From How Space Stations Work:

On May 14, 1973, NASA launched its first space station — Skylab 1 — into orbit. During the launch, the station was damaged. A critical meteoroid shield and one of the station’s two main solar panels were ripped off and the other solar panel was not fully stretched out. That meant that Skylab had little electrical power and the internal temperature rose to 126 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius).

The first crew, Skylab2, was launched 10 days later to fix the ailing station. The crew consisted of Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joseph Kerwin. The Skylab 2 astronauts stretched out the remaining solar panel and set up an umbrella-like sunshade to cool the station. With the station repaired, the astronauts spent 28 days in space conducting scientific and biomedical research.

Modified from the third stage of a Saturn V moon rocket, Skylab had the following parts:

• Orbital workshop - living and working quarters for the crew
• Airlock module - allowed access to the outside of the station
• Multiple docking adapter - allowed more than one Apollo spacecraft to dock to the station at once (However, there were never any overlapping crews in the station.)
• Apollo telescope mount - contained telescopes for observing the sun, stars and Earth (Keep in mind that the Hubble Space Telescope had not been built yet.)
• Apollo spacecraft - command and service module for transporting the crew to and from the Earth’s surface

Skylab was manned by two additional crews. Skylab 3 consisted of Commander Alan Bean and astronauts Jack Lousma and Owen Garriot. They spent 59 days in space. The final crew, Skylab 4, consisted of Commander Gerald Carr and astronauts William Pogue and Edward Gibson. This crew spent 84 days in orbit, conducted experiments and photographed comet Kohoutek.

Skylab was never meant to be a permanent home in space, but rather a workshop where the United States could test the effects of long-duration space flights (that is, greater than the two weeks required to go to the moon) on the human body. When the flight of the third crew was finished, Skylab was abandoned. Skylab remained aloft until intense solar flare activity caused its orbit to decay sooner than expected. Skylab re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned over Australia in 1979.

Learn more about Skylab over at NASA’s mission hub. Image credit: NASA.

(Source: howstuffworks, via howstuffworks)

Lanzamiento del Skylab (NASA).

(Source: astroperlas, via space-pics)

Skylab: America’s Humanity’s First Home in Space Launched 40 Years Ago Today

With all the futuristic talk today about missions to Mars, lunar bases and asteroid mining, it’s easy to forget that man has already been living off of the planet on and off for decades. Forty years ago today, Skylab — America’s Humanity’s first outpost in space — was launched. The three-man orbiting laboratory was designed to conduct scientific experiments in space, such as studies of the effects of weightlessness on man and other living organisms, and observations of the sun.

Here’s a look back at the pioneering Skylab mission, including mechanical failures, an aborted rescue mission, a crew mutiny and an unplanned crash landing on Earth.

View Wired Skylab Gallery

video: NASA, space.com
article: wired.com

In honor of Skylab’s anniversary, here is a documentary worth every second of your time. Educate yourself on the space race and private industry as it concerns us today.

Orphans of Apollo is (description provided by mirforpeace) …the extraordinary true story of a rebel group of entrepreneurs who seized command of the Russian Mir Space Station. It was the pioneering efforts of these brave, free marketeer buinessmen who launched the New Space Revolution, and kick-started the privatization of outer space as we know it today. This is the greatest story never told, and one film you are not supposed to see…

“Orphans of Apollo” is the award winning documentary that has been called the “greatest space story never told.” The film tells the extraordinary true story of a small group of entrepreneurs who felt, ‘orphaned’ by President Nixon’s decision to end the NASA Apollo Moon program and the subsequent years of nominal space activity. This band of brothers took matters into their own hands, and commandeered the Russian Mir Space Station, behind the backs of NASA and the US government. The rebellious, yet pioneering efforts has been credited with launching the new commercial Space Revolution. This is the remarkable untold story of the greatest secret in the new space race.

