The ISS. The closest thing we currently have to a space colony is the International Space Station. While it can be considered a success in terms of international cooperation and scientific research, the ISS far from self-sufficient. Sweat and urine can be recycled into fresh water and filters and scrubbers keep the air breathable, but without regular resupply missions, the station's occupants wouldn't last long. Still, the future looks bright up there – NASA has several ISS missions scheduled for 2010, expanding the station and adding new components (as well as spare parts).

Lunar Colonization. The best prospect for a human colony on the moon seems to be NASA's Constellation project. The Altair Lunar lander will be able to carry a crew of four astronauts to the moon and support them there for a seven-day mission. Alternately, it can descend robotically to the moon carrying critical infrastructure for a longer-term lunar outpost. When completed, that outpost will support a crew of four for up to 180 days. NASA has a slick interactive website that explains Constellation.

A great deal of thought is being put into what astronauts will live in on the moon. The first moon base will likely be an inflatable dome. NASA has been testing such a design at McMurdo Station in Antarctica to see how it deals with extreme cold. Although there are no blizzards on the moon, the test will also prove whether or not the "lunar bounce house" is tough enough for a long-term mission. An inflatable habitat has the advantages of being light-weight and only requiring a few hours to set up.

Beyond that preliminary outpost, lunar settlers will require something a bit more sturdy and permanent. Rigid, durable building materials are too heavy to send from the Earth's surface to the moon – it would be impossibly expensive. The best option, then, is to create building supplies from the raw materials already present on the moon. The recent discovery of a large amount of water on the moon makes the production of concrete using lunar regolith much more feasible, but even without water, it's possible. In 2007, a paper published in the Journal of Aerospace Engineering explained how the regolith could be processed into sulfur, which could then be mixed with regolith to make waterless concrete. They even examined the physical properties of said concrete, and proposed a cylindrical habitat structure.

A more recent paper in the same journal studied potential lunar colonization in-depth, examining potential structural designs, insulation, power needs and other factors. If you're not willing to take the researchers' word for it, you could always study space architecture yourself. The University of Houston College of Architecture boats the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSAl). Students design and model space vehicles, orbital stations, and lunar and Martian habitats. Many of their designs come directly from NASA requests. While fun, it is a challenging curriculum, since designers must incorporate radiation shielding and variations in gravity, problems terrestrial architects rarely have to consider.

Martian Colony. We're a long way from colonizing Mars – decades, at least. However, NASA's Constellation program does have a Martian outpost as its ultimate goal. Creating a colony on the moon will generate an enormous amount of data that will directly aid the quest to put humans on Mars.

The European Space Agency isn't waiting around, though. They're currently screening volunteers to take part in a 520-day simulated mission to Mars. This year, they wrapped up a 105-day precursor simulation. The long-term test will examine the physical and psychological effects of such a mission.

Candidates should be aged 20-50, motivated, in good health and no taller than 185 cm. They should speak one of the working languages: English and Russian. Candidates must have a background and work experience in medicine, biology, life support systems engineering, computer engineering, electronic engineering or mechanical engineering.

Beyond. The "moon to Mars" path for human colonization of space isn't the only idea out there. In 2008, a group of researchers proposed a "company town" model for creating a space mining colony. What would they be mining? Water. Where would they be mining it? From the inside of comet 4015 Wilson-Harrington. Sometimes considered an asteroid, 4015 may in fact be a burned-out or intermittently active comet. The researchers believe that finding a large supply of water somewhere other than Earth is the key to post-Earth survival of the human race. Their company town model proposes an entire economic system that would support up to 10,000 colonists.

Image: NASA Ames Research Center

Despite the event's name, the activities will actually continue through May 2nd, where there will be a celebration at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Astronauts from the recent Shuttle mission, STS-119, will be present, and there will be a live broadcast from the International Space Station.

The overall focus of this event is education, and as such, schools and civic groups have been invited and encouraged to participate. According to NASA, there will be educational activities at the museum from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. EDT.

More information can be found here : http://www.spaceday.org

Image from the South Dakota Space Grant Consorteum, 2002

The ISS is growing another section, which will allow more astronauts to live and do research for months at a time in space. Space shuttle Discovery brought up an enormous, 16-ton strut that will form the backbone for this new section. It also brought up enormous solar arrays which should keep the ISS zooming along with photon power.

Images via AP/NASA.

There's been an ongoing toilet crisis on the ISS ever since the last one broke, and we've been trying not to imagine all the pooping into bags that's been going on up there. Luckily, the new mega-recycling toilet was already in the works and arrived this week. Already, flight engineer Sandra Magnus has installed it and the plumbing is all hooked up and ready to go.

