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In 1950, the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium promoted its Conquest of Space exhibition with a peculiar stunt. They solicited letters from the general public, inviting them to reserve seats on the first flight into space. Letters poured in from around the country, reflecting the public's grand space age dreams. More »
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The Light Mill never reached the popularity of the Drinking Bird or Newton's Cradle, but chances are you've seen it. It looks like a light bulb with four spinning paddles inside. Although no power is pumped through the mill, it spins as long as light hits it. Find out how these little mills work, and how some day we might use them to jet around nebulae. More »
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Anyone who looks back on Robert Heinlein's ‘juvenile' novels, twelve books written for young adults between 1947 and 1958, as inspiration for his current work gets my attention. I loved every one of those novels, particularly Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and Starman Jones (1953), but David Neyland says it was Time for the Stars (1956) that got him thinking about the 100 Year Starship Study. If you've been keeping up with Centauri Dreams, you know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which handles cutting-edge research and development for the US military, is putting on a starship symposium this fall in Orlando, FL. More »
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Today the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Cape Canaveral for STS-135, the final mission of the program. Mission Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot, Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, will be the final United States astronauts to take off under the power of United States crafts, for the foreseeable future. Their destination will be the International Space Station, where they will deliver vital components to the orbiting platform, returning to Earth 12 days later. Once on the ground, Atlantis will join the remaining space shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and the Enterprise, in their new lives as museum pieces around the United States. More »
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Our best chance to send humans to Mars will be in the mid-2030s, but the Red Planet might not be our final destination. It might actually be much easier and just as effective to land on Mars's moon tiny Deimos. More »
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Yuri Gagarin only wished he could have a big flight deck, like the spacious bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, when he went into space. Real-life space travel remains claustrophobic and lonesome, as every inch of space inside the vehicle counts. More »
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We have a long way to go before we can get a probe to another star in the space of a human lifetime. More »
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Travel has long had an environmental cost: gasoline, jet fuel, spandex pants for bicycling. With space tourism soon to become a common occurrence, what will be the environmental price? More »
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A plan to send live microbes to the Red Planet's largest moon risks wrecking our search for extraterrestrial life, argues Barry E. DiGregorio. More »
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Despite being outshined by its rowdy neighbor to the south, Canada has its own plans of conquering the lunar frontier. More »
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Most of us know Wernher von Braun as the German V-2 pioneer who went from the Nazis to NASA. But did you know he published a scifi novel with detailed spacesuit schematics? Here are some examples. More »
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SpaceShipTwo, a Virgin Galactic plane, may be ready to make regular commercial flights to space within twelve months. More »
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The craggy Martian terrain is daunting for wheeled probes, and Mars' distance from Earth makes refueling rovers impossible. English scientists are exploring the possibility of harnessing radioactive isotopes and Mars' abundant carbon dioxide to launch probes across the Martian landscape. More »
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All current plans to send human explorers to Mars suggest the first mission is 25 years away. But a one-way journey could actually be possible very soon, and it might be just what we need to kick-start human space exploration. More »
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America's current plans for human space exploration seem horribly slow, considering we won't leave Earth's orbit until 2025 and won't reach Mars until 2035. Worse than that, solar radiation spikes could keep us grounded for decades more. More »
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What are hoop sails, and — assuming we get the physics right — how could these curious devices help spacecraft travel the stars? More »
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Interested in seeing what stylish astronauts the world over have been wearing since the dawn of manned space flight? Glad you asked, because the blokes at Space.com have combined his handy chart. [Space] More »
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Today in Florida, President Obama will announce his new goals for the NASA space program. Robots will go to space instead of humans. And Americans may never walk on the Moon again. But is that a bad thing? More »
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Artificially generated black holes could provide us with the power to make inter-solar travel a possibility. New research shows how strapping a black hole to your starship might just give you the juice to get to Alpha Centauri. More »
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For those who felt that Virgin Galactic's plan of passenger spaceflight fell down due to the lack of provision for satellites, relief is at hand: The company has announced that they will be adding private satellite launches to their offerings. More »
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You've heard of space explorers exploiting gravity to save fuel, but using a new method, spacecrafts could, with a little push, roll through the solar system mostly unaided. It's like rolling downhill all the way to work to save gas. More »
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Wired Science has a wonderfully weird collection of offbeat patches to commemorate various NASA missions, featuring everything from Marvin the Martian to Stephen Colbert, and the stories behind them. [Wired Science] More »
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If you are looking for an antidote to the pyrotechnics and computer generated effects of summer blockbusters, look no further than Segundo de Chomón's century-old films, which depict space travel using painstakingly handcrafted optical trickery. More »
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One of the many obstacles to establishing a base on the moon is determining how to supply oxygen to lunar residents. But a team of scientists have found a way to extract oxygen from the moon's greatest resource — rocks. More »
