Daily Archives: November 7, 2019

Laika, Russian cosmonaut dog, 1957. Laika was the first animal to orbit the Earth, travelling on ... [+] board the Sputnik 2 spacraft launched on 3 November 1957. The Soviet space programme used dogs and other animals in order to ascertain the viability of later (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Laika was just a Moscow stray when she was drafted as a guinea pig for the Soviet Unions launch of its Sputnik 2 spacecraft.The iconic photo in which her mongrel paws lazily grace the edge of her tiny metal carrier belies the fact that her first launch would be her last.

While Sputnik 2, which blasted into low-Earth orbit on November 3, 1957 was deemed a success, Laika was on a one-way trip.As NASA points out, she expired a few hours after launch, even though the Sputnik 2 spacecraft didnt burn up in Earths outer atmosphere until April 1958.

Thus, this weeks sixty-third anniversary of this poignant launch raises a real ethical question - should we humans be sending animals into space?And even if they are sent up with all the precautions, is that a risk that they deserve having inflicted upon them?

Sergei Khrushchev, the late Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschevs eldest son, told me in a 1998 interview that he was worried about what would happen to Laika.That he sympathized with the dog.But his father told him in so many words, Laikas fate was inconsequential when looking at the larger picture of what the soviets deemed their mandate to conquer low-Earth orbit.

"My father's goal was to threaten Americans with death in the cheapest way," Sergei Khrushchev, who now lives in the U.S., told me in the February 1998 issue of the U.K.s Geographical Magazine. "For him the [Soviet] R-7 ICBM was most important. We were defenseless against the Americans and their huge fleet of heavy bombers. But it was never our goal to destroy the US, and we didn't have the capability to make a first strike until the 1970s."

Even so, ground-based geopolitics and the notion that animals are expendable has been an attitude that has pervaded throughout the history of spacefaring nations forays into space.

Before humans actually went into space, one of the prevailing theories of the perils of space flight was that humans might not be able to survive long periods of weightlessness, NASA has noted.The American space agency points out that both American and Russian scientists utilized animals - mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs - in order to test each country's ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed.

These early space missions were deemed too risky for humans and, in the case of Laika, were known to be a one-way trip, Lori Marino, an evolutionary neurobiologist and president of The Whale Sanctuary Project, told me.There were also many monkeys, mice, cats, insects and even fish who gave their lives unwillingly so that we might explore space, she says. Most of these animals died either during or shortly after their flights or were deliberately killed afterwards, Marino notes.

On January 31, 1961, Ham became the first chimpanzee to make it to sub-orbital space launched atop an American Mercury Redstone rocket; paving the way for the successful 1961 launch of Alan Shepard, Jr. - America's first human astronaut, says NASA.Ham splashed down in the Atlantic some 60 miles from the recovery ship after his 16.5-minute flight, says the agency.And aside from suffering fatigue and dehydration was in good shape.

Even so, Marino says Ham was cruelly captured by animal trappers and ripped from his family at a very young age; subjected to 18 months of training in which he received electrical shocks to the soles of his feet.Then when he failed to respond correctly in tests, Marino says he had restraints placed on his neck, torso, and limbs for extended periods.He spent his remaining years in zoos, dying at the young age of 26.

Chimpanzee "Ham" in space-suit is fitted into the couch of the Mercury-Redstone 2 capsule #5 prior ... [+] to its test flight which was conducted on January 31, 1961.

Yet NASA has a different take.

Without animal testing in the early days of the human space program, the Soviet and American programs could have suffered great losses of human life, says NASA. These animals gave their lives and/or their service in the name of technological advancement, paving the way for Humanity's many forays into space, it says.

But Marino disagrees.While we rightly laud the courage of human astronauts, she says, we need to remember that the path was paved for them by other animals who were not fortunate enough to reap the rewards of their service.

Does that also go for family pets who might want to follow their humans into space?

Animals should not be taken into space, full stop, said Marino.

Space travel in the near future is going to be, at best, severely uncomfortable and compromising for human astronauts, Marino notes.But while human astronauts know what they are getting into, other animals do not, she says.

We do not have the right to put the lives of other animals at risk for our purposes, said Marino.

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The Case Against Sending Animals Into Space - Forbes

After 12 bottles of Bordeaux wine made their way to the International Space Station (ISS), now cookie dough is giving it company in outer space.

Astronauts will bake the chocolate chip cookies at the ISS in a prototype oven, as part of a historic micro-gravity experiment. The objective of the initiative is to make long-duration space travel more hospitable.

