Category Archives: Space Travel

Picture your ideal vacation destination.

If youre imagining the dark and cold vacuum of space, then Elon Musks SpaceX tourism is just for you!

Ah yes, Elon Musk, the guy known for laughing at a deer at the bottom of a swimming pool and for making a meme of his Tesla Cybertruck reveal when a demonstrator accidentally broke the trucks unbreakable windows.

Oh, and he founded his own NASA.

Jokes aside, Musks space exploration company, SpaceX, could be the saving grace for astronomy during a quiet time of NASA launches. SpaceX recently signed a deal with Space Adventures to make the stars above us the newest tourist hot spot; it plans to send four people in a spaceship as early as the end of next year.

Late 2021 may sound like an optimistic timeline, but it is actually a realistic one. Space Adventures has already run eight tourism trips to the International Space Station, and Musk started what CNN called the new Space Age when he flew a Tesla Roadster near Mars in the worlds most powerful rocket in 2018.

NASA apparently recognized SpaceXs potential as well, having given $2.6 billion in 2014 for the development of the Crew Dragon, the spacecraft that will be used to propel tourists into space.

Although tourism is only an afterthought next to SpaceXs endgame of Mars colonization, the commercialization of space travel could be what scientists need to spur the next Space Race. Space travel is expensive and time-intensive, and it can seem frivolous to invest in when there are more immediate concerns closer to home here on Earth.

Science needs a push to put stakes in space exploration. After all, a push is what put a man on the moon.

The U.S. government believed it was impractical to grant the $152 billion that was spent on the moon landing until Russias launch of the Sputnik satellite upped the pressure.

SpaceX changes the game by opening up possibilities for space travel that are not solely reliant on the government; its founded by a car company CEO and is recruiting non-astronaut civilians. Just as the U.S. broke grounds in research in the face of competition from Russia, commercialized space travel could prompt competition, resulting in reduced costs, increased efficiency, faster timelines and groundbreaking expeditions.

Space tourism will probably remain exclusive to the wealthy, but it could reignite global interest in astronomy and motivate trailblazing research into space exploration.

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Space tourism could spur the next Space Race | Opinion - The Daily Collegian Online

Hordinsky was the flight surgeon (primary doctor) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and his patients were American astronauts. He was with NASA from 1972 to 1981, the whole time that Skylab, the U.S. space station, was operational.

Skylab allowed the astronauts to be in space for prolonged periods of time, and this extended time living in a weightless environment affected their bodies in many ways. It altered the functioning of all the bodys organs, especially the heart, stomach and intestines, eyes and brain.

On Earth, gravity pulls bodily fluids toward the lower parts of the body, but in microgravity, fluids move from the lower parts toward the upper body, and this redistribution of fluids causes the heart to become enlarged, which affects the amount of oxygen that reaches the brain. This redistribution of fluids also takes place in the eyes, affecting vision.

In microgravity, there is also a noticeable amount of bone and muscle wasting. These were some of the new issues that Hordinsky needed to carefully monitor while the astronauts were in outer space.

Jerry Roman Hordinsky was born Aug. 3, 1942, to Bohdan and Irene (Tysowsky) Hordinsky, in Kalush, a small city in western Ukraine. Bohdan Hordinsky was a well-respected doctor in the Soviet-controlled republic of Ukraine and was reportedly Josef Stalins personal physician for a while.

Shortly before Jerrys birth, Kalush fell to the Nazi German Army and was occupied by the Third Reich, which systematically attempted to kill all of the Jews in the town. Since Hordinsky had many Jews as patients, and had continued to treat them after German occupation, he knew that he and his family were at risk and decided to flee the country.

The Hordinsky family fled to Vienna, Austria, and ended up settling in a small city in the Austrian Alps. When the war ended, they moved to Salzburg, Austria, where Hordinsky headed a United Nations hospital.

On Dec. 14, 1947, the family boarded a vessel headed to the U.S. and arrived in New York City on Christmas Day. Hordinsky practiced medicine at St. James Hospital in Newark, N.J., and, in 1949, moved to Bottineau, N.D., where he spent a year as an intern at the hospital. In 1951, the family relocated to Drake and Dr. Hordinsky established his practice there.

