This is How NASA Wanted to Rescue Space Shuttle Astronauts

A NASA astronaut holds the Personal Rescue Enclosure in this photo. By NASA - Kenneth S. Thomas, Harold J. McMann: U. S. Spacesuits. 2nd edition. Springer, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4419-9566-7, p. 38, doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-9566-7_4., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64033886

For most of us, this would be a nightmare.

Imagine being curled up inside a 90 cm (36 inch) fabric sphere with a small window and a small air tank while dangling from the Canadarm. As your tiny sphere shifts, you’d see Earth out your tiny window, then the Space Shuttle, damaged by some accident or other that caused you to need rescuing, then Earth again. Panic would set in pretty quickly.

But that’s where Space Shuttle astronauts in an emergency could’ve found themselves if NASA’s Personal Rescue Enclosure (PRE) had been put into practice.

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SpaceX’s Starship Has a Glorious Liftoff — but Then Spins and Explodes

Starship launch
SpaceX's Starship super-rocket rises from its Texas launch pad. Credit: SpaceX via YouTube

SpaceX’s Starship launch system lifted off on its first full-scale test flight today, rising majestically from its Texas launch pad but falling short of stage separation.

The uncrewed mission represented the most ambitious test yet for the world’s most powerful rocket — which eventually could send people to the moon and Mars, and even between spaceports on our own planet. 

Liftoff from SpaceX’s Starbase complex at Boca Chica on the South Texas coast came at 8:33 a.m. CDT (9:33 a.m. EDT). The Starship system’s Super Heavy booster, powered by 33 methane-fueled Raptor rocket engines, rose into clear skies with a deafening roar and a blazing pillar of flame.

Hundreds of SpaceX employees cheered at the company’s California headquarters, but the crowd turned quiet three minutes into the flight when the Starship upper stage failed to separate from the booster as planned. The entire rocket spun in the air as a ground-based camera watched.

A minute later, SpaceX’s flight termination system destroyed both stages of the rocket as a safety measure. “Obviously, we wanted to make it all the way through, but to get this far, honestly, is amazing,” launch commentator Kate Tice said.

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Happy Presidents Day: George Washington’s Hair Set to Go to Deep Space

Illustration: Vulcan Centaur rocket launch
An artist's conception shows a Vulcan Centaur rocket lifting off. (United Launch Alliance Illustration)

If it turns out that a future extraterrestrial invasion force is headed by a clone of George Washington, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

Admittedly, that would be the unlikeliest outcome of a space shot that aims to send hair samples from America’s first president — and from Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan — into deep space.

The samples, which include bits of DNA, are to be included on Houston-based Celestis’ “Enterprise Flight,” a memorial space mission that will also carry DNA and cremated remains from the late astronaut Philip Chapman, Star Trek celebrities and scores of Celestis clients. The time capsule will be sent into space later this year as a secondary payload aboard United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, and eventually settle into stable orbit around the sun.

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This is Your Brain on Spaceflight

An MRI scan using of a volunteer's brain for the BRAIN-DTI experiment using tractography to show neural networks. Researchers suspect that astronauts’ brains adapt to living in weightlessness by using previously untapped links between neurons. As the astronauts learn to float around in their spacecraft, left–right and up–down become second nature as these connections are activated.
An MRI scan using of a volunteer's brain for the BRAIN-DTI experiment using tractography to show neural networks. Researchers suspect that astronauts’ brains adapt to living in weightlessness by using previously untapped links between neurons. Credit: University of Antwerpen

When you go to space, it’s going to change your brain. Count on it. That’s because space travelers enter microgravity, and that challenges everything the brain knows about gravity. The experience alters their brain functions and “connectivity” between different regions. It’s all part of the ability of our brains and nervous systems to change in response to changes in the environment, or because of traumatic brain stress or injuries.

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Axiom’s U.S.-Saudi Crew Approved for Private Mission to Space Station

Ax-2 crew portraits
The Ax-2 crew includes, from left, Peggy Whitson, John Shoffner, Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. (Axiom Space Photos)

NASA and its international partners have approved the crew lineup for Axiom Space’s second privately funded mission to the International Space Station — a lineup that includes the first Saudi woman cleared to go into orbit.

Two of the former crew members — former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and John Shoffner, a Tennessee business executive, race car driver and aviator — had previously been announced.