The spacecraft carrying the dough of DoubleTree by Hilton's chocolate-chip cookies left the Earth on Saturday from NASAs Wallops Flight Facility, and arrived at the ISS on Monday.

For the initiative, DoubleTree by Hilton has partnered with New York-based Zero G Kitchen, which creates appliances for microgravity use in long-duration space flights, and Nanoracks, a provider of commercial access to space.

Excited to be the first hospitality company to participate in research aboard the space station, Shawn McAteer, senior vice president and global head, DoubleTree by Hilton, said, Were thrilled that our chocolate chip cookie is sending Hilton hospitality into orbit and contributing to a pivotal moment in aerospace history as we test the outcome of the first food baked in space.

Commenting on this being the first time that anything will be baked in space, Mary Murphy, senior internal payloads manager, Nanoracks said in a statement, "What will the cookies look like? Will they bake out equally in all directions and form a sphere, or stay flat? While we dont know for sure how the experiment will turn out, we are looking forward to finding out and learning how to best bake food products in space.

Whether Earthlings will get a taste of the cookies is yet to be decided, as they will undergo additional testing on their return home to assess the outcome.

And though astronauts aboard the ISS will have to skip eating the cookies they bake, the spacecraft has taken up special pre-baked chocolate chip cookies by the hotel for them.

In 1985, a half bottle from Bordeauxs 1975 vintage spent a week in space, thanks to a French astronaut who also took fine viands along on a space shuttle trip.

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Made in space: In a historic experiment, astronauts to bake chocolate-chip cookies at the ISS - Economic Times

It's not often I get to write about astronauts and space travel. In fact, it's happened exactly... never. But now, thanks to a high-flying collaboration of Stanford researchers past and present, I get to write about something that's really out of this world.

Since 2006, iPS cells (short for induced pluripotent stem cells) have been at the forefront of groundbreaking research in biology and medicine. The cells' ability to become nearly any tissue in the body makes them an invaluable resource for physicians wishing to study the effect of drugs on specific, hard-to-obtain tissues or for researchers wanting to delve into the molecular missteps that lead to all manner of diseases.

Now iPS-derived human heart muscle cells called cardiomyocytes have found their way into space, as part of a study by cardiologist and stem cell researcher Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, graduate student Alexa Wnorowski and former Stanford graduate student Arun Sharma, PhD. With the help of NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, PhD, (also a former Stanford graduate student!), Wnorowski and Sharma studied the effect of the low gravity of the International Space Station on the heart cells' structure and function.

They published their findings today in Stem Cell Reports.

As Sharma, now a senior research fellow at Cedars-Sinai, explained in an email:

This project represented an opportunity for biomedical researchers to collaborate with astronauts and engineers in order to learn more about how a very unique environment, microgravity, affects the cells of the human heart.

Sharma, Wnorowski and Wu found that the cardiomyocytes cultured on the space station exhibited different patterns of gene expression than did their counterparts grown back here on Earth. They also displayed changes in the way they handled calcium -- an important regulator of contraction rate and strength.

Interestingly (and perhaps reassuringly for astronauts like Rubins), the cells appeared to return to normal when their five-and-a-half week jaunt into low Earth orbit ended.

"Working with the cells that launched to and returned from the International Space Station was an incredible opportunity," Wnorowski said. "Our study was the first conducted on the station that used human iPS technology, and demonstrated that it is possible to conduct long-term, human cell-based experiments in space."

All in all, the researchers were interested to see how nimbly the cells adjusted to their new, free floating life.

"We were surprised by how quickly human heart cells adapted to microgravity," Sharma said. "These results parallel known organ-level adaptations that happen to the heart during spaceflight."

Photos of Kate Rubins by NASA

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The final frontier? Studying stem cells on the International Space Station - Scope

Will Chinas Belt and Road Initiative include affordable space travel? - Sciences and Technology - RFI

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Will Chinas Belt and Road Initiative include affordable space travel? - RFI English

NASA is moving one step closer to another moon mission; Phil Keating reports on the details.

Humans have entered their 20th year with a continuous living presence in space atthe International Space Station.

To celebrate the 19th anniversary of the arrival of the first crew to live aboard the International Space Station, NASA has sent a Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply spacecraft to the outer space outpost to aid in research for long-term space missions, the agency reportedin a press release on Saturday.

The spacecraft launched from NASAs Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Saturday morning carrying nearly 8,200 pounds of science investigations and cargo and is scheduled to arrive at the space station around 4:10 a.m. Monday, with coverage of its approach and arrival to be streamed live on NASA Television and the agencys website.

