Space Station Threshold

Communication with spacecraft is vital for NASA, and since the World Wide Web has enabled easy, reliable and quick contact for people around the world, the space agency decided to model a new deep space communication system on the internet. A month-long test of this "Interplanetary Internet" was successfully conducted by transmitting ...

In an initiative energized by Google Vice-President Vint Cerf, the International Space Station could be testing a brand new way of communicating with Earth. In 2009, it is hoped that the ISS will play host to an Interplanetary Internet prototype that could standardize communications between Earth and space, possibly replacing point-to-point single ...

Commenting on the strategy for the exploration of Mars, Buzz Aldrin, second man on the Moon and tireless space exploration advocate, has said that he believes the first explorers of the Red Planet should stay there. Following similar lines of the first European pioneers who settled in America, a small group of interplanetary explorers should [...]

One of the wonderful things about space exploration and astronomy is how how it brings people together across cultures, countries and even languages. Almost all of the current planetary missions — Phoenix, Cassini, and Dawn, for example — are collaborative efforts between scientists and space agencies around the world. And all of ...

Some sobering news from a recent rocket science conference: It is highly improbable that humans will ever explore beyond the Solar System. This downbeat opinion comes from the Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, where future space propulsion challenges were discussed and debated. It is widely acknowledged that any form of ...

Next week, Boulder, Colorado will play host to the eleventh annual Mars Society conference. There will be a huge array of speakers, lectures and workshops anyone can get involved in to learn more about the future of manned exploration on Mars. The Mars Society is an international organization working to raise public awareness about the [...]

NASA's first man in space, John Glenn has said a plan to set up a Moon base to facilitate the manned exploration of interplanetary space is a very bad idea. Under the current US government direction, NASA hopes to (eventually) establish the manned outpost for future launches to Mars and beyond, thus avoiding the huge [...]

Social networking sites are the backbone of "Web 2.0" and now one of the most popular sites, Bebo (popular with a younger demographic), hopes to reach out to extraterrestrial civilizations. Why? Well, the power of social networking sites like Bebo, Facebook and MySpace is that you can keep in touch with friends, make new friends [...]

The US space agency needs to have better consideration for the sexual needs of their astronauts during long missions in space. Also, more research needs to be done to investigate human embryo development in zero-gravity or low-gravity environments, especially if NASA is serious about setting up a colony on Mars in the next 30 years. [...]

We've all asked this question at some point: How long would it take to travel to the stars? And could I do it in my lifetime? There are many answers to this possibility, some very simple, others in the realms of science fiction. To make this easier to answer, we'll address how long it would [...]