“The mobile gravity suit is a small, untethered, and flexible intravehicular activity (IVA) suit,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in the Frontiers in Physiology journal.

The idea is to give astronauts maximum flexibility while on board a spacecraft, without reducing crew time. “With the gravity suit, astronauts will be able to float freely around the space station while adhering to their every day tasks,” the paper reads.

“The negative pressure is generated by its own portable vacuum system, ensuring full mobility, and user-control,” the paper reads.

Suddenly, a billion miles doesn’t seem so far.

---

Experts say the right kind of propulsion system could carry spacecraft to Saturn in just two years. The direct fusion drive (DFD), a concept being developed by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, would make extremely fast work of the nearly billion miles between Earth and Saturn.

🌌You like our badass universe. So do we. Let’s explore it together.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The president of Virgin Galactic gave state lawmakers an update Monday on the company’s progress toward commercial spaceflight.

Virgin Galactic President Mike Moses said the first test space flight from Spaceport America will happen sometime this fall, which is the final step before taking paying customers into space.

Let’s get this over with once and for all: We are going to Mars. The only questions are: When? Who? How? Which way? And, of course, why?

Why?

Science and civilization.

On this day in 1899, Robert Goddard first considered the concept of space flight, which his work would later help make a reality.

On this particular fall afternoon at age 17, he was sent to prune a cherry tree in his backyard. While he worked, he found himself imagining, as he later wrote in his diary, “how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet.”

It was at that moment that Robert Goddard dedicated himself to making space flight a reality. As he was to recall later, “I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended for existence at last seemed very purposive.”