Category The Universe, Exploring the Universe, Solar System, The Moon, Space, Space Travel

A space station must maintain an atmosphere similar to that on Earth in order for it to be habitable. In the ISS, oxygen is made by electrolysis. A generator splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. Carbon dioxide is collected by special materials and released into outer space. Water is recycled for maximum efficiency. It is collected from various sources including urine, sinks and showers, and cleaned for reuse. The ISS is heated by all the electronic equipment on board.

The air and water on the Space Station all originally came from Earth. Astronauts and cosmonauts transport these vital supplies to the Space Station when they travel there on Soyuz capsules (a type of spacecraft). Astronauts and cosmonauts also receive supplies from uncrewed spaceships, such as the Russian Progress and American Dragon. Uncrewed means with no people on board.

But fresh supplies from Earth aren’t enough to sustain the Space Station. That means if you’re onboard the Space Station you are really, really into recycling. The Space Station’s water recycling system produces pure drinking water from waste water, sweat and even urine. In the words of astronaut Douglas Wheelock, “Yesterday’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee.”

Water, which is made of oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together, is also used to maintain oxygen supply on the International Space Station. Using a process called electrolysis, which involves running electricity through water, astronauts and cosmonauts are able to split the oxygen from the hydrogen.

Electricity is one thing on the Space Station that doesn’t come from Earth, as the Space Station’s vast solar panels convert sunlight into power. But what’s done with the hydrogen that’s left over? Using some chemistry and smart thinking, they’re actually able to turn it back into water! The hydrogen is combined with carbon dioxide (that the astronauts and cosmonauts breathe out) to produce water and methane. So now there’s some more water to drink, while the methane is simply waste that is blown out into space through special vents.

So if you get a chance to see the Space Station tonight, you can marvel at many things. Marvel at a spaceship travelling more than seven kilometres every second. Marvel that you can see where people live 400 kilometres above the Earth. And marvel at recycling that keeps people alive in the harsh environment of space.

Because space stations are so large, it is impossible to build them on Earth and then carry them into space. Instead, space stations must be built in orbit. This can be a long, difficult and dangerous process. The International Space Station (ISS) is currently in orbit around Earth. It began construction in 1998, but installation of all 100 components will not be finished until 2006. Over forty space flights will be needed to bring parts and equipment to the ISS, and around 160 space walks, totaling nearly 1300 hours, will be required to put it all together.

The International Space Station weighs almost 400 tonnes and covers an area as big as a football pitch. It would have been impossible to build the Space Station on Earth and then launch it into space in one go – there is no rocket big enough or powerful enough. To get round this problem the Space Station was taken into space piece-by-piece and gradually built in orbit, approximately 400 km above the Earth’s surface. This assembly required more than 40 missions.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a multi-nation construction project that is the largest single structure humans ever put into space. Its main construction was completed between 1998 and 2011, although the station continually evolves to include new missions and experiments. It has been continuously occupied since Nov. 2, 2000.

As of January 2018, 230 individuals from 18 countries have visited the International Space Station. Top participating countries include the United States (145 people) and Russia (46 people). Astronaut time and research time on the space station is allocated to space agencies according to how much money or resources (such as modules or robotics) that they contribute. The ISS includes contributions from 15 nations. NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia) and the European Space Agency are the major partners of the space station who contribute most of the funding; the other partners are the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Current plans call for the space station to be operated through at least 2024, with the partners discussing a possible extension until 2028. Afterwards, plans for the space station are not clearly laid out. It could be deorbited, or recycled for future space stations in orbit.

Crews aboard the ISS are assisted by mission control centers in Houston and Moscow and a payload control center in Huntsville, Ala. Other international mission control centers support the space station from Japan, Canada and Europe. The ISS can also be controlled from mission control centers in Houston or Moscow. 

Scientists and engineers are continually working on new ways to carry expensive payloads into space. The X-34 is a small rocket designed to be launched by an aeroplanes. It is hoped that the X-34 will be able to minimize the cost of carrying satellites into orbit. The DC-XA was a new design for a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. It made four successful flights before crashing. The Rotors is designed to work without the heavy technology needed to pump rocket fuel. Its rotor blades spin, literally throwing propellant into the combustion chamber.