This dramatic tale chronicles the adventure of the boldest business plan the Earth has ever seen. ‘MirCorp’, the entrepreneurial company ’s vision to transform the Russian space station into an outpost for what was intended to be the first phase of a trillion dollar business. The project was to include mining of asteroids, gravity free laboratories, a space ‘hotel’, and a research facility. MirCorp was the ultimate start-up company, and unlike anything the universe had ever seen.

Join this band of rebels out to change the course of history in space, as they board a private jet, fly to Russia, negotiate one of the most remarkable business deals of the final frontier. Follow this diverse group as they pioneer their way through this new business of space. Listen to the management team as they struggle with issues of branding, finance, technology, and engage in the ultimate slugfest with the most powerful governments and bureaucrats.

Orphans of Apollo is an intimate and compelling epic which eloquently communicates the real origins of the private commercial new space revolution. Now for the first, and possibly the last, time, “Orphans of Apollo” combines archival material from original NASA film footage, Russian archival footage, personal footage, IMAX footage, with interviews and or footage with key players including Tom Clancy, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Rick Tumlinson, Walt Anderson, Gus Gardellini, Jeff Manber, and others. Available via Google, Amazon, Amazon Instant Video

website | blog

Skylab: America’s First Home in Space Launched 40 Years Ago Today

With all the futuristic talk today about missions to Mars, lunar bases and asteroid mining, it’s easy to forget that man has already been living off of the planet on and off for decades. Forty years ago today, Skylab — America’s first outpost in space — was launched. The three-man orbiting laboratory was designed to conduct scientific experiments in space, such as studies of the effects of weightlessness on man and other living organisms, and observations of the sun.

Full Article

(Source: spaceplasma, via spaceplasma)

Light Pollution | Losing The Dark

Starry skies are a vanishing treasure because light pollution is washing away our view of the cosmos. It not only threatens astronomy, it disrupts wildlife, and affects human health. The yellow glows over cities and towns — seen so clearly from space — are testament to the billions spent in wasted energy from lighting up the sky.

To help raise public awareness of some of the issues pertaining to light pollution, Loch Ness Productions in collaboration with the International Dark-Sky Association has created a 6.5-minute “public service announcement” called Losing the Dark. It introduces and illustrates some of the issues regarding light pollution, and suggests three simple actions people can take to help mitigate it.

Losing the Dark was initially created in fulldome video format for digital planetarium use. It also has been made as a conventional flat screen video, for use in classrooms, kiosks, museum theaters, and advocate multimedia presentations. Classic planetarium theaters without fulldome capability can show this version using their traditional video projectors.

via The International Dark Sky Association (IntlDarkSkyAssoc)

Stay Curious! Watch: The City Dark; more about the film HERE.

NASA Announces Giant Inflatable Extension to ISS

Wired.co.uk Update: We’ve heard back from Bigelow Aerospace’s Mike Gold, who has confirmed for us that — contrary to earlier reports — the inflatable extension to the ISS will not be on the scale of the BA-330 module. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (Beam) will weigh 1,360kg, with a length of four metres and diameter of three metres. It will be based on the Genesis II prototype that is currently in orbit around the Earth (mentioned in the article below), and will be launched in 2015 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of a general ISS resupply mission.

The Beam will be the first inflatable module that will be occupied by humans, with astronauts taking measurements over a period of two years as they test its ability to handle the environment of space. By late 2016 Bigelow also plans to have placed two BA-330 modules into orbit, to form what they call their Alpha Station — a private space station that customers will be able to rent out at the price of $25 million (£15.6 million) for two months’ use of 110m3 of space. Taxiing astronauts on a SpaceX rocket will be at least $26 million per journey and 60-day stay, while naming rights for the Alpha Station will also be going for (you guessed it) $25 million per year.

Gold said: “Expandable habitats are an enabling technology that will make the dream of robust beyond lower-earth-orbit human space exploration a reality. Our habitats not only represent a better choice in terms of enhanced capability and safety, but by dramatically lowering costs, a system like the BA-330 holds the key to making beyond lower-Earth orbit human space exploration physically and financially possible. The BA 330 and expandable habitats will not just offer enhanced protection from radiation and micrometeorites, but protect future astronauts from a much more dangerous threat, lack of funding.”

