250 miles up into outer space, the International Space Station (ISS) hurtles silently around Earth at about 5 miles per second. Inside, scientific experiments are constantly underway, from harvesting lettuce to studying what living a year in space does to the human body. One particular study, conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and concluded last month, has found that two species of tiny fungi originally from Antarctica have survived living in Mars-like conditions for a period of 18 months. These results could prove critical in the efforts to find an answer to the question immortalized by David Bowie: Is there life on Mars? The findings were published in the journal Astrobiology.
The competition in commercial space just got a little more intense. In an highly anticipated press conference today, NASA officials announced private spaceflight company Sierra Nevada will join SpaceX and Orbital ATK and begin launching cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.
SpaceX rockets have shuttled cargo to and from the International Space Station, and now NASA wants the company to get ready to carry humans onboard too. On Friday, the space agency announced a work order for a manned mission in late 2017.
NASA is not allowed to do business with Chinese scientists. That's according to a 2011 ban that makes the scientific endeavor to explore the universe unfortunately political. However, the law doesn't say that private American companies can't work with China in space, and according to the Houston Chronicle, a company called NanoRacks is exploiting that loophole to set up the first Chinese experiment on the International Space Station.
Planetary Resources, a company that wants to mine asteroids for precious materials, has just launched a demonstration vehicle to test out its asteroid mining technologies. The breadbox-sized Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) is so-named because the original Arkyd 3 died a fiery death in the Orbital Sciences explosion in October. This one survived its launch to the International Space Station in April, and today, astronauts booted it out of an airlock to see how it fares in low Earth orbit.
Last month, security researcher Chris Roberts was removed from a United Airlines flight, after the airline claimed he had endangered his fellow passengers by tweeting a message about potential security vulnerabilities aboard the aircraft. In 2012, Ars Technica reports, Roberts claimed to have hacked into the International Space Station, according to a recently discovered video.
The International Space Station is getting a makeover starting this week. On Friday, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Terry Virts will conduct the first of a series of spacewalks to reconfigure the outside of the station to create two new docking ports, Discovery News reports. The new ports will provide parking spots for spacecraft that will be visiting in the near future—namely, the commercial space taxis being developed by SpaceX and Boeing.
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