RLVs as workhorse launch vehicles have yet to appear, however, for several reasons. The primary reason for the emphasis on expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) instead of RLVs has historically been the higher up-front development costs of RLV designs. In order to field fully reusable launch vehicles, reusable components and operations techniques must be developed along with the vehicle design. Although construction of RLVs has been possible, governments and commercial companies have been reluctant to provide the funding required to build RLVs that have higher initial costs, but that would reduce operating costs in the long-term. When the designs for the Space Shuttle fleet were first considered, fully-reusable concepts were introduced, and the original selected design was to have two reusable stages. Budgetary pressures, however, molded the vehicle into the partially-reusable system used today.

The materials and designs to construct TSTO RLVs have been available for 35 years, but innovations are still required to develop a SSTO vehicle that can transport payloads to orbit at low costs. Advances in propulsion and structural technology (such as new lightweight composite materials) have been made over the last few decades that are enabling the development of SSTO vehicles. SSTO vehicle technologies may be validated in the next few years with the testing of NASA’s X-33 and X-34 vehicles and with the development of commercial SSTO designs such as the Roton-C. Developments that will be demonstrated by the X-33 will include load-bearing fuel tanks and composite structures. Both the X-33 and Roton plan to use aerospike engines (the aerospike design has existed for decades it has yet to be fully flight tested).

Today there are several drivers that are pushing RLV development forward. The desire to reduce launch costs in the commercial and government markets is greater than ever. The growth in the number of proposed LEO satellite constellations for telecommunication applications has produced demand for low-cost launches, encouraging entrepreneurial aerospace companies to develop commercial RLVs to serve this market. RLV designs for space tourism applications have been seriously proposed in the last few years. The X PRIZESM competition is encouraging construction of passenger-carrying sub-orbital RLVs by over a dozen start-up companies by offering a $10 million prize to the first vehicle to demonstrate the capability to carry 3 people to a 100 km sub-orbital altitude and repeat the flight within 2 weeks.

Government programs are also a key source of RLV development. NASA’s current X-33 and X-34 RLV prototype and technology development programs grew out of a series of studies examining the next step following the Space Shuttle program. In 1985, NASA and the Department of Defense were directed by the President to devise a common plan to develop space transportation systems beyond the Space Shuttle. The resulting Space Transportation Architecture Study was focused on meeting civil and military launch needs, and endorsed examining air-breathing propulsion technologies, TSTO systems, and solid rocket boosters.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity. This stated that travel at the speed of light is impossible. He argued that the faster an object moves, the heavier it becomes, so that an object travelling at the speed of light would have infinite mass, which is impossible. Spacecraft are getting faster and faster but may never be able to reach the speeds needed to travel between stars.

If we ever want to travel to, ahem, galaxies far, far away, we’ll need to find a way of getting there within our lifetime. For example, travelling to Alpha Centauri, one of our closest galactic neighbours 4.35 light years away, would take approximately 70,000 years if we made the journey at the same speed as NASA’S Voyager 1 probe. Even Yoda would struggle with that time scale.

One way to push the boundaries of space exploration is to travel faster than light, which is a mindboggling, 670,616,629mph, or 1.07bn km/hr. By comparison, the fastest manmade spacecraft – NASA’S Juno Probe – briefly reached 165,000 mph (266,000 km/h).

But according to our understanding of the laws of physics, it’s impossible to break ‘c’, the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein.

The main barrier that we – and most particles – have is mass. Any object with mass accelerates, gaining energy, but it always needs more to accelerate further. So, propelling us to the speed of light would take an infinite amount of energy. ‘There is simply no fuel source big enough to accelerate you or I to light speed,’ Peter William Millington, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham explained. But that hasn’t stopped scientists trying to find a workaround to this mammoth problem. Teams at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland tried to get neutrinos – the lightest known particles in the universe – to exceed the speed of light but failed.

However, their efforts were not without drama. In 2011, the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion tracking Apparatus) team made an announcement that promised to rewrite our understanding of the universe, by saying they had ‘high confidence’ that neutrinos had travelled faster than light, giving science fiction fans immediate hope that spacecraft might be possible. Theoretically, at least. However, it turned out that the results were wrong due to a faulty cable connection in the GPS system used to time the particles. This made their journey look around 73 nanoseconds speedier than it was. So for now, at least, we won’t be able to travel beyond the speed of light based on our current understanding of the laws of physics.

