Who will make our sandwiches in space? In the 1960s, the vision of the perfect female astronaut was as a space mom—a woman who would cook and clean and sew spacesuits, all while using her bounteous uterus to give birth to the little boys and girls who would populate the final frontier.

In 2008, Cameron Smith, an anthropology professor at Portland State University in Oregon, decided to build a space suit. He designed the Mark I to protect himself on a high-altitude balloon ride, and so far it’s passed tests in a hypobaric chamber and underwater. Last year, independent space program Copenhagen Suborbitals offered him a potential path to the stratosphere (between about 30,000 and 165,000 feet above Earth). Smith will make a suit for the Danish group this summer, and they’ll help him build a helium balloon craft. Traditional pressure garments can cost upwards of $30,000. Smith’s materials set him back about $2,000, thanks to creative use of junk parts and spare kitchenware. “We’re trying to make it easier for people to get into space,” he says.

In microgravity, Newton's law of equal and opposite reactions is especially salient.

When we think about primates in space, we usually think of Ham, the monkey that preceded NASA’s Mercury astronauts on a suborbital Redstone mission. But more than a decade before this notable primate flight there were a series of monkeys named Albert who were also launched to gather data about the effects of spaceflight on men. They flew as part of Project Hermes, a program that saw recovered V-2s launched in the United States, and they are among the often overlooked heroes of the early space age.

Great seat in the house, or GREATEST seat in the house?

The recipe for creating a habitable planet turns out to be surprisingly simple: Just add water—and atmospheric gases. Mars has both, relics from four billion years ago when the planet was warm and wet. “When it comes to Mars, and only Mars, the notion of terraforming is no longer in the realm of science fiction,” says NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay. Humans could warm the planet and restore a thick atmosphere in a matter of decades, but producing breathable levels of oxygen would take 100,000 years with today’s best technology: plants. New inventions could, in theory, speed that along too. “Living off the land is going to be essential for long-term human explorers beyond Earth,” says Laurie Leshin, a geochemist on the Mars Curiosity team. “We have to figure out how to do this stuff.”