Original Article: The International Space Station is set to triple in size with an inflatable extension module, according to Nasa. While the exact details of the new module haven’t been revealed yet — a press conference is scheduled for 16 January for that — the contract is known to be worth $17.8 million (£11 million) to Bigelow Aerospace, who specialise in building inflatable spacecraft.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module will be based on the the company’s BA-330 habitat modules, two prototypes of which are currently orbiting Earth after being launched in 2006 and 2007. The BA-330’s advantage over the current ISS living module is that it’s much wider and larger — it’s 330m3 by itself, which is almost half the 837m3 in the ISS so far. It’s also spread out in a much larger central room rather than along thin corridors like in the ISS, which would allow for greater flexibility for conducting experiments. If the new module is based on Bigelow’s BA-2100 prototype, though, that could mean an extra 2100m3, effectively adding triple the current size of the ISS with just one new module.

It might seem madness to make a spaceship out of something inflatable, but Bigelow claim that in tests their vectran skins are actually more resistant to being pierced than Nasa’s solid aluminium casings, with projectiles which pierced through metal of similar thickness to that found on the ISS only getting halfway through the inflatable skin. Inflatable skins made of vectran have another advantage, too, in that they reduce the amount of radiation astronauts receive. When metal gets hits by solar radiation it can get excited and also emit radiation, but non-metallic spaceship walls made of materials like vectran don’t, which is good news for astronauts. That’s partly the reasoning behind the idea of using inflatable buildings to house supercomputer complexes on the moon, as proposed by Ouliang Chang.

Nasa does have its own inflatable technology — Wired.co.uk reported last year on some inflatable kevlar heat shields that the space agency has been testing for future space missions. Inflatable technology makes a lot of sense for space travel as it could lead to much lighter payloads, and experiments have been conducted with the technology since the 1950s.

It’s only recently that inflatable tech has become strong enough to be a realistic option, though, and the claims being made about it are certainly eye-catching — Bigelow’s largest module, the BA-2100, may be six times larger than the BA-330 but is apparently weighs only 63.5 tonnes, which is within the capacity of the next generations of rockets currently under development. The ability to deploy entire space stations using a single rocket could create a market for them in the same way that companies like SpaceX have begun finding it economical to develop and launch their own rockets.

Bigelow and SpaceX announced in May 2012 that they would aim to launch their own independent Bigelow Commercial Space Station by 2015, with the intention of using it as a destination for space tourists. The ISS module will be specifically for further experiments on the ISS, though, according to Nasa’s Lori Garver, who said: “This partnership agreement for the use of expandable habitats represents a step forward in cutting-edge technology that can allow humans to thrive in space safely and affordably, and heralds important progress in US commercial space innovation.”

The ISS is currently budgeted to run until 2020, and while it will probably run for longer than that the next generation of space stations will begin to appear in orbit and supplant its role as the one permanent human settlement outside of the atmosphere — including Russia’s Opsek and China’s as-yet unnamed successor to the Tiangong project.

by Txchnologist Staff

Our eyes here at Txchnologist are usually firmly set to the horizon, scanning for what the future holds. Sometimes, though, we get a kick out of turning around and seeing what the past’s modern technology looked like and how people back then thought about the future.

Today, we bring you a few good finds from the vault that capture the future machines of the past. Click here to see a few more.

Read More

What Matters About Antimatter

Just like the dog that didn’t bark in the night time, the absence of antimatter in the universe worries us. Why there isn’t more of it is one of the biggest mysteries in particle physics, and one which my experiment (LHCb, at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider) was built to explore. On April 24 this year the LHCb experiment unveiled its latest findings. I want to explain here why these results matter, why they are a triumph, and why, despite them, we are little nearer that precious understanding of why and how this has happened.

Read More.

(Source: christinetheastrophysicist)

Brain implants: Restoring memory with a microchip

William Gibson’s popular science fiction tale “Johnny Mnemonic” foresaw sensitive information being carried by microchips in the brain by 2021. A team of American neuroscientists could be making this fantasy world a reality.

