Lifeboat Foundation

What will happen when the International Space Station ends?

The Starfighters are lobbying to become the first certified astronaut training fleet endorsed by NASA.

Three billion miles away on the farthest known major planet in our solar system, an ominous, dark storm — once big enough to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean from Boston to Portugal — is shrinking out of existence as seen in pictures of Neptune taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The United Arab Emirates is seeking ideas from around the world that explore the possibilities of space settlement and habitation.

Image: Stratolaunch Billionaires are taking to space the way wistful young men take to the sea in 19th Century novels. Last week, Elon Musk launched his Tesla Roadster at the astroid belt using the world’s most powerful rocket currently in operation. Not to be outdone, Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen also has a big plan (and a big plane) for going to space. In December of last year, the Stratolaunch performed its first taxi at the Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, CA. While that doesn’t seem terribly exciting, it’s the first step to getting the Stratolaunch, the world’s largest plane eve…

Light sails can later use space-dust braking Richard Bizley/Science Photo Library By James Romero Our galaxy may contain billions of habitable worlds that don’t host any life. Should we attempt to change that? Breakthrough Starshot is a project with ambitious aims to use such systems to send tiny, lightweight probes to Alpha Centauri. The goal is to take pictures of our nearest star, but these systems could also deliver much larger payloads into orbit around nearby stars, says Gros. Potential targets include the planetary system around TRAPPIST-1, a red dwarf star just 40 light years away…

Using a jet of radio waves, astronomers have begun to map the other side of the Milky Way. Within 10 years we could have a complete map of the entire galaxy.

The universe is highly magnetic, with everything from stars to planets to galaxies producing their own magnetic fields. Astrophysicists have long puzzled over these surprisingly strong and long-lived fields, with theories and simulations seeking a mechanism that explains their generation.

If humans are destined for deep space, they need to understand the space environment changes health, including aging and antibiotic resistance.

A new NASA project could help. It aims to develop technology used to study “omics”—fields of microbiology that are important to human health. Omics includes research into genomes, microbiomes and proteomes.

The Omics in Space project is being led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The project was recently funded by NASA’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health four years of study. Over that time, NASA hopes to develop 3D printable designs for instruments on the International Space Station (ISS), that can handle liquids like blood samples without spilling in microgravity. These tools could enable astronauts to analyze biological samples without sending them back to Earth.