The International Space Station is like no other place on Earth, and not just because it’s not actually on Earth at all. The orbiting laboratory is inhabited by crews of scientists that live there for months before being changed out for fresh faces, and this poses a huge challenge when it comes to cleanliness. It’s …
It’s been a number of months since the failed Soyuz launch derailed plans for astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to head to the International Space Station, but they finally made it to their original destination. In a launch late Thursday, both Ovchinin and Hague headed to the ISS with first-time space traveler Christina …
SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft has been hanging out at the International Space Station for around a month now after delivering supplies and various other goods to the astronauts in early December. Missions to resupply the ISS happen on a regular basis, but as its time in space comes to a close, the cargo craft has …
We already knew that Russia was in the midst of an incredibly deep investigation into the origins of a strange hole that was found in a part of its Soyuz space vehicle earlier this year. The part of the ship that was damaged is no more — it was jettisoned during reentry and burned up …
It was a number of months ago that astronauts aboard the International Space Station were forced to deal with a rather unusual problem. The space station’s sensors alerted them to the presence of an air leak in the Soyuz ship that brought crew to the station and remained attached. A leak is obviously a very …
It was late August when a mysterious hole was discovered in a Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station. The hole, which had apparently be hastily patched before the Soyuz launched from Earth, eventually broke open and began leaking air out into space, at which point the space station’s system detected it. Initially thought …
Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the past decade or so, but one of the scariest portrayals of how AI could ultimate doom us was created way back in the late 1960s. HAL-9000, the nefarious AI from 2001: A Space Odyssey, saw human life as expendable in the shadow of its mission objectives. …
Southern California is usually a pretty comfortable place, temperature wise, but you’d never know it when you find yourself stuck in a traffic jam on a packed freeway. NASA’s powerful new ECOSTRESS instrument installed on the International Space Station can generate incredibly detailed heat maps of whatever it’s pointed at, and NASA just pointed it …
Russian cargo resupply trips to the International Space Station have become such a regular, predictable thing that even NASA rarely bothers to make a big deal out of them, but today’s resupply mission is worth some attention. The ship, called Progress, took off from its launch site in Kazakhstan at just before 10 p.m. GMT …
Spending a few months aboard the International Space Station is a privilege that only a tiny fraction of people will ever experience. We can only imagine how thrilling it must be to spend your days falling around the Earth while performing groundbreaking research and playing games in space. But being an astronaut also comes with …