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As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, people have had a lot of discussion about the value of a revitalized space program. But, some point out, there is value in the space program beyond space itself. More »
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The 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing is right around the corner, and former io9 researcher Andrew Liptak is documenting this momentous event in a series of posts on his blog. Today he's got a detailed backstory on the missions that led up to that amazing first human step on the Moon. He writes: More »
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Ronald D. Moore's long-awaited Virtuality airs June 26, and we've got exclusive concept art showing the inner workings of the deep-space probe Phaeton and its various modules — including a super-detailed diagram explaining the physics of the ship. More »
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What if rockets didn't require those heavy oxidizers to get into orbit? The European Space Agency is daring to dream, awarding a €1 million grant to a British firm that's looking into air-breathing spacecraft. More »
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Right now, the final frontier of space is only open to a select few. But in the coming decades, you won't need to be a supersoldier to go into orbit. You'll just need your wallet. More »
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Click to viewIf you're going on a long space trip, you'll soon realize that you can't carry all the fresh water you'll need with you. The cost of getting all that water into space would destroy your budget before you ever built a single photon torpedo launcher. The answer, of course, is recycling. Those childhood dreams of traveling to space probably didn't include drinking your own sweat and pee. More »
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Earlier this week we showed you the wonderful “cosmic soap opera” from Disney’s “Mars and Beyond” television show from 1957. This much more serious clip shows what a future expedition to Mars might look like. The spaceships (conceptualized by Ernst Stuhlinger and Werner von Braun) were 500 feet in diameter and powered by electricity generated by the atomic reactor carried in the tail. This meant they could operate continuously over a period of years. Each carried a small landing craft for descent to the Martian surface, and had quarters for 20 men (in 1957, there was no mention of female astronauts). P.S. The sound is a little faint, crank it up or use your headphones. More »
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In December 1957, only two months after the Soviets launched Sputnik, Look magazine presented a timetable predicting the future of American space travel. "If you have a life expectancy covering the remainder of the 20th century, you will live to see man land on the moon," it stated confidently. At the time, the U.S. space program had yet to successfully launch a satellite of its own. Perhaps as a result, Look's timeline was surprisingly cautious. More »
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Currently there are six Earth satellites in orbit around Mars, and three Earth robots on the surface. The latest robot to land, the Phoenix Lander, touched down on Sunday afternoon. But as Oobject reminds us, there are at least 12 missions to Mars that have been lost. Pictured is Mars 1, a satellite sent to Mars in 1962 by the Soviet Union, whose communications were lost while it was en route to the red planet. Another famous lost mission was the Polar Lander, which vanished mysteriously near the Martian south pole several years ago (pictured below). More »
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What happened to Polar Lander, the last Mars rover that NASA tried to land in the Martian polar region, where it hopes that the Phoenix rover will touch down on May 25? The mysterious fate of the lander that simply disappeared moments before reaching Mars has been the subject of both scientific and UFO-logy debates. Was it shot down by angry Martians dwelling at the pole? Did it encounter some strange magnetic phenomenon that disabled it? Or did it just malfunction? We may soon find out. More »
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In a little over two weeks, skydiving specialist Michel Fournier plans to break the world record for the highest skydive ever attempted. If all goes well, he will jump from a balloon at an altitude of around 131,000 feet, or 25 miles above Saskatchewan, Canada. At around 115,000 feet his body will blow through the sound barrier. More »
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Jules Verne first published From The Earth to the Moon, or De la Terre à la Lune, in 1865, pre-dating our first real visit to our lunar neighbor by over 100 years. It involves a post -American Civil War group called The Baltimore Gun Club firing a three-person capsule from an enormous gun. The goal: to get them to the Moon, although it would have been a one-way trip. Is trying to fire people into space crazy? Check out the some little known facts about the book, the real life efforts to do the same, and the impact it's had on science fiction, in the triviagasm below. More »
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Scientists have unlocked the secret of suspended animation, a state of "undeath" where the body's metabolism shuts down but all major organs continue to function. Hydrogen sulfide, also known as sewer gas, may be the miracle substance that finally allows humans to stay alive in a frozen, non-aging state. In science fiction, of course, suspended animation is used by astronauts to travel across great distances in space by putting their bodies into suspend mode. Suspended animation could also be induced in dramatically injured people to prevent them from dying while being rushed to the hospital. What's truly amazing is how simple it turns out to be. More »
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What would we have to do to our bodies if we wanted to live on Mars? io9 consulted scientists, our imaginations, and a designer, and came up with the most realistic-possible portrait of a Martian colonist who might truly exist on the Red Planet in 100 years. She's really tall, doesn't have to wear a bra, and has some pretty awesome photosynthesis and water-reclaiming implants in her exosuit. It's time to meet the first Martian woman. Click through for full frontal. More »
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We may not have interplanetary travel for humans yet, but it's never too early to start dealing with problems related to interstellar trade and solar system stock market crashes. That's why textbook publisher Routledge has a journal called Astropolitics, whose latest issue features an in-depth scholarly article on "problems of interplanetary and interstellar trade." And no, the problems aren't "we don't have warp drive yet." More »
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This depressed little traveling alien, who has been searching unsuccessfully for life on one of the planets he's visited, is ecstatic when he descends from his space craft to find an alien cat looking for a friend. They take walks together, check out their reflections in a crater-like pond, and lie down under the night sky. Then the alien cat wakes up... It's a cute silent film that embodies the loneliness of space travel. Ilias Sounas via Neatorama More »
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