RICHARD BRANSON: SPACE TRAVEL COSTS WILL FALL FROM $250,000 A POP

Amongsome of the scientific investigations being carried to the ISS are entitledMore Probing of Mysteries of the Universe, where astronauts will make repairs on an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, Testing Personal Protective Equipment for Astronauts, where astronauts will wear an AstroRad Vest to test unpredictable solar particle events, Food Fresh from the Oven which examines food cooked in microgravity, and 3D Printing with Recycled Materials, which will test systems needed to reprocess plastic into 3D printing filament that can then be transferred for use to the Made in Space Manufacturing Device, which is a 3D printer that has been used on the orbiting laboratory since 2016,in the space agencys own words.

The exterior of the International Space Station.

NASA TRACKING MULTIPLE ASTEROIDS HEADING TOWARD EARTH

Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will be intercepting the spacecrafts cargo from the International Space Station with the stations robotic arm, while NASAs Andrew Morgan will monitor telemetry during the interstellar cargo transfer.

This delivery marks the 12th cargo flight to the ISS by the Northrop Grumman Cygnus spaceship and the first under its current Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract with NASA, which will support dozens of new and existingscientific investigations, according to the space agency.

The ISS is amicrogravity laboratory in earth's orbitthat has hosted 239 people from 19 different countries and has conducted over2,600 experiments from 3,900 researchers in 107 countries. NASA has spent an estimated $100 billion overall on the International Space Station, with $3 to $4 billion per year being spenton maintainance alone, NASA revealed in a July 2018 report.

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The giantlaboratory has been travelling around the globe at five miles per second since the first part of it was launched into orbit back in 1998and wasmanned by its first crew in Nov. 2000, the three of whichstayed a total of 136 days.

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Resupply ship heads to space station to aid research missions - Fox Business

Mars its the subject of countless science fiction novels and has long been a fascination amongst us earthlings. Today NASA is setting its sights on making a human Mars landing a reality within the next two decades. Located on average 140 million miles away from Earth, distance is just one obstacle in sending humans to the red planet.

Maintaining the health of the astronauts venturing to Mars is another major challenge scientists and researchers are grappling with today. However, the advancements and technologies that come from these challenges could have implications for future healthcare.

When you think about it, its really for humans exploring deep space on behalf of all of humanity. Everything that we do creates a new way to do healthcare, Dorit Donoviel, director at Translational Research Institute for Space Health, said at the Space Health Innovation Conference on Saturday.

Historically, space exploration has led to medical advances that impact the world in general. In particular, space travel has allowed researchers to look at the effects of aging on the human body.

What we learn about space health is relevant to you and I, especially as we age. So, aging on Earth is not that unlike going to space for a long period of time, former NASA astronaut and Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC Davis Stephen Robinson told HIMSS Media. That gives us potential for insights that can really influence everyone here on Earth.

Robinson gave the example of osteoporosis. In space, astronauts are at a higher risk for losing mass in their bones in a process similar to osteoporosis.

If we can learn to counteract that in space for people who are experiencing that onset very rapidly, maybe we can take that back to Earth for the rest of us, he said.

Traveling to Mars poses a new set of health challenges for NASA. For one, the planet is further than any to which humans have traveled before. Unlike other missions, due to the orbital mechanics of the journey, astronauts wont be able to come home if there is a health emergency.

So, the round trip to mars is nearly three years, and maybe one of [the crew] will be a physician and they are going to have to contend over that long duration mission far away from Earth without any possibility of return or abort, or any ways of replacing broken parts with normal health concerns, Donoviel said.

Far away from Earth the stakes are high. Common conditions can have devastating impacts.

Having a simple kidney stone in space for example can be life threatening, Donoviel said. In addition to those regular concerns that could occur in that mission, we are going to have the extremely hostile environment of the space environment and the craft. So, we are going to have to contend with situations where they are going to have to provide their own healthcare.

The challenges arent just physical strain on the body, but psychological and social. The crew going to Mars will spend three years in a tight space with less than a handful of companions.

How do you relieve that concept of, I cant have those things I had before? I have no access to that, and maybe you havent even anticipated how that confinement was going to affect you, Jennifer Fogarty, chief scientist at the NASA Human Research Program, said during the conference. How do you give people self-awareness when they are going down a road where they are going to struggle, and then have tools available when it is actionable that can help them? It could be virtual reality, it could be augmented reality.

