News Stories relating to "space"

A vital but unasked question is: what happens to human waste in space? Right now, astronauts bring it back home with them, but on longer space voyages, other solutions will be needed.

This will become more important in the future, when long space voyages are planned. Karen Miller writes that on a two-year trip to Mars, a crew of six...

The International Space Station, with its two-man crew (one American, one Russian) is losing cabin pressure, meaning it may have sprung a leak after recently being hit by a piece of space junk. So far, there are no plans to abandon the ISS, since NASA says the leak is small and is "having no impact on station operations and the crew is in no...

Astronomers now think that life spread throughout the Milky Way via microbes hitching a ride on asteroids and comets, and that it didn't originate on Earth. It will eventually leak out into other galaxies?if it hasn't already. This means that life is probably widespread, although the planet(s) where life originated may now be barren or may...

We recently reported that astronauts on board the International Space Station said they saw strange lights in space. NASA has discovered these were incredibly high auroras, produced by the recent solar storms, although they still don't know how this was possible.

Auroras are usually only seen from Earth, close to the poles. They are...

With so many probes heading for Mars and other planets, the question of whether they could bring back new diseases has become important. SARS, Mad Cow Disease and HIV are only three of the diseases that have crossed the species barrier, so infectious pathogens from Martian rock samples probably could too.

Leslie Mullen writes in...

People like to send mail that's postmarked "Christmas," or some other exotically-named town. Now you can send someone a letter from the International Space Station?if you can afford the $20,000 "stamp." Now that the Russians are no longer taking tourists to the ISS, they're thinking up new ways to make money to support their space program. For...

Brian Walker is known as the "Rocket Guy" because he's built his own rocket, which he plans to ride into space. "Hopefully I'll launch from the black rock desert in Nevada," he says. He?s been working on Project RUSH (Rapid Up Super High) for 4 years. When his rocket, Earthstar One, is completed, he will use it to ascend 50 miles straight up....

The QuickBird satellite is taking photographs of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, trying to spot the remains of Noah's Ark. Aircraft pictures taken in the late 1940s, as well as more recent secret spy satellite shots of the area, have revealed what could be nothing more than an unusual geological formation, but it could also be the remains of...