Their motivation is different but the outcome would be somewhat similar. Hailed as one of 2013’s top ten technological breakthroughs by MIT, the work by the University of Southern California, North Carolina’s Wake Forest University and other partners has actually spanned a decade.

But the U.S.-wide team now thinks that it will see a memory device being implanted in a small number of human volunteers within two years and available to patients in five to 10 years. They can’t quite contain their excitement.

“I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime,” said Ted Berger, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “I might not benefit from it myself but my kids will.”

Rob Hampson, associate professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University, agrees. “We keep pushing forward, every time I put an estimate on it, it gets shorter and shorter.”

The scientists — who bring varied skills to the table, including mathematical modeling and psychiatry — believe they have cracked how long-term memories are made, stored and retrieved and how to replicate this process in brains that are damaged, particularly by stroke or localized injury.

Berger said they record a memory being made, in an undamaged area of the brain, then use that data to predict what a damaged area “downstream” should be doing. Electrodes are then used to stimulate the damaged area to replicate the action of the undamaged cells.

They concentrate on the hippocampus — part of the cerebral cortex which sits deep in the brain — where short-term memories become long-term ones. Berger has looked at how electrical signals travel through neurons there to form those long-term memories and has used his expertise in mathematical modeling to mimic these movements using electronics.

Hampson, whose university has done much of the animal studies, adds: “We support and reinforce the signal in the hippocampus but we are moving forward with the idea that if you can study enough of the inputs and outputs to replace the function of the hippocampus, you can bypass the hippocampus.”

The team’s experiments on rats and monkeys have shown that certain brain functions can be replaced with signals via electrodes. You would think that the work of then creating an implant for people and getting such a thing approved would be a Herculean task, but think again.

For 15 years, people have been having brain implants to provide deep brain stimulation to treat epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease — a reported 80,000 people have now had such devices placed in their brains. So many of the hurdles have already been overcome — particularly the “yuck factor” and the fear factor.

“It’s now commonly accepted that humans will have electrodes put in them — it’s done for epilepsy, deep brain stimulation, (that has made it) easier for investigative research, it’s much more acceptable now than five to 10 years ago,” Hampson says.

Much of the work that remains now is in shrinking down the electronics.

“Right now it’s not a device, it’s a fair amount of equipment,”Hampson says. “We’re probably looking at devices in the five to 10 year range for human patients.”

The ultimate goal in memory research would be to treat Alzheimer’s Disease but unlike in stroke or localized brain injury, Alzheimer’s tends to affect many parts of the brain, especially in its later stages, making these implants a less likely option any time soon.

Berger foresees a future, however, where drugs and implants could be used together to treat early dementia. Drugs could be used to enhance the action of cells that surround the most damaged areas, and the team’s memory implant could be used to replace a lot of the lost cells in the center of the damaged area. “I think the best strategy is going to involve both drugs and devices,” he says.

Unfortunately, the team found that its method can’t help patients with advanced dementia.

“When looking at a patient with mild memory loss, there’s probably enough residual signal to work with, but not when there’s significant memory loss,” Hampson said.

Constantine Lyketsos, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore which is trialing a deep brain stimulator implant for Alzheimer’s patients was a little skeptical of the other team’s claims.

“The brain has a lot of redundancy, it can function pretty well if loses one or two parts. But memory involves circuits diffusely dispersed throughout the brain so it’s hard to envision.” However, he added that it was more likely to be successful in helping victims of stroke or localized brain injury as indeed its makers are aiming to do.

The UK’s Alzheimer’s Society is cautiously optimistic.

“Finding ways to combat symptoms caused by changes in the brain is an ongoing battle for researchers. An implant like this one is an interesting avenue to explore,” said Doug Brown, director of research and development.

Hampson says the team’s breakthrough is “like the difference between a cane, to help you walk, and a prosthetic limb — it’s two different approaches.”

