A cargo carrier designed for low Earth orbit could provide a cheap route to the red planet. Dragon, the privately built space capsule intended to haul cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), is auditioning for another high-profile role. Its maker, SpaceX of Hawthorne,...
Filling the pantry for the first voyages to the Re...
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A green thumb and a little flair as a gourmet chef may be among the key skills for the first men and women who travel to the Red Planet later this century, according to a scientist who reported here on preparations for the first manned missions to Mars. Speaking at the 242nd National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Maya R. Cooper said that provisioning the astronauts with food stands as one of the greatest challenges in scripting the first manned mission to Mars. ACS, the world largest scientific society, opened the meeting at the Colorado Convention Center and downtown hotels. With more than 7,500 reports on...
Vegans on Mars? PETA...
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Most space fans hope that humans will eventually reach Mars. As for cows and chickens, that’s another question. Animal rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has sent a letter to space entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of rocket company SpaceX, urging him to make...
Russian, European sp...
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With just months to go before the end of a Moscow-based simulated journey to Mars, the European Space Agency (ESA) head said on Wednesday a joint mission with Russia to the Red Planet was in the pipeline. Speaking to reporters at an air show near Moscow on Wednesday, ESA head Jean-Jacques...
NASA Selects Investi...
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PASADENA, Calif. — NASA has selected three science investigations from which it will pick one potential 2016 mission to look at Mars’ interior for the first time; study an extraterrestrial sea on one of Saturn’s moons; or study in unprecedented detail the surface of a...
Time Is Now For Huma...
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“The time for a human mission to Mars is now,” write the editors of “A One Way Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet,” a collection of articles published in book form this month by the Journal of Cosmology. “The overall message of this volume is not just that...
Mars should be US space agency’s focus: pane...
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NASA should focus its efforts on a solar-powered rover mission to Mars rather than human spaceflight in the coming decade, but only if costs can be slashed, a science panel said Monday.The recommendation was part of a report by the National Research Council urging a series of planetary missions “that could provide a steady stream of important new discoveries about the solar system” from 2013 to 2022. The report comes as NASA faces scrutiny from lawmakers over its proposed 2012 budget and pressure from the public to find a new way to transport astronauts into space once the three-decade old shuttle program ends this...
Mars, Brought To You...
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NASA scientists and their colleagues are now proposing corporate financing for a human mission to Mars. This raises the prospect that a spaceship named the Microsoft Explorer or the Google Search Engine could one day go down in history as the first spaceship to bring humans to the red...