All they need now is some privacy. Apparently the toilet came with a flimsy curtain, which Magnus removed in order to install the toilet. Hopefully they'll re-hang the curtain - or maybe get a door or something for just a little more privacy.

The toilet is part of a much bigger overhaul of the ISS life support systems, which includes a complete water-reclamation system for recycling the astronauts' urine and sweat for use as gray water as well as (hopefully) potable water too. Right now, the water recovery system (pictured below) that will recycle urine has been tested back on Earth and the purified urine is deemed safe for use in washing. Further tests will reveal if it's safe to drink as well.

The water recovery system, it is hoped, will make life easier for a bigger crew in the coming year. Six astronauts will crew the ISS, doubling the number of humans living in orbit.

SOURCE: Space.com

All images via NASA.

Let's be honest for a minute - living on the ISS pretty much sucks. It's like the college dorm from hell (after some frat boys broke in and stole all the gravity for the weekend). Terrible food. Noisy. Some random people you barely know constantly breathing down your neck. And absolutely zero privacy. If it wasn't for the sheer awesomeness of being in space, no one would go.

NASA spent $30 million developing new private rooms for the orbital platform in an effort to make things more bearable, and it looks like they succeeded admirably. Four of the new rooms will be installed (two were delivered by Endeavor, with two more soon to come). Each one is tiny, like more of a closet than a room, but it's remarkably soundproof and has a door. There are hooks for a sleeping bag, a foldout laptop table (with foot anchors, so astronauts can sit comfortably), and velcro on the walls for attaching family photos and girly calendars.

Even though these new ISS cabins are roughly the size of a bathroom stall, I think they will represent a huge improvement in quality of life for the astronauts. After all, they've got 250 lbs. of insulating polyethlene to protect them from dangerous solar flare radiation. What bachelor pad can boast that?

Sadly, the ISS cabin doors don't lock, and I don't think NASA has developed a zero-G version of the sock-on-the-doorknob. Image by: NASA.

A space of one's own. [BBC News]

If you'd like to enjoy a cool pint of fresh water in space, the "shipped-from-Earth" variety will cost you $15,000. That's why the International Space Station captures every bit of evaporated water possible, collects it and purifies it for use as drinking water. While astronauts were apparently fine with drinking each other's sweat, exhaled water vapor and shower water, NASA hadn't crossed the urine barrier yet. But that's about to change.

Last week, Space Shuttle Endeavor carried aloft a Michigan Technological University designed Water Recovery System. Here's how it turns pee into a refreshing drink:

1). Urine is distilled, removing a bunch of the "bad stuff" you wouldn't want to drink.
2). It's combined with the other waste water (the sweat and shower water).
3). Solids are filtered out. You don't want someone's hair in your morning drink.
4). The water passes through a bunch of multi-filtration beds made of materials that remove contaminants either by absorbing them or negating them via ion exchange.
5). At this point, the water holds some non-organics and solvents. A reactor breaks those impurities down into carbon dioxide, water and ions.
6). Leaving behind the CO2 and the ions gives you water that's as pure as a mountain stream. Probably purer. Image by: NASA.

Turning Urine Into Water For Space Station Recycling. [Science Daily]

Astronauts who are in space at the time of an election were given the right to vote by a 1997 Texas law (astronauts tend to live in or near Houston). Fincke and Chamitoff will cast their votes, and the results will be sent to the Harris and Brazoria County Clerk via encrypted downlinks and emails. The two participatory democracy loving space travelers even made a "Get Out the Vote" video while on board the ISS.

If they're going through all that trouble to vote, wouldn't you feel like a jerk if you didn't bother? So vote already!

No word on which candidate the astronauts plan to vote for, but the ISS is sporting a "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos" bumper sticker. Image by: NASA.

Be like an astronaut: Vote! [Scientific American]

This image is of a cumulonimbus cloud over Africa. It has a similar shape to that of the thunderhead, though it doesn't necessarily have to cause thunderstorms. Often it will, however.

You can see a ton of other images in this series at the Boston Globe.

The Sky, From Above [Boston Globe]

First, two caveats: most of these satellites are representative of an entire class of satellites. There may be others that serve similar functions, but the satellites listed are exemplars. Also, the list is obviously U.S.-centric. If you live in Europe or Asia, there are likely different satellites that fill the roles of these all-star orbiters.

Hubble Space Telescope - By taking thousands of breathtaking photos unhindered by the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, the Hubble has brought the beauty and mystery of space to more people than any other observatory, not to mention the massive amount of scientific research accomplished with it.

Galaxy 14 - This communications relay carries digital TV signals for much of the east coast, including ESPN, Lifetime, Sci-Fi, CNN, A&E and my personal favorite, the History Channel.