It will still take time for many people to accept their findings and their claims, he says, but they don’t expect to have a shortage of volunteers stepping forward to try their implant — the project is partly funded by the U.S. military which is looking for help with battlefield injuries.

There are U.S. soldiers coming back from operations with brain trauma and a neurologist at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is asking “what can you do for my boys?” Hampson says.

“That’s what it’s all about.”

(Source: neurosciencestuff)

Buzz Aldrin Has New Yorkers Buzzing About Mars

When Buzz Aldrin’s new book landed in stores Tuesday (May 7), starstruck fans turned out in droves to see the legendary Apollo 11 astronaut talk about his vision for creating the first permanent human colony on Mars.

At least 300 people packed into the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Union Square, some carrying stacks of Aldrin’s “Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration” (National Geographic Books) to be signed, while others just tried to catch a glimpse of the second man ever to walk on the moon.

In the audience, one boy with an Apollo pen made rocket ship noises and at least one baby and one teenage girl separately were dressed in mock NASA astronaut flight suits. Nearly everyone rose to their feet to snap pictures when Aldrin made his entrance. [Buzz Aldrin’s Visions for Mars Missions & More (Video)]

“I think it’s pretty awesome that he’s probably one of the only people in the city right now who has been off this planet,” said Philip Gazzara, a Queens man who was excited to stumble on the event on his way to Trader Joe’s.

Buzz Aldrin became a household name his star power when he set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, bounding off the lunar module just after his crewmate, the late Neil Armstrong. But today Aldrin is firmly against sending humans back to the place he famously explored, for now at least.

He thinks the U.S. and a group of international partners need to set their sights on Mars, and ultimately he doesn’t want to send astronauts there only to bring them back home. Aldrin envisions sending space pilgrims to colonize the forbidding planet, and his book he lays out a plan to get there, which includes an initial expedition to Mars’ largest moon Phobos followed by deep-space cruisers that could ferry people from Earth to Mars.

In a Q&A session with co-author, Leonard David, a veteran space journalist and frequent contributor to SPACE.com, Aldrin touched on the historical implications of putting bootprints on the Red Planet.

“History, hundreds and thousands of years in the future, will observe that moment of making that commitment to do that,” Aldrin said. Whichever leader decides to do so, Aldrin added, would exceed Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn and Christopher Columbus in solar system fame.

Aldrin hopes to have an American president commit to continuous manned Mars exploration by 2019, and he is confident that space officials will have no trouble finding willing pioneers. The astronaut pointed to the 78,000 people who have already applied to become Red Planet colonists with the nonprofit organization Mars One.

Not everyone in the audience was as optomistic about Aldrin’s vision. Tom Marshall, who came in from New Jersey, had serious doubts about the plan, hinging on U.S. partnership with other countries like China. “If we don’t get along down here, we can’t make it up there.”

Asked why he came out to see Aldrin, Marshall simply said, “He landed on the moon.”

That stark fact proves endlessly captivating to Aldrin’s fans and the astronaut handles the inevitable flurry of questions about his Apollo 11 lunar landing with wit. One young boy in the audience asked Aldrin what he did during his trip to the moon, to which the astronaut replied, “We waited until it was time to come home.” Another kid asked what it first felt like to step on the moon, and Aldrin answered shortly, “It felt good,” teasing that “fighter pilots don’t have feelings; we have ice water running through our veins.”

The surfaces of Asteroid Itokawa, the Moon, Venus, Mars, Titan, and Earth. All images show a view of nearby rocks to the distant horizon. The amount of surface modification evident of each of the bodies increases roughly from left to right.

From the the rubble pile asteroid of Itokawa, the cratered plains of the moon, the volcanic basalts of Venus, the basalt filled craters of Mars, the eroded icy cobbles of Titan to the great oceans of Earth, a variety of surfaces in our solar system is represented.

(Source: annesastronomynews.com)

quotes from the future

Real, complete, fire-able 3D printed ‘liberator’ gun downloaded tens of thousands of times
May 9, 2013

If gun control advocates hoped to prevent blueprints for the world’s first fully 3D-printable gun from spreading online, that horse has now left the barn about a hundred thousand times.

