twin brother.

They say the comparison hasn’t raised any red flags about long-term spaceflight on the International Space Station. “On the whole, it’s encouraging,” Craig Kundrot, director of NASA’s Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications Division, said here today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But the studies have raised questions about the potential impact of exposure to weightlessness and space radiation during longer missions to the moon and Mars.

“It’s mostly green flags, and maybe a handful of things that are roughly like yellow flags, things just to keep an eye on,” said Christopher Mason, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine who serves as the principal investigator for the Twins Study.

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Winemaker builds a Champagne bottle for zero-G

Champagne in zero-G
A team sponsored by the Mumm Grand Cordon Stellar Project samples sparkling wine poured from a specially designed bottle aboard a zero-gravity airplane flight. (Maison Mumm Champagne via YouTube)

Will future spacefliers be able to drink a bit of celebratory bubbly in zero gravity? Leave it to a French winemaker to find out, using some out-of-the-box engineering.

Past studies have shown that carbonated beverages, ranging from soda pop to beer and wine, can turn into a sticky, gassy mess in microgravity.

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Unscrambling the tale of an astronaut’s genes

Mark and Scott Kelly
Retired astronauts Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly are still identical twins. (NASA Photo / Robert Markowitz)

My Twitter feed was buzzing this week with reports that Scott Kelly’s genes were knocked permanently out of phase because he spent a year in space.

Some of the reports made it sound as if Scott Kelly was no longer the identical twin of retired astronaut Mark Kelly, who participated in the genetic study down on Earth.

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No potty breaks on Blue Origin space trip

Amazon's Jeff Bezos
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos takes questions in front of Blue Origin’s mock-up for the New Shepard spaceship’s crew capsule. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Are you worried about having to pee while you’re flying on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship? Or getting sick? Billionaire founder Jeff Bezos has a word of advice: Fuhgeddaboudit.

During this week’s visit to the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Bezos handled the standard questions about, um, bodily needs while in the confines of the suborbital spaceship that Blue Origin is developing.

Those questions have been addressed before, but perhaps not quite as authoritatively (or humorously). Watch our video, and then we’ll sum up answers to all the burning questions that arose.

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French astronaut enjoys sax in space

Thomas Pesquet
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet shows off his sax on the International Space Station. (NASA / ESA Photo)

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield had his guitar, and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman had her flute: Now French astronaut Thomas Pesquet has his sax in space.

The saxophone was included in the SpaceX Dragon cargo shipment that arrived at the International Space Station on Feb. 23, and Pesquet’s crewmates kept it hidden until his 39th birthday four days later.

Now the sax is out of the bag, thanks to a series of tweets that came out this week.

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Thanksgiving in space: Work, turkey and football

Kimbrough on space station
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough shows off a pouch holding Thanksgiving turkey. (NASA via YouTube)

The two Americans aboard the International Space Station won’t be getting Thanksgiving Day off, but they will be getting NASA’s traditional turkey dinner … out of a vacuum-packed pouch.

“We’ll heat this up, and it’ll taste really good, just like you’re having it at home,” NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, the station’s commander, said in a pre-holiday video.

Also on the menu: mashed potatoes, cornbread dressing, green beans and mushrooms (all dehydrated), and pouch-preserved candied yams plus cherry-blueberry cobbler for dessert. There’ll be powdered sweet tea with lemon for Kimbrough, an Atlanta native.

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who arrived at the station over the weekend, will be in on the festivities, along with the crew’s three Russians and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

“Of course, Thanksgiving in my world is not complete without some football, so we’re going to have Mission Control send up some live football games for us to watch, to complete the experience of Thanksgiving,” Kimbrough said.

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Where will Jeff Bezos put space colonists?

O'Neill colony
This artist’s conception from the 1970s shows the interior of an O’Neill cylinder. (Credit: NASA)

SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space.

His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O’Neill cylinders.

The concept was laid out in 1976 in a classic book by physicist Gerard O’Neill, titled “The High Frontier.” The idea is to create cylinder-shaped structures in outer space, and give them enough of a spin that residents on the inner surface of the cylinder could live their lives in Earth-style gravity. The habitat’s interior would be illuminated either by reflected sunlight or sunlike artificial light.

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5-year-olds ask questions about life in space

Image: Kjell Lindgren
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren answers questions from 5-year-olds as he stands inside a mockup of the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. (Credit: Wired / NASA)

How do you know when to get up in space? And what do you eat? Kindergartners got answers to these and other burning questions about life on the International Space Station from NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren in a video done up by Wired.

Lindgren came back to Earth from the space station in December after spending 141 days in orbit. That may sound like a short stint, compared to the 340-day stint that his former crewmate Scott Kelly just finished, but it’s plenty long enough to get into a zero-G routine.

The questions that the 5-year-olds asked are the sorts of things that 25-year-olds would be interested to hear as well: For example, one of Lindgren’s favorite space foods was a “faux-cheeseburger” he made from a pieced-together recipe: rehydrated beef patties and cheddar cheese spread, rolled up in a tortilla with squirts of ketchup and mustard on top.

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