While crews generally have a physician on board during the mission, if the doctor needs care it will be the rest of the crew, predominantly engineers, who will have to step up.

We know we need something in the vehicle, and we know we need something on the ground, and we know it has to talk to each other. We know that [during the] Mars mission, we dont get to bring anyone back, Erik Antonsen, assistant director of human systems risk management at NASA and an emergency medicine physician, said at the conference. So all we have the option to do is to move knowledge, not people. We have to figure out how to enable those data systems to provide that knowledge or capability that support in an appropriate way if we want to enable something like a Mars mission.

But implementing technologies like telemedicine and remote monitoring is easier said than done. In Mars there is no cloud network or WiFi. There is a deep space network, but technologies will have to be built specifically to work within it.

Onboarding new technologies is also a risk for crews with limited space.

There is a lot of talk about 3D printing. Sure, its possible but again that is going to be measured against resources such as food and water, Fogarty said. You start seeing trade-offs.

NASA is also looking at a number of other niche issues that will likely impact the crew's health, including radiation, hostile closed environments and altered gravity fields.

While there are countless challenges that come with putting humans on Mars, NASA is partnering with innovation organizations and reaching out to entrepreneurs to problem solve.

So what kinds of solutions do we need? No doubt autonomous, light, lean, robust, Fogarty said.

One of the organizations that NASA is partnering with is the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), a consortium which includes the Baylor College of Medicine, California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The program is focused on translating biomedical research and technology into space health.

TRISH is designed to go do cutting-edge stuff. High risk fail fast, fail often, running it through, see[ing] what they need, Fogarty said.

Due to the limited space, by the time any technology makes it into a mission it needs to be heavily vetted.

When you go into a space flight vehicle, that is not where you need to be cutting edge. That is a very scary thing because you dont have the data to support it, Fogarty said. You may not be able to fix it, and now that thing you chose to take instead of more water gives you a zero. That is really a worst-case scenario from a NASA perspective for how you plan missions.

Fogarty said that in many ways NASA is looking at challenges that are similar to those facing home health.

We have a lot in common with home healthcare untrained people that arent going to have real-time communication to operate a device, Fogarty said. Can they do it? Are your instructions good enough and easy enough? Is your user interface friendly enough so that person could operate that without mission control and 40 people helping you with a procedure? So definitely we are continuing to push on it.

But unlike on Earth where room is plentiful, innovators need to consider space configurations.

It is really great that we can develop 50, 60, 100 point-of-care devices and they are all using different techniques and different reagents. Guess what somehow in space flight you got to bring that down to probably one item, Fogarty said.

There remains a lot of work to be done before the first person steps onto Mars. But the groundwork is rolling and the mission has the potential to change the future of humans.

We may need to leave this planet and how do we learn? This is one of the stepping stones, Fogarty said. It may not be Mars where we are going to go and colonize permanently well learn though. These are really amazing opportunities.

Read more:

Mission to Mars: The healthcare challenges facing NASA - MobiHealthNews

It sounds like a line out of a weird new-age space comedy, but it's 100 percent factual: DoubleTree's famous welcome chocolate chip cookie is in outer space. A spaceship launched at 9:59 a.m. EDT Saturday from NASAs Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia made its way to the International Space Station Monday morning. Among the "8,200 pounds of science investigations and cargo?" A Zero-G Oven, DoubleTree cookie dough, and DoubleTree cookies.

The oven was "designed for microgravity aboard the International Space Station," per NASA, and could result in "psychological and physiological benefits" for crew members "from eating flavorful cooked meals." Until this experiment, food had never been baked in spaceastronauts eat specially made, pre-packaged meals instead. You know, space food.

If you're scratching your head wondering how DoubleTree got involved, it's a tale as 2019 as it gets. Someone from the hotel brand's social media responded to an Elon Musk tweet about putting a dummy and a Tesla into space; the tweet caught Zero-G Kitchen's attention, DoubleTree SVP Shawn McAteer told Delish, and the two companies began working together.

"One of their big missions is making space travel more hospitable, so they said what would we better than starting the experiment with chocolate chip cookies," McAteer said.

Since the oven is in the testing stage, the astronauts won't be able to eat the freshly baked cookies this time around. But, since the temptation of a fresh baked cookie is real and the astronauts are up there through January, DoubleTree sent some already-made cookies up for the team to enjoy, too. If all goes well, astronauts could soon be eating foods hot out of the oven on future missionsdessert included, of course.