That’s the number of downloads of the 3D-printable file for the so-called “Liberator” gun that the high-tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed has seen in just the last two days, a member of the group tells me. The gun’s CAD files have been ten times more popular than any component the group has previously made available, parts that have included the body of an AR-15 and the magazine for an AK-47.”This has definitely been our most well-received download,” says Haroon Khalid, a developer working with Defense Distributed. “I don’t think any of us predicted it would be this much.”

The controversial gun-printing group is hosting those files, which include everything from the gun’s trigger to its body to its barrel, on a service that has attracted some controversy of its own: Kim Dotcom’s Mega storage site. Although the blueprint is only publicly visible on Defense Distributed’s own website Defcad.org, users who click on it are prompted to download the collection of CAD files from Mega.co.nz, which advertises that it encrypts all users’ information and has a reputation for resisting government surveillance.

Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed’s 25-year-old founder, says that the group chose to use Mega mostly because it was fast and free. But he also says he feels a degree of common cause with Kim Dotcom, the ex-hacker chief executive of Mega who has become a vocal critic of the U.S. government after being indicted for copyright infringement and racketeering in early 2012. “We’re sympathetic to Kim Dotcom,” says Wilson. “There are plenty of services we could have used, but we chose this one. He’s down for the struggle.”

The most downloads of Defense Distributed’s “Liberator,” surprisingly, haven’t come from the U.S., but from Spain, according to Khalid’s count. The U.S. is second, ahead of Brazil, Germany, and the U.K., he says, although he wasn’t able to provide absolute download numbers for each country.

Update: Although Spain was initially outpacing the U.S. in downloads, it seems more Americans have now downloaded the file.

The gun’s blueprint, of course, may have also already spread far wider than Defense Distributed can measure. It’s also been uploaded to the filesharing site the Pirate Bay, where it’s quickly become one of the most popular files in the site’s 3D-printing category. “This is the first in what will become an avalanche of undetectable, untraceable, easy-to-manufacture weapons that will turn the tables on evil-doers the world over,” writes one user with the name DakotaSmith on the site. “Share and enjoy.”

It’s worth noting that only a fraction of those who download the printable gun file will ever try to actually create one. Defense Distributed used an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST to print their prototype, a 3D printer that the vast majority of its fans won’t have access to.

Nonetheless the “Liberator,” which I first revealed last Friday and then witnessed being test-fired over the weekend, has caused an enormous stir online. Defense Distributed says that it received 540,000 users to its website in the two days since its printable gun was released, and its video revealing the gun has attracted 2.8 million views on YouTube.

The project has also already immediately inspired a legal backlash. New York congressmen Steve Israel and Chuck Schumer have both called for the renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act to ban any gun that can’t be spotted with a metal detector.

But Defense Distributed’s real goal hasn’t been to create an undetectable gun so much as an uncensorable, digital one. As the group’s founder radical libertarian founder Cody Wilson sees it, firearms can be made into a printable file that blurs the line between gun control and information censorship, blending the First Amendent and the Second and demonstrating how technology can render the government irrelevant.

“Call me crazy, but I see a world where contraband will pass underground through the data cables to be printed in our homes as the drones move overhead,” Wilson said when we first spoke in August of last year. “I see a kind of poetry there…I dream of this very weird future and I’d like to be a part of it.”

Source (Forbes)

Scary. We reported this about a year ago when they only had a few parts of the gun available to print. It got reblogs with comments like ‘yah but they won’t develop the technology in our lifetime to print the whole gun.’ Welp, as I said then and I say now, this is not some distant-future technology. It is here now, available to people who have an expensive 3D Printer, but in the next few years, 3D printers will become cheaper and cheaper and eventually, way cheaper. So I think this is important & I think we should be paying attention to this.

As much as I love 3D printing, here is a darker side to it. The double edge sword theory comes in play with most technologies and 3D printing isn’t immune to that.

(Source: thepeoplesrecord.com, via ikenbot)