GOES-12 - From its high-altitude geosynchronous orbit, GOES-12 keeps a constant watch on weather conditions in most of North America.

The Moon - Tides, werewolves, the Apollo Program: without our natural satellite, we'd have none of these things.

KH-13 - This U.S. spy satellite is so secret, even the name is probably wrong (the government started giving them random names after people caught onto to the KH numbering system). Who knows what black budget, cutting edge satellite intelligence gathering devices are capable of these days?

GPS IIR11 - The U.S. government's NAVSTAR program brought global positioning abilities first to the military, then to the general public. It takes a constellation of these things for the system to work, so IIR11 is just one cog among many. Without it, there'd be no geocaching!

GoldenEye - With the ability to fire an EM pulse that could have wiped out an entire nation's financial records, GoldenEye is typical of fictional satellites and representative of our fears of orbiting weapons.

International Space Station - It's a symbol of international cooperation and a frontier outpost in the quest to colonize space. The low orbit maintained by the ISS makes it one of the easiest satellites to spot with the naked eye.

NOAA 17 - Unlike the GOES satellites, the NOAA satellites have asynchronous orbits, spinning around the globe to spot developing weather patterns that affect billions of people.

LANDSAT 7 - NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey teamed up in the 1970s to create a catalogue of Earth images shot from space. Since then, not only has the data improved with huge advances in digital photography, but numerous companies (including Google) have licensed the images for their mapping software.

Graphic by Stephanie Fox.

Sources: The Landsat Program

NAVSTAR - GPS Block IIR

Geostationary Satellites

Galaxy 14 at 125.0°W

ESA scientists are currently testing intermetallic materials, combinations of metal similar to alloys in which two or more metals are diffused together on a molecular level. Titanium aluminide is an intermetal that could cut the weight of fan blades in jet engines by half. Unfortunately, titanium aluminide tends to fail under high temperatures. This can be solved by introducing small amounts of other materials, such as niobium. In Earth gravity, weight differences between the different metals makes it difficult to get them to diffuse properly.

Small-scale tests in rockets have shown that zero-g solves many of the issues with intermetallic production. The ESA will run larger tests over longer periods of time in the new Columbus science module on the ISS. These space metals could revolutionize the aerospace industry. Photo by: NASA.

'Space metals' aid perfection quest. [BBC]

The ESA's ATV is fully automated. When it gets close to the ISS, the entire docking procedure is handled by computers using GPS, optical sensors and an off-board laser range-finder. Once it is docked, astronauts can enter the cargo bay directly from the main ISS modules and retrieve supplies without ever putting on a space suit. It will remain docked for several months, during which time it will be emptied of supplies and then gradually filled with waste and garbage (liquid and solid).

When it's time for another cargo vehicle to dock with the ISS, the Jules Verne will undock and head into a steep re-entry over the Pacific Ocean, burning up when it hits the atmosphere. The ESA has plans for another six expendable cargo vehicles - it would be cool if they named them all after classic sci-fi authors. The Jules Verne carried two rare manuscripts by the groundbreaking writer, which will be kept on the ISS. Photo by: ESA.

Impressive dress-rehearsal for Jules Verne ATV. [ESA]

Rule Number One: Make good use of wall space. As you can see from the picture of Zvezda's eating area above, every part of the wall has been turned into storage. Fruits and meals are strapped to the wall, along with utensils. The fridge is set into the wall over the table. Of course it's a little harder to strap things to the wall in Earth gravity, but there are still plenty of ways to make good use of wall space. You can put up shelves relatively cheaply, or get wall hangers for file folders and books.

Rule Number Two: Be sure there are a lot of windows and private spaces, even if they aren't very big. In the picture above, you see one of the Zvezda sleeping pods, which may be tiny but keeps the cosmonauts happy by having a closing door and gorgeous view from the window portal. The pods got a rave review from former NASA astronaut John Blaha, who slept in an identical space pod on the space station Mir:

You can kind of just lay there in your sleeping bag, look outside into space, and dream. You're either looking out at the stars, or you're looking at the planet (Earth), or you're looking at the horizon. It's like your bedroom. It's your place, and nobody else goes in there.

Rule Number Three: Every space should have at least three uses. Here you can see one of the astronauts talking on a ham radio that goes through a ceiling-mounted laptop (sorry, ceiling mounting may not be as convenient on Earth). Behind him, underneath the pictures, is a treadmill. So this area is for communications, computing, and exercising. Again, this is almost a no-brainer for Earth-dwellers. You can, for example, use a kitchen table as an eating area, work space, and entertainment zone if you've got a sturdy table, a few chairs, and a laptop.

Of course, the ISS doesn't always look uncluttered, as you can see. Here's their laptop farm:

Images courtesy of NASA.