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At an early age, it became very evident that Jerry Hordinsky was gifted intellectually, and he was sent to St. Paul to attend the prestigious St. Thomas Military Academy for junior high and high school. After graduating, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he focused on an engineering and pre-medicine curriculum and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in applied mathematics.

On Sept. 16, 1963, Hordinsky began medical school at the University of North Dakota, which at that time was only a two-year program. For his final two years, he attended Northwestern University in Chicago, receiving his medical degree in 1967. Hordinsky interned in Chicagos Cook County Hospital, earning his license to practice medicine.

On Sept. 20, 1968, Hordinsky enlisted in the U.S. Army as a flight surgeon, with the anticipated opportunity to eventually work for NASA. He was sent to Boston where he earned a masters degree in industrial health from Harvard University in 1972, and then went to the University of Oklahoma where he became certified in both occupational and aerospace medicine.

Since Hordinsky was no longer obligated to serve in the Army due to being discharged on March 19, 1971, he was hired by NASA to be a flight surgeon. At the time Hordinsky was hired, NASA was nearing completion of the Apollo phase of its space program, and plans were well underway for launching a space station into orbit in the spring of 1973. On Dec. 11, 1972, the last Apollo flight took place, and on May 14, 1973, the rocket carrying the Skylab space station was launched into orbit.

Skylab was a 169,950-pound space station that contained a workshop and solar observatory for three crew members. On May 25, the first manned flight to the Skylab space station was launched with astronauts Charles Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joseph Kerwin aboard.

Besides the effects on the body already mentioned earlier, there were also other concerns. With a reduction of oxygen to the brain, the control of emotions was reduced, and because the three astronauts would be living and working in very cramped quarters, the chances of emotional flare-ups increased.

Another great concern was nausea in space. Space sickness, or space adaptation syndrome, is nausea experienced by as many as half of all space travelers during their adaptation to weightlessness once in orbit. Since a number of space walks were scheduled for the astronauts in Skylab, it could be fatal for them to vomit while in a space suit. The vomit could smear the inside of the helmet, blinding the astronaut, and because the helmet could not be removed, the vomit could be inhaled or clog the oxygen circulation system.

Hordinsky carefully examined all of the astronauts medical data transmitted from Skylab to the monitors at his medical facility, noting anything that veered from normal. Each night, he would hold a radio conference with the astronauts to elicit any of their concerns or anxieties and then make recommendations to address their concerns and correct the medical abnormalities.

The first manned Skylab (called Skylab 2) mission lasted 28 days, and the crew returned to Earth on June 22, 1973. Skylab 3 was launched on July 28, and the astronauts remained in space for 59.5 days. Skylab 4 was launched on Nov. 11, and the astronauts returned to Earth on Feb. 8, 1973, having been in space for 84 days.

Astronaut Owen K. Garriott, Skylab 3's science pilot, performs an extravehicular activity at the Apollo Telescope Mount of Skylab in 1973. Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons / Special to The Forum

Much of Hordinskys work occurred after the astronauts returned to Earth. He ran extensive tests for three days on each of the men, with a heavy emphasis on making certain that their minds and bodies were adapting properly to the gravitational environment back on Earth.

Because NASA realized that the more effective Space Shuttle program was moving forward, the scheduled launching of Skylab 5 was canceled. The mid-1970s was a period of dtente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and both countries agreed to do a joint space venture called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). On July 15, 1975, both the U.S. and Soviet Union launched separate spacecrafts that docked/joined together on July 17, and the teams did joint space ventures and experiments.

After 44 hours together, the spacecrafts separated and the teams returned to Earth. Upon splashdown, the U.S. crew was exposed to toxic fumes that were accidentally vented into the cabin of the aircraft, and the astronauts were hospitalized for two weeks. This was the only major health issue that Hordinsky was not able to avert during his time as flight surgeon, and it was totally out of his control.

With no more space flights scheduled until 1981, Hordinsky went to Germany and served as deputy flight surgeon for the European Space Agency. From 1982 to 1999, he worked for the Federal Aviation Administration as its clinical and research medical officer and then as manager of their Aeromedical Research Division. Much of his work involved writing reports about health and safety issues he observed and encountered while he was the primary flight surgeon for the astronauts involved in space travel.

