Space Travel
Space is for everybody. It's not just for a few people in science or math, or for a select group of astronauts. That's our new frontier out there, and it's everybody's business to know about space - Christa McAuliffe
image by: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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The 12 Greatest Challenges for Space Exploration
Humanity began in Africa. But we didn’t stay there, not all of us—over thousands of years our ancestors walked all over the continent, then out of it. And when they came to the sea, they built boats and sailed tremendous distances to islands they could not have known were there. Why?
Probably for the same reason we look up at the moon and the stars and say, “What’s up there? Could we go there? Maybe we could go there.” Because it’s something human beings do.
Space is, of course, infinitely more hostile to human life than the surface of the sea; escaping Earth’s gravity entails a good deal more work and expense than shoving off from the shore. But those boats were the cutting-edge…
Resources
The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward
Rather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence.
The Moon Landing United People Around the World. That Was Then…
Today we are so much more connected by technology—and yet so much more disconnected.
Yuri Milner: The Tech Billionaire Who Puts Science at Center Stage
He's somewhat reinvented tech investment strategies, but what this would-be physicist cares about most is the success of scientific endeavor. And he's putting his money where his mouth is including Breakthrough Starshot.
11 things to know about the historic Apollo 11 mission
Whether you saw the landing as it happened on Sunday, July 20, 1969, or recently watched rare or never-before-seen footage in the documentary, "Apollo 11," produced in partnership with CNN Films, there may be some things you've forgotten or never knew about the mission.
Elon Musk is changing the rules of space travel
SpaceX is developing a viable commercial launch ability, but Musk has not been shy about his ultimate goal of colonizing Mars.
Would Money for Mars Be Better Spent on Earth?
Mars is more popular than ever, with pie-in-the-sky talk of manned missions within our lifetime. But such aspirations don't come cheap. Should we really be throwing money into space when there's so much good it could do on the ground?
An Exhaustive Inventory of the International Space Station's Medicine Cabinet
Life in space is fraught with a dizzying array of potential calamities. With no quick lifeline to an ambulance or hospitals, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have to be prepared to tackle medical emergencies, literally on the fly.
Could Space Travel Make Astronauts Go Blind?
Sad news for our space adventurers: A new study indicates that time spent in zero gravity may be bad for their vision.
Exploring the Planets Enriches Us at Home
Given the steady stream of high tech innovations that has streamed forth from the agency for decades, enriching our lives and bolstering our economy, the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars should be an occasion not just to celebrate an astonishingly cool civilizational achievement, but also to renew our national commitment to the peaceful exploration of outer space. We can start by restoring funding to the agency’s prodigiously dynamic and successful interplanetary explorations.
NASA Is Considering Deep Sleep for Human Mars Mission
A NASA-backed study is exploring an innovative way to bring humans to Mars: Putting the spaceship crew in a deep sleep while they travel to the Red Planet.
One Of The Biggest Obstacles To Long-Term Space Travel Is Hiding In Our Bones
Bone physiology is, without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges to long-term space travel. Your body slowly but constantly remodels your bones (even in adulthood) and without gravity, your body has much less stimulus to tell it, "Hey, this bone you're making needs to be strong."
Richard Branson on Space Travel
The billionaire entertainment mogul talks about the future of transportation and clean energy.
Scott Kelly: A Giant Step For Health And Medicine?
Kelly is a walking data repository that can help us better understand how the human body works not only in space but also back on Earth.
Space Exploration Could Herald the Beginning of the Post-Human Era
Robotic advances will erode the practical case for human spaceflight. Nonetheless, I hope people will follow the robots into deep space, though it will be as risk-seeking adventurers rather than for practical goals.
Space Exploration: The Future is Now
Within a decade, we will become a multi-planet species, and within a century we very likely will be a multi-solar-system species.
Study Explores the Health Risks of Deep-Space Travel
The Apollo astronauts who reached the Moon die more often from heart disease than astronauts who never made it to space or who only reached low-earth orbit, bringing attention to the potential perils of deep-space travel.
Surviving on Mars: why getting humans to the Red Planet begins at the South Pole
Beth Healey researches health in extreme environments, spending a little over a year 1,000 miles from the geographic South Pole in Antarctica at a base called Concordia. Her research will help prepare humans for the physical effects of space travel and interplanetary colonisation, specifically to Mars, but will also have applications back on Earth.
The Health Risks of Space Travel
But despite such achievements, space travel still involves a myriad of health risks for people. From DNA damage caused by radiation exposure to the bone loss, muscle loss, and blood pressure changes that occur when living in microgravity, to name a few. And the longer a person is in space, the greater the toll on their health.
The top 7 ways a trip to Mars could kill you, illustrated
Elon Musk wants humans to travel to Mars. He just doesn’t want to be the first to go. Because, uh, there’s a very good chance of dying.
Virtual Space Travel Is Almost Here
Let’s kick things off with some depressing news first. Although the prospect of taking a vacay in space is thrilling, it’s also unrealistic — at least for the remainder of this century. Sure, there are reusable rockets and tourism-fitted spacecraft, but we’re still decades away from delighting in weightlessness. So if you can’t bring people to space, the next best thing is to bring space to people — through a combination of virtual and augmented reality.
What One Year of Space Travel Does to the Human Body
The goal of the yearlong expedition is to better understand how the human body reacts to microgravity for long durations. Researchers say they hope the data acquired in this mission will help them figure out how to send humans on even longer missions, like one to Mars, which would take two-and-a-half years, roundtrip.
What Space People Can Teach Us about Healthy Living
However, imagine life two or three hundred years from now. If we haven’t blown ourselves up or fried the planet by then, it’s likely that a lot more everyday people will be spending time in space. For future asteroid miners, mars and lunar settlers, scientists, tourists and explorers, precise dietary and exercise practices will be a mundane but necessary part of daily life.
The 12 Greatest Challenges for Space Exploration
Humanity began in Africa. But we didn’t stay there, not all of us—over thousands of years our ancestors walked all over the continent, then out of it. And when they came to the sea, they built boats and sailed tremendous distances to islands they could not have known were there. Why? Probably for the same reason we look up at the moon and the stars and say, “What’s up there? Could we go there? Maybe we could go there.” Because it’s something human beings do.
Breakthrough Initiatives
The Breakthrough Initiatives are a program of scientific and technological exploration, probing the big questions of life in the Universe: Are we alone? Are there habitable worlds in our galactic neighborhood? Can we make the great leap to the stars? And can we think and act together – as one world in the cosmos?
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