Take a look at this interesting video clip showing the effects of a re-boost on the astronauts onboard the International Space Station. This took place last week, 26th October  2011, and raised the ISS back up to an altitude of around 242 miles (390km). The clip shows the effects of the ISS accelerating, in effect leaving behind all of the astronauts onboard.  

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Illustration showing Tiangong 1 (left) visited by Shenzhou 8 (right)
Thursday 29th September 2011 saw the Chinese Space Agency (CNSA) take another step along the road to achieving their ambition of creating a mini orbiting space station.

The 19,000 pound Tiangong 1 (translation Heavenly Palace) module was successfully launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket, witnessed by many leading Chinese politicians and dignitaries, including President Hu Jintao, watching from the Beijing control centre.

The Tiangong 1 spacecraft will steadily make its way up to maintain an eventual orbit of approximately 220 miles (354km), where it will wait to be joined by an unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft sometime in November. The two vessels will then take part in China’s first space docking manoeuvre, forming a mini-space station some 60 feet long for 12 days,  before the Shenzhou module returns to Earth.

Further missions will visit Tiangong 1 next year, potentially carrying Chinese astronauts on board as China seeks to consolidate its place in the future of space exploration. The very best of luck to them.    

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First man to walk on the Moon Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong, first man to set foot on the Moon in 1969, is usually known as a quiet man of few words who would rather avoid the spotlight. 

Yesterday, however, saw him take part in a 4 man committee testifying before Congress about the current state of the American human spaceflight program, with the words “embarrassing” and “unacceptable” being freely used.

"We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future", Armstrong told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

"For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable."

His words echoed the sentiments felt by many with the cancelation by President Barack Obama of the Constellation program that would have returned man to the Moon, and with the recent final flight and retirement of the space shuttle program, leaving no capability for the US to send humans into space.

Armstrong was joined by fellow astronaut and last man to step on the Moon in 1972, Eugene Cernan, who was equally dismissive of the current administration at NASA.

"Today, we are on a path of decay. We are seeing the book close on five decades of accomplishment as the leader in human space exploration", Cernan said.

Given the current poor economic situation of the United States and a new determination to encourage commercial companies to supply the next generation of crew and cargo transport vehicles, it is difficult to see how the US can lead at the forefront of future space exploration – but I guess time will tell.  


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Space programs of the largest agencies in the industry are currently suffering the effects of the global economic crisis. NASA recently retired the Space Shuttle program despite not having a working substitute. Yet these financial hiccups are not enough to discourage everybody.

Ugandan Chris Nsamba, founder of the African Space Research Program, has an ambitious dream - to put someone in orbit in just six years. To this end, he has turned his own back garden into a spaceship construction site. Although lacking in the sophisticated tools and machinery generally needed for this type of work, all those involved in the project seem to be happy and proud of what they are trying to do. 

The first step undertaken by Nsamba and his volunteer team, mostly made up of engineering students, is to build an aircraft, giving the group valuable experience to help them with the next task of designing a real spaceship capable of flying around the Earth with a Ugandan onboard.

"The plane is still far from being completed and it has no engine," confessed the future aerospace engineers in a recent interview, and though the aircraft is not much more than a rough prototype, it is sufficiently motivating for the group, who have decorated it with the Ugandan flag on the fuselage.

Nsamba is a restless dreamer who tries to think of everything. He is the one to train the team, helped by his experience as an astronomy student, and it is he who will one day certify the future Ugandan astronaut. He does not allow a lack of local facilities to hamper their progress and has even come up with a plan to simulate microgravity: "I've got a jet engine on order so I'm planning to build a tunnel, put the engine at one end and when I throw a guy in he'll float in a similar way to how he would in space."

Possibly not all Nsamba’s dreams will become reality and probably the launch of a spacecraft from Kampala, Uganda will not take place in the next decade. However, it is good to see that there are still dreamers out there in the world, willing and able to battle against disadvantage, adversity and disbelief. 

So many have so much in this world and yet do so little – by contrast, Chris Nsamba does so much with practically nothing. For him, quite literally, not even the sky is the limit!

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This week in London saw the unveiling of a tribute to Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, 50 years after he became the first man in Space on 12th April 1961, and also half a century after he visited London and was greeted by cheering crowds on July 14th that same year.  

 The statue, which is a gift from the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, is placed just off The Mall outside the British Council offices, and opposite the statue of another great explorer Captain James Cook. The monument showing Gagarin standing on a globe in his spacesuit, is a copy of one that can be found just outside Moscow, in the town of Lyubertsy where Gagarin worked in his teens as a foundry worker. 

In addition to the statue, an exhibition called 'Gagarin in Britain' is also taking place at the British Council from 19 July to 13 September 2011. The display includes items from the Vostok manned space program, the first space suit, and an ejector seat from the model used by Gagarin when he parachuted out of Vostok 1 at an altitude of 7km.

It is an excellent opportunity to see some of the earliest space items that marked the beginning of space exploration so get along there if you are in the city – I certainly hope to in August!
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With the final flight of NASA's shuttle Atlantis due to take place later this week, it will bring with it an end to the capability of the USA to send its own astronauts into Space. I'm sure it is going to be a very sad day for many when Atlantis makes its final landing after a 12 day mission to the International Space Station (ISS), and many people I am sure will be left shaking their heads in disappointment. 
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The US will now be reliant on Russia for future astronaut transportation to the ISS until such time as privately developed commercial crew transport becomes available, hopefully in the next few years but with no guarantees as to time scale. Quite coincidentally today I came across this graphic which shows the yearly cost per seat the US will have to pay on board the Russian Soyuz capsules. According to Charlie Bolden, current Nasa Administrator, the price is going up due to inflation and not because the Russians are taking advantage of their monopoly. Perhaps true, but inflation would seem to be very high at the moment! 
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Yet another problem with long term Space travel has been highlighted this week, following the release of results for a study by NASA researcher Lakshmi Putcha and her colleagues.

