The International Space Station

The International Space Station is now more than two decades old. And while primary construction of the orbiting laboratory ended a little more than a decade ago, before the retirement of NASA's space shuttle, the station has continued to evolve with smaller modules and an ever-changing array of visiting spacecraft.

Over this time the station has begun to show its age, being exposed to the extreme hot and cold temperatures of space, a vacuum environment, and micrometeoroid debris. 

For more than 20 years, these harsh conditions have worn on the station, inducing stress fractures and other damage.

Following the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, NASA lost the ability to fly humans around the station to catalog these changes with highly detailed photographs. 

But thanks to the emergence of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle, astronauts have started circumnavigating the station once again after undocking and before heading home.

Most recently, the Crew 2 mission led by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough undocked from the space station on November 8, and the crew was able to capture multiple views of the space station.  READ MORE...

SEX in SPACE

Houston, we have a problem! Love and sex need to happen in space if we hope to travel long distances and become an interplanetary species, but space organizations are not ready.

National agencies and private space companies — such as NASA and SpaceX — aim to colonize Mars and send humans into space for long-term missions, but they have yet to address the intimate and sexual needs of astronauts or future space inhabitants.

This situation is untenable and needs to change if we hope to settle new worlds and continue our expansion in the cosmos — we’ll need to learn how to safely reproduce and build pleasurable intimate lives in space. To succeed, however, we also need space organizations to adopt a new perspective on space exploration: one that considers humans as whole beings with needs and desires.

As researchers exploring the psychology of human sexuality and studying the psychosocial aspects of human factors in space, we propose that it is high time for space programs to embrace a new discipline: space sexology, the comprehensive scientific study of extraterrestrial intimacy and sexuality.

The final, intimate frontier
Love and sex are central to human life. Despite this, national and private space organizations are moving forward with long-term missions to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon and Mars without any concrete research and plans to address human eroticism in space. It’s one thing to land rovers on another planet or launch billionaires into orbit — it’s another to send humans to live in space for extended periods of time.

In practice, rocket science may take us to outer space, but it will be human relations that determine if we survive and thrive as a spacefaring civilization. In that regard, we argue that limiting intimacy in space could jeopardize the mental and sexual health of astronauts, along with crew performance and mission success. On the other hand, enabling space eroticism could help humans adapt to space life and enhance the well-being of future space inhabitants.  READ MORE...

NOTE:
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Simon Dubé, PhD candidate, Psychology of Human Sexuality, Erobotics & Space Sexology, Concordia University

Dave Anctil, Chercheur affilié à l'Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA), Université Laval

Judith Lapierre, Professor, Faculty of Nursing Science, Université Laval

NASA Astronauts

Russia's state-owned news service, TASS, has published an extraordinarily defamatory article about NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor. 

The publication claims that Auñón-Chancellor had an emotional breakdown in space, then damaged a Russian spacecraft in order to return early. This, of course, is a complete fabrication.

The context for the article is the recent, near-disastrous docking of the Russian Nauka science module with the International Space Station. 

The TASS article attempts to rebut criticism in US publications (including Ars Technica) that covered the incident and raised questions about the future of the Roscosmos-NASA partnership in space.

One of a dozen rebuttals in the TASS article concerns a 2018 incident—a 2 mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle docked with the International Space Station. 

Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, and NASA's Auñón-Chancellor had flown to the station inside this Soyuz in June. The leak was discovered in late August.

Left unchecked, the small hole would have depressurized the station in about two weeks. Fortunately, cosmonauts were able to patch the hole with epoxy, and the Soyuz spacecraft was deemed safe to fly its crew of three back to Earth.

Attention quickly turned to what had caused the hole to appear. A micrometeoroid strike was ruled out. Some Russian media reported that it had been caused by a manufacturing or testing defect, and this seems to be the most plausible theory. 

At the same time, however, sources in the Russian government started baseless rumors that perhaps a disgruntled NASA astronaut had drilled the hole.  READ MORE

Shooting Star

From his perch on the International Space Station, a French astronaut watched a long-running Russian space module break into pieces in a shower of fireworks. What's more, he caught the event on video.

The European Space Agency's Facebook page shows a sped-up timelapse of the module, called Pirs, meeting its fiery demise Monday (July 26) under the watch of Thomas Pesquet.

"Atmospheric reentry without a heat shield results in a nice fireball," Pesquet wrote in the post, which also included a French description. "You clearly see smaller pieces of melting metal floating away and adding to the fireworks."  READ MORE

Video: Watch a spacecraft burn up in Earth's atmosphere from space station
Related: Astronaut watches Russian space station module fall from space in fiery demise (photos)

Missing Microbes

Even in the harshest environments, microbes always seem to get by. They thrive everywhere from boiling-hot seafloor hydrothermal vents to high on Mt. Everest. Clumps of microbial cells have even been found clinging to the hull of the International Space Station (SN: 08/26/20).

There was no reason for microbial ecologist Noah Fierer to expect that the 204 soil samples he and colleagues had collected near Antarctica’s Shackleton Glacier would be any different. 

A spoonful of typical soil could easily contain billions of microbes, and Antarctic soils from other regions host at least a few thousand per gram. 

So he assumed that all of his samples would host at least some life, even though the air around Shackleton Glacier is so cold and so arid that Fierer often left his damp laundry outside to freeze-dry.

Surprisingly, some of the coldest, driest soils didn’t seem to be inhabited by microbes at all, he and colleagues report in the June Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 

To Fierer’s knowledge, this is the first time that scientists have found soils that don’t seem to support any kind of microbial life.  READ MORE