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On April 25, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch cargo to the space station and two organs-on-a-chip experiments designed by University of Pennsylvania scientists. They want to understand why so many astronauts get infections while in space. NASA has reported that 15 of the 29 Apollo astronauts had bacterial or viral infections. Between 1989 and 1999, more than 26 space shuttle astronauts had infections.

Huh and his team have created two separate experiments for this first launch. The first essentially mimics an infection inside a human airway, to see what happens to the bacteria, and the surrounding cells, in orbit. Huh’s BIOLines lab created the actual chips.

A lung chip is made of a polymer, and a permeable membrane is the platform for the human cells. For the lung-on-a-chip, one side of the membrane is coated with lung cells, to process the air, and capillary cells on the other, to provide the blood flow. The membrane is stretched and released to provide the bellows-like effect of real lungs.

Continue reading “Organs on a Chip Experiments Will Investigate the High Rate of Infections in Astronauts” »

A Harvard physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible.

But don’t pack your bags for a trip to other side of the galaxy yet; although it’s theoretically possible, it’s not useful for humans to travel through, said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis, from Harvard University, written in collaboration with Ping Gao, also from Harvard and Aron Wall from Stanford University.

“It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel,” Jafferis said. He will present his findings at the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver.

Continue reading “Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow” »

SpaceX will launch NASA’s $69 million mission to crash a spacecraft into an ASTEROID in 2021 to test methods that could save Earth from deadly impacts…

The groundbreaking mission will be the first demonstrated attempt to deflect an asteroid by purposely crashing an object into it at high speed.

After launching from California’s Vandenberg Air Force base atop a Falcon 9 rocket in 2021, the DART craft is expected to reach the object Didymos in October 2022, when it’s 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth.

Continue reading “SpaceX will launch NASA’s mission to crash spacecraft into an asteroid” »

Thanks to way cool new tech, Venus may no longer be such a longshot for robotic landers. Let’s hope that Brandon gets his additional Phase Two study out of NIAC and NASA will finally send a lander to Venus.

Thanks to innovative new technology, Venus may no longer be such a longshot for robotic landers.

Continue reading “NASA Looks Into Rechargeable Venus Lander; Powered By Microwave-Beaming Atmospheric Balloon” »

Yay earth saved :DDDDDD.

Add another project to the list of collaborations between NASA and SpaceX.

The behavior of 20 mice on the International Space Station is helping shed some light on how humans might adapt to living in space.

The female mice were flown out on the International Space Station aboard an uncrewed SpaceX Dragon capsule and spent up to 37 days floating in NASA’s Rodent Habitat. Video footage show that the mice immediately began their usual grooming, feeding, huddling and socializing, but within 10 days of leaving Earth, younger mice began to run in circles around their cage.

Continue reading “Video Captures How Mice React to Zero Gravity Aboard Space Station” »

The first commercial flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy ended with two boosters touching down on land while a third alighted on its drone ship out at sea.

On April 13, the crew had already traveled 200,000 miles away from Earth when one of the oxygen tanks exploded, forcing them to abort the mission and head back, fighting for their own survival.

You may be familiar with the immortal line “Houston, we have a problem,” which was supposedly uttered by Lovell in the 1995 film “Apollo 13.” Actually, the real quote was “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” and it was Swigert who said it.

#FlipFacts

Continue reading “Today in Science History: The third manned lunar landing mission, Apollo 13, kicked off with the launch of the Odyssey spacecraft” »