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DoubleTree's Famous Chocolate Chip Cookie Will Be The First Food Baked In Space - Delish.com

DoubleTree's famous chocolate chip cookie will be first food baked in space

It sounds like a line out of a weird new-age space comedy, but it's 100% factual: DoubleTree's famous "welcome" chocolate chip cookie is in outer space. A spaceship launched at 9:59 a.m. ET Saturday from NASAs Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia made its way Monday morning to the International Space Station Monday.

Among the "8,200 pounds of science investigations and cargo" was a Zero-G Oven, DoubleTree cookie dough and DoubleTree cookies.

The oven was "designed for microgravity aboard the International Space Station," per officials with NASA, and could result in "psychological and physiological benefits" for crew members "from eating flavorful cooked meals." Until this experiment, food had never been baked in space astronauts eat specially made, pre-packaged meals instead.

If you're scratching your head wondering how DoubleTree got involved, it's a tale as 2019 as it gets. Someone from the hotel brand's social media responded to an Elon Musk tweet about putting a dummy and a Tesla into space; the tweet caught Zero-G Kitchen's attention, DoubleTree SVP Shawn McAteer told Delish, and the two companies began working together.

"One of their big missions is making space travel more hospitable, so they said what would we better than starting the experiment with chocolate chip cookies?" McAteer said.

Since the oven is in the testing stage, the astronauts won't be able to eat the freshly baked cookies this time around. But since the temptation of a fresh-baked cookie is real and the astronauts are up there through January, DoubleTree sent some already-made cookies up for the team to enjoy, too. If all goes well, astronauts could soon be eating foods hot out of the oven on future missions dessert included, of course.

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DoubleTree's famous chocolate chip cookie will be first food baked in space - Alton Telegraph

Everything we think we know about the shape of the universe could be wrong. Instead of being flat like a bedsheet, our universe may be curved, like a massive, inflated balloon, according to a new study.

That's the upshot of a new paper published today (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy, which looks at data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint echo of the Big Bang. But not everyone is convinced; the new findings, based on data released in 2018, contradict both years of conventional wisdom and another recent study based on that same CMB data set.

Related: From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time

If the universe is curved, according to the new paper, it curves gently. That slow bending isn't important for moving around our lives, or solar system, or even our galaxy. But travel beyond all of that, outside our galactic neighborhood, far into the deep blackness, and eventually moving in a straight line you'll loop around and end up right back where you started. Cosmologists call this idea the "closed universe." It's been around for a while, but it doesn't fit with existing theories of how the universe works. So it's been largely rejected in favor of a "flat universe" that extends without boundary in every direction and doesn't loop around on itself. Now, an anomaly in data from the best-ever measurement of the CMB offers solid (but not absolutely conclusive) evidence that the universe is closed after all, according to the authors: University of Manchester cosmologist Eleonora Di Valentino, Sapienza University of Rome cosmologist Alessandro Melchiorri and Johns Hopkins University cosmologist Joseph Silk.

The difference between a closed and open universe is a bit like the difference between a stretched flat sheet and an inflated balloon, Melchiorri told Live Science. In either case, the whole thing is expanding. When the sheet expands, every point moves away from every other point in a straight line. When the balloon is inflated, every point on its surface gets farther away from every other point, but the balloon's curvature makes the geometry of that movement more complicated.

"This means, for example, that if you have two photons and they travel in parallel in a closed universe, they will [eventually] meet," Melchiorri said.

In an open, flat universe, the photons, left undisturbed, would travel along their parallel courses without ever interacting.

The conventional model of the universe's inflation, Melchiorri said, suggests that the universe should be flat. Rewind the expansion of space all the way to the beginning, to the first 0.0000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, according to that model, and you'll see a moment of incredible, exponential expansion as space grew out of that infinitesimal point in which it began. And the physics of that superfast expansion point to a flat universe. That's the first reason most experts believe the universe is flat, he said. If the universe isn't flat, you have to "fine-tune" the physics of that primordial mechanism to make it all fit together and redo countless other calculations in the process, Melchiorri said.

But that might end up being necessary, the authors wrote in the new study.

That's because there's an anomaly in the CMB. The CMB is the oldest thing we see in the universe, made of ambient microwave light that suffuses all of space when you block out the stars and galaxies and other interference. It's one of the most important sources of data on the universe's history and behavior, because it's so old and so spread throughout space. And it turns out, according to the latest data, that there's significantly more "gravitational lensing" of the CMB than expected meaning that gravity seems to be bending the microwaves of the CMB more than existing physics can explain.