Need a medication here on Earth? No problem – simply visit your local chemists or look in your medicine cabinet at home where simple medications such as pain-killers or antibiotics, if stored correctly, have a shelf life of up to a couple of years and retain most of their potency in that time. However, astronauts in Space it would seem might not be quite so lucky.

Longer duration Space travel, such as to Mars, may require astronauts to spend up to 2 years on board a space craft, and so the need to take greater volumes of medication will be required. Little is currently know in relation to the potential effects that the Space environment can have on these – an environment subject to such factors as microgravity, radiation, flight vibration, as well as variations in temperature and humidity.

Consequently, a study was conducted involving flying four boxes of drugs, each containing 35 medications up to the International Space Station (ISS). In accordance with good scientific practice, four identical boxes were also kept under controlled conditions at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, USA, to act as a control for comparison. The four boxes from the ISS were returned one by one, back to Earth after varying lengths of time, with one box returning after just 13 days and the last box returning after 28 months on the ISS.

The medications were analysed to see how they compared to the control kits and it was found that; less than third of the medications kept in Space met US requirements for levels of active ingredients; the longer the kits were in Space, the fewer the number of formulations that retained acceptable potency levels.

The authors conclude that "It is important to characterize space-specific degradation products and toxicity limits using ground-based analogue environments of space that include proton and heavy ion radiation, vibration and multiple gravity conditions.  This information can facilitate research for the development of space-hardy pharmaceuticals and packaging technologies."

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NASA Astronaut Cady Coleman, currently onboard the International Space Station, teamed up this week with Ian Anderson from vintage British rock group Jethro Tull to perform the first ever Space-Earth duet on the flute, in tribute to the 50th anniversary of the first manned Space flight by Yuri Gagarin.

The realities of trying to synch up the two performances in real time, however, were impossible with astronaut Coleman being on the ISS some 250 miles up in orbit, and Anderson currently touring in Russia. Consequently Coleman recorded her part in the duet “Bouree” a few days prior to Anderson performing his part at a concert in Perm, Russia. The two performances were then spliced together for the tribute video.

Hit the play button and have a listen – it sounds good!

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 April 12th 2011 will see celebrated the 50th anniversary of the historic Space flight of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin. 

Born March 9th 1934 and although coming from a humble background, he gained the rank of senior lieutenant in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s Air Force. 

However, it was in 1960 that Gagarin's life would change forever when he was one of 20 pilots selected for the Soviet Space program. The selection process consisted of physical and psychological testing, as well as a detailed assessment of performance obtained in training, so life was not easy for the young cosmonaut candidate.

 The long awaited answer to who would be chosen finally came and Gagarin found himself selected to participate in the first manned space mission in history. Besides his good performances in the selection process, other factors counted in his favour such as coming from a simple background with both parents being farmers, an important factor within the Soviet communist system. He had a flamboyant and charismatic personality, and more importantly Gagarin was short, measuring only 1.60m or 5 foot 3 inches tall – a crucial consideration when the spacecraft designed for the mission, Vostok-1, was compact and left little room to accommodate a pilot.

 Vostok-1 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on April 12th 1961, arrived in orbit and completed one lap around planet Earth before reentry, taking a total time of 1 hr 48 minutes. The flight of the space craft was fully automatic and the control panel locked. Gagarin did though have a code key with which to take control of the ship in case of necessity, though this did not turn out to be needed. However, not quite all went as planned with one service module failing to separate from the main sphere as intended, remaining attached by some wires. This caused some wild gyrations of the craft to take place upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere, before the wires eventually burned through freeing the remaining sphere and allowing a smoother descent.

With just 7km to go before landing, Gagarin ejected from the sphere and landed safely by parachute. This fact was denied by the Soviet Union for many years, for fear of the flight not being recognised by the FAI, the world governing body for air sports. The rules of the day stated that astronaut and craft must come down together and thus the true facts were kept quiet until 1971.

 Fifty years ago today Yuri Gagarin took less than 2 hours to write his name in the history books, forever to be remembered as the first person in Space, and heralded the beginning of a new relationship between mankind and his blue planet. 

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The dangers presented to astronauts by long term missions into Space have long been known, are numerous, and for the most part remain in the realms of theory and supposition due to a lack of real life situations and physical data.

What can be done by scientists is to create an artificial environment that simulates one or more of the conditions that may be faced by astronauts, and conduct appropriate experiments to evaluate the possible effects on the human physiology.

For example, scientists at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, USA have done exactly this in relation to the possible effects of cosmic radiation on the human heart, details published April 6 2011, in the journal Radiation Research.

Researchers analysed the effect of exposure to iron ion radiation on mice, a radiation commonly occurring in Space, to see if exposure promotes the development of arterial disease (atherosclerosis).

According to Prof. Dennis Kucik, associate professor in the department of pathology, UAB, “It's well known that prolonged exposure to radiation sources here on Earth, including those used in cancer treatment, excessive occupational exposure and atomic bombs, are associated with an increased risk for atherosclerosis. But cosmic radiation is very different from X-rays and other radiation found on Earth. The radiation risks of deep-space travel are difficult to predict, largely because so few people have been exposed."

Results from the research found that permanent damage to the aorta and carotid arteries in mice did take place, which suggests that deep Space missions, such as those to Mars, might present health risks for astronauts from radiation that could give rise to heart problems.   

For more details click HERE
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