They’ll be joined by Ali AlQarni and Rayyannah Barnawi, representing Saudi Arabia’s national astronaut program. Only one other Saudi citizen — Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, who flew on the space shuttle Discovery in 1985 — has ever been in space. The 10-day Axiom Space mission, known as Ax-2, is currently scheduled for this spring.

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Exploring the Outer Solar System Takes Power, Here’s a Way to Miniaturize Nuclear Batteries for Deep Space

Two features that could be cryovolcanoes exist on Pluto. They lay on either side of heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia in this color-enhanced image of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft taken in July 2015. (Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) / Southwest Research Institute (SwRI))
Two features that could be cryovolcanoes exist on Pluto. They lay on either side of heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia in this color-enhanced image of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft taken in July 2015. (Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) / Southwest Research Institute (SwRI))

As science and technology advance, we’re asking our space missions to deliver more and more results. NASA’s MSL Curiosity and Perseverance rovers illustrate this fact. Perseverance is an exceptionally exquisite assemblage of technologies. These cutting-edge rovers need a lot of power to fulfill their tasks, and that means bulky and expensive power sources.

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Axiom’s Next Trip to the ISS Will Carry the First Saudi Woman in Space

Illustration: SpaceX Crew Dragon at ISS
An illustration shows SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule approaching the International Space Station. (Credit: SpaceX)

Axiom Space says it’s working with the Saudi Space Commission to send two spacefliers from the Arab kingdom, including the first Saudi woman to go into orbit, to the International Space Station as early as next year.

The inclusion of a female astronaut is particularly notable for Saudi Arabia — where women were forbidden to drive motor vehicles until 2018, and where the status of women is still a controversial subject.

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Socks, The Final Frontier

ISS026-E-011334 (18 Dec. 2010) --- NASA astronaut Catherine (Cady) Coleman, Expedition 26 flight engineer, is pictured with a stowage container and its contents in the Harmony node of the International Space Station.
ISS026-E-011334 (18 Dec. 2010) --- NASA astronaut Catherine (Cady) Coleman, Expedition 26 flight engineer, is pictured with a stowage container and its contents in the Harmony node of the International Space Station.

What is the greatest challenge facing humans as we prepare for the first crewed missions to Mars? Solar and cosmic radiation? Atrophying bone and muscle? Growing food? How about laundry? It’s strange but true, right now we don’t have a way to clean laundry in space.

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DNA From Star Trek’s Original Doctor Will Ride to the Final Frontier

Star Trek actors at Enterprise rollout
In 1976, the crew of the original "Star Trek" TV show attended the rollout of the prototype space shuttle Enterprise in California. In the front row, from left: NASA Administrator James Fletcher, DeForest Kelley ("Bones"), George Takei ("Sulu"), Nichelle Nichols ("Uhura"), Leonard Nimoy ("Spock"), series creator Gene Roddenberry and Walter Koenig ("Chekov"). Photo Credit: NASA

A memorial spaceflight paying tribute to the cast and crew of the original “Star Trek” TV show has just added another star to the passenger list.

DeForest Kelley — who played Leonard “Bones” McCoy, the Starship Enterprise’s physician — will be represented by a thimble-sized sample of DNA on next year’s “Enterprise Flight.” Kelley passed away in 1999 at the age of 79, but the DNA was extracted from a hair sample that was preserved after his death.

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Godspeed, Uhura: A Bit of Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols Will Go to Space

Nichelle Nichols at NASA Mission Control
Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols visited NASA in 1977 to support an astronaut recruitment campaign. (NASA Photo)

Nichelle Nichols, who blazed a trail for Black actors as Lieutenant Uhura on the original “Star Trek,” never got to go to space while she was alive — but her ashes and her DNA are due to reach the final frontier as early as this year.

The symbolic samples are scheduled to fly beyond the moon, along with the ashes of other dearly departed Star Trek pioneers such as James Doohan (“Scotty”); Majel Barrett Roddenberry (“Nurse Chapel”); the TV series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry; and visual-effects wizard Douglas Trumbull.

To top it all off, Nichols’ memorial journey will begin with the launch of a Vulcan rocket. “I’m sure she would have much preferred to go on the shuttle,” said her son, Kyle Johnson, “but this was a pretty close second.”

The “Enterprise” memorial mission is being organized by Houston-based Celestis, which has been making arrangements to fly its customers’ cremated remains for a quarter-century. A gram of Nichols’ ashes, plus DNA samples taken from her and from Johnson, will be among the secondary payloads for United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur mission, set for no earlier than December.

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