The data the team is drawing upon comes from a 2018 release from the Planck experiment a European Space Agency (ESA) experiment to map the CMB in more detail than ever before. (The new data will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available now on the ESA website. Both Di Valentino and Melchiorri were part of that effort as well.)

To explain that extra lensing, the Planck Collaboration has just tacked on an extra variable, which the scientists are calling "A_lens," to the group's model of the universe's formation, "This is something that you put there by hand, trying to explain what you see. There's no connection with physics," Melchiorri said, meaning there's no A_lens parameter in Einstein's theory of relativity. "What we found is that you can explain A_lens with a positively curved universe, which is a much more physical interpretation that you can explain with general relativity."

Melchiorri pointed out that his team's interpretation isn't conclusive. According to the group's calculations, the Planck data point to a closed universe with a standard deviation of 3.5 sigma (a statistical measurement that means about 99.8% confidence that the result isn't due to random chance). That's well short of the 5 sigma standard physicists usually look for before calling an idea confirmed.

But some cosmologists said there were even more reasons to be skeptical.

Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University, told Live Science that the Nature Astronomy paper failed to take into account another important paper, published to the arXiv database on Oct. 1. (That paper has not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal.)

In that paper, University of Cambridge cosmologists George Efstathiou and Steven Gratton, who both also worked on the Planck Collaboration, looked at a narrower subset of data than the Nature Astronomy paper. Their analysis also supported a curving universe, but with much less statistical confidence than Di Valentino, Melchiorri and Silk found looking at a larger segment of the Planck data. However, when Efstathiou and Graton looked at the data together with two other existing data sets from the early universe, they found that overall, the evidence pointed toward a flat universe.

Asked about the Efstathiou and Gratton paper, Melchiorri praised the careful treatment of the work. But he said the duo's analysis relies on too small a segment of the Planck data. And he pointed out that their research is based on a modified (and, in theory, improved) version the Planck data not the public data set that more than 600 physicists had vetted.

Linde pointed to that reanalysis as a sign that Efstathiou and Gratton's paper was based on better methods.

Efstathiou asked not to be directly quoted, but pointed out in an email to Live Science that if the universe were curved, it would raise a number of problems contradicting those other data sets from the early universe and making discrepancies in the universe's observed rate of expansion much worse. Gratton said he agreed.

Melchiorri also agreed that the closed-universe model would raise a number of problems for physics.

"I don't want to say that I believe in a closed universe," he said. "I'm a little bit more neutral. I'd say, let's wait on the data and what the new data will say. What I believe is that there's a discrepancy now, that we have to be careful and try to find what is producing this discrepancy."

Originally published on Live Science.

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(Image credit: Future plc)

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The Universe Might Be a Giant Loop - Space.com

Many companies are investing a lot of money in projects to know if there is a possibility of life outside our planet. For these people, the sky will never be the limit. Now, an American company aspires to build a huge space hotel for those who want to live a life beyond the earths atmosphere.

The Gateway Foundation claims that it is designing the worlds first space hotel, the Von Braun Space Station. The forecast is that Von Braun will be operational in 2025 to accommodate 100 tourists every week, says its architect, Tim Alatorre.

But how will such an invention work? The technology on which this steller hotel is based is similar to that used in the current International Space Station (ISS), although, with a gravity that is generated by the rings that give shape to this project.

The Von Braun space station structure will consist of two concentric structural rings fixed together with a set of spokes supporting a Habitation Ring made-up of large modules.

The large 190-meter diameter wheel will rotate to create a gravitational force similar to that felt on the moon. Around it, there will be 24 individual modules equipped with sleeping accommodation and other support functions, such as bars, kitchens, lounges. Each module is 20-meter long and has a diameter of 12 meters and offers a total of 500 m of habitable surface spread over 3 floors.

This rotating space station is designed to be the largest human-made structure in space and will house up to 450 people, including guests, employees, and scientists since some of the modules will be rented for equipment for research purposes.

The inspiration behind it (this space station) really comes from watching science fiction over the last 50 years and seeing how mankind has had this dream of starship culture, Timothy Alatorre, the lead architect of this space station, told Space.com.

It is an extremely ambitious project that will require astronomical amounts of funds to ever be built. But it also shows how passionate humans are and how much they want to get the opportunity to travel into space during their lives.

But will this first spaceport ever be built? And if it is built, could we build it by 2025?

The Gateway Foundation is not the only company aiming to expand the space travel opportunity. In June, NASA announced that it hopes to open the International Space Station to private astronauts by 2020.

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The worlds first space hotel will open its doors in 2025 - Inceptive Mind