Despite Shutdown, Astronauts Still Run Up Walls

The current government shutdown has severely impacted NASA. According to The Verge: 

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will see over 90 percent of its civilian workforce immediately furloughed: 17,701 out of 18,250 total employees, according to the shutdown plan the agency filed last week. As President Obama put it in an emergency address last night, "NASA will shut down almost entirely, but Mission Control will remain open to support the astronauts serving on the Space Station."

The shutdown plan link in the article no longer works, since all of NASA's websites and social media accounts have beeen shut down. The good news is that the astronauts on the ISS will be supporrted.  One way they can deal with the stress is to run up a wall! 

Creepy photo, huh? I took the above photo of the treadmill that astronauts use to stay in shape while on the International Space Station (ISS) during my trip to NASA Mission Control in Houston, TX earlier this year.  Using the port and starboard nautical terms for left and right, the treadmill is essentially on the wall.  But in a weightless environment of space, the terms up, down, left or right have no absolute meaning. 

Here's a photo of the actual treadmill, which was named after Stephen Colbert after he won a naming contest. As you can see his smiling face in the photo above, the treadmill is officially called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT).

Astronaut Karen Nyberg posted this video recently of her experience on the treadmill. She needs to be tethered so she doesn't float off, and the treadmill itself can't be fixed completely onto the wall - it needs to be able to move so that the forces put on the treadmill by the runner don't affect the flight path of the station.  Remember, this is space, and there is no drag or wind resistance to prevent movement - any little push can seriously set you off course. 

The video is set up so that it looks like the treadmill is on the "bottom" of the ISS, but if you look closely at the orientation of other objects, you can see that we are actually on the "wall". 

In addition to seeing the treadmll, I was fortunate enough to meet Karen and the other current residents of the International Space Station before they departed on their trip as Expedition 36. Of course I'm right next to Karen because she loves me.  Here's one of my favorite pics ever!

Fyodor Yurchikhin, Karen Nyberg, me, Luca Parmitano

NASA Shut Down, But We Still Celebrate 55 Years

(Editors Note: Most of the NASA links are inactive because of the government shutdown. Yay Congress.) 

In the midst of the Cold War, the US government created NASA in 1958 to gain an edge in space exploration. It was partially a defensive move agains the Soviet launch of the first Earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.  NASA superseded the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was formed in 1915 to pursue aeronautical research.

In the past 55 years, NASA has grown beyond its iniitial goals to be part of a global initative in support of space travel and harnessing its benefits for Earth. Check out the following infographic to get a sense of accomplishments as well as future endeavours. My hope is that this blog will be around long enough to cover each of the "things to come"! For more info, click on the infographic or visit this site.

Some more detail is available on NASA's site:

We’ve sent 12 humans to walk and work on the moon, sent four rovers and four landers to explore Mars and sentVoyager into interstellar space.

We’ve studied our home planet, every other planet in the solar system, and the sun at the center of it all.

We’ve peered deep into the distant past of the universe with Great Observatories like Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra.

We’ve built an International Space Station larger than a five-bedroom house and sent humans to live and work off the planet continuously since November 2000. 

We've flown 30 years of space shuttle missions to launch and repair Hubble, build the space station and perform science in Earth orbit.

We've developed experimental aircraft and tested technologies that make today's airplanes safer and greener

We’ve produced hundreds of innovations that enable current and future NASA missions and improve the daily lives of everyone on Earth, from life-saving medical technologies to advances in telecommunications, weather forecasting, robotics and emergency response.

There’s way too much to list it all … and we’re not done yet.

We plan to land humans on Mars in the 2030s. We're getting set to send MAVEN to Mars and OSIRIS-REx to an asteroid, and we'll be watching as Juno arrives at Jupiter and New Horizons arrives at Pluto. We’ll launch the James Webb Space Telescopeto follow Hubble in the quest to understand our universe, looking all the way back to the first luminous glows after the Big Bang.   We’ll continue looking at the home planet from our unique perspective in space, improving air travel and developing cutting-edge technologies for the benefit of all mankind.

Preparing To Go To Mars + ISS Video

The International Space Station (ISS) will be testing a new module that will eventually help toward long duration spaceflight to places like Mars. If that isn't cool enough, the module, named BEAM, will be delivered by the private SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in 2015!  This is another example of the private industry taking on the challenges of spaceflight and coordinating not only with the US government, but the other governments involved with the ISS as well. I've covered the previous SpaceX launches here.

The astronauts inside of the ISS will be testing the BEAM module to make sure it is up to task. If you want to check out where they'll be testing, check out this video from inside the ISS that I found this while browsing CNET's Australian site.

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan.

If you can't see the video below, click here.

Happy New Year From Spaaaaaaace!

From NASA's Google+ page: 

Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineers Chris Hadfield and Tom Marshburn of the International Space Station's Expedition 34 crew send down their best wishes for a happy new year

SpaceX's Dragon to Become First Commercial Aircraft to Visit International Space Station

The title pretty much says it all. At 4:45am EST on May 19th, SpaceX will live stream the launch of their Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket. It's a huge day for space geeks such as myself, but I'm glad that the coverage is extending to the mainstream.

For all of the talk about budget cuts to NASA and ending the shuttle program, it's great to report on the future of space travel. I really believe that space (and the ocean) need to be explored to better understand what role we play in this vast universe. It's not about finding aliens, but about doing the science that's hard to do within the physical confines of Earth. But I won't lie and say I wouldn't be excited if we found a Mass Relay ...

Note that this is a demonstration mission, but assuming everything goes well cargo (and potentially astronauts) will be ferried back and forth in the future.

For more info check out their press kit.