The X-33 is a single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicle designed by NASA. It is currently a sized-down prototype of a new rocket design called the Venturestar, which will be built if the X-33 is successful. The Venturestar will be able to travel into space and back in one piece, without jettisoning any boosters or fuel tanks, and will lower the cost of putting one pound of payload into orbit by more than 90%.

Currently under construction, X-33 is the subscale prototype of the VentureStar single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicle (RLV). The project is a joint effort of NASA and the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. VentureStar is a potential successor to the Space Shuttle, providing low-cost access to orbit for satellites and humans. The major document on this CD-ROM is our exclusive reproduction of the incredibly detailed Critical Design Review (CDR). It might sound boring, but it isn’t: it contains every imaginable fact and graphic for this exciting project! This is one of the most innovative vehicles in aerospace history, and the CDR provides the full details with thousands of beautiful color cutaway drawings, schematics, and photographs. The illustrations are simply spectacular! Topics covered include: VentureStar Concepts and Systems, Aerospike XRS-2000 Engine and Fluid Systems, Vehicle Systems, Main Propulsion System, Structural, Mechanical Systems, Avionics and ! Software, Thermal Protection System, Flight Control System, Flight Analysis, Facilities, Operations and Ground Systems, Flight Test Program, Launch Site and Launch Pad. In addition, the CD includes up-to-date news and program status reports, a gallery of images, and even a computer-animated movie clip depicting the countdown and launch. As another title in the World Spaceflight News American Space Encyclopedia CD-ROM series, it is truly an authoritative source for spaceflight enthusiasts!

First off the X-33/ Venturestar was a significant scientific achievement. The RLV concept is the basis for our ability as inhabitants of our plant to pursue space exploration efficiently and effectively in the future. NASA has critical information available from the lessons learned on this project. Each contributor to the program pushed the limits of advanced technology as far as humanly possible. This book when reviewed in detail provides documentation crediting human imagination and the shape of things to come. Design, engineering, manufacturing, business management all contributed to the awesome technological capabilities that would stem from this project had it been completed. New materials never considered in the past were placed on this vehicle to prove the technology was space worthy. In the near future we will all benefit from knowledge that can be traced back to the X-33.

Some companies are already taking bookings for leisure trips into space. In 2001, the American millionaire Dennis Tito was the first “tourist” in space, flying into orbit in a Russian Sow: rocket. Other firms have already spent millions on designing hotels and condominiums on the Moon! As the price of traveling into space lessens, more and more people will make plans to go on the ultimate holiday in orbit.

Space tourism has experienced many false dawns. Companies have come and gone that have offered everything from trips to the Moon to a new home on Mars. But after broken promise after broken promise, things might be about to change.

Seven people have paid to go to space before, with American multimillionaire Dennis Tito becoming the first space tourist in 2001, flying to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Soyuz capsule to the tune of $20 million. Six more space tourists would follow in his footsteps, but despite hopes otherwise, little else followed. No space tourist has flown since 2009.

This year, however, we are expecting several private companies in the US to start taking humans to space, most for the first time. And, if all goes to plan, this could be a vital step towards making space more accessible – where paid trips and privately funded astronauts become the norm. “2019 does feel like the year that’s going to be the culmination of two decades of development work that have gone into space tourism,” says industry analyst Caleb Williams from consulting firm SpaceWorks. “And if we’re lucky, we’ll see the birth of an entirely new industry.”

One of those companies is Virgin Galactic, who on 13 December 2018 conducted their first trip to near-space. Two pilots, Mark Stucky and Frederick Sturckow, took Virgin’s spaceplane VSS Unity to an altitude of 82.7 kilometres (51.4 miles). This year, the company plans to conduct more test flights, with the possibility of taking its first passengers – founder Richard Branson being first of all – to space.

“We hope now to get into a regular cadence of space flights which will be historically unprecedented,” says Stephen Attenborough, commercial director at Virgin Galactic. “[2019] promises to be a turning point after many years of dedication, patience and hard work.”