Dr. Jerry Hordinsky died on Oct. 20, 2000.

Did You Know That is written by Curt Eriksmoen and edited by Jan Eriksmoen of Fargo. Send your comments, corrections, or suggestions for columns to the Eriksmoens at cjeriksmoen@cableone.net.

Curt Eriksmoen, Did You Know That? columnist

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Eriksmoen: Doctor who grew up in ND kept orbiting astronauts healthy - Grand Forks Herald

BROWNSVILLE, Texas The effort continues to name Brownsville the next space city. Currently two cities in the U.S. have that title, Houston and Cape Canaveral. Now Brownsville wants in. It is a title that exists only by name, but with SpaceX getting ready a for launch in 2020, the community excitement and interest are expected to grow.

The South Texas Astronomical Society hosting a panel to begin discussions on what it means to have a space program in our back yards.

Richard Camuccio, Cristina V. Torres Memorial Observatory, Assistant Director, Theres this interest that is there that needs to be tapped. I see it that it will happen. Its an inevitability. Its not if but when.

Its not the first time the idea has been floated around. In 2019 staff from NASA spoke about Brownsvilles potential to become a space city. Referring to the creations of new industry jobs, both directly and assisting with space travel. Academic focus on the sciences and engineering.

Right now SpaceX makes up a major bulk of space exploration in South Texas, but the goal is to have a regional effort in schools, the general public, and local business.

Victor De Los Santos, South Texas Astronomical Society, When we do become the space city, its the culture and its the people and were all a part of it. its not just big corporations coming in and doing all the work.

Marija Jette, South Texas Astronomical Society, Getting all these forces together and multiplying the effect. Really making a name for Brownsville as the place to do research and create new exciting business and technologies.

One of the many big space projects for SpaceX in the future involves travel to Mars.

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Brownsville aiming to become Space City by 2030 - KVEO-TV

Both photons and gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light through the vacuum of empty... [+] space itself. Despite the fact that it isn't intuitive, there's no evidence that there's a physical medium, or aether, required for these entities to travel through.

All throughout the Universe, different types of signals propagate. Some of them, like sound waves, require a medium to travel through. Others, like light or gravitational waves, are perfectly content to traverse the vacuum of space, seemingly defying the need for a medium altogether. Irrespective of how they do it, all of these signals can be detected from the effects they induce when they eventually arrive at their destination. But is it really possible for waves to travel through the vacuum of space itself, without any medium at all to propagate through? That's what Wade Campbell wants to know, asking:

Back in the late 1800s, an "aether" was proposed as the medium that light travels through. We now don't believe that is the case. What is the evidence and/or proof that no aether exists?

It's an easy assumption to make, but a difficult assertion to disprove. Here's the story.

Whether through a medium, like mechanical waves, or in vacuum, like electromagnetic and... [+] gravitational waves, every ripple that propagates has a propagation speed. In no cases is the propagation speed infinite, and in theory, the speed at which gravitational ripples propagate should be the same as the maximum speed in the Universe: the speed of light.

Back in the earliest days of science before Newton, going back hundreds or even thousands of years we only had large-scale, macroscopic phenomena to investigate. The waves we observed came in many different varieties, including:

In the case of all of these waves, matter is involved. That matter provides a medium for these waves to travel through, and as the medium either compresses-and-rarifies in the direction of propagation (a longitudinal wave) or oscillates perpendicular to the direction of propagation (a transverse wave), the signal is transported from one location to another.

This diagram, dating back to Thomas Young's work in the early 1800s, is one of the oldest pictures... [+] that demonstrate both constructive and destructive interference as arising from wave sources originating at two points: A and B. This is a physically identical setup to a double slit experiment, even though it applies just as well to water waves propagated through a tank.

As we began to investigate waves more carefully, a third type began to emerge. In addition to longitudinal and transverse waves, a type of wave where each of the particles involved underwent motion in a circular path a surface wave was discovered. The rippling characteristics of water, which were previously thought to be either longitudinal or transverse waves exclusively, were shown to also contain this surface wave component.

All three of these types of wave are examples of mechanical waves, which is where some type of energy is transported from one location to another through a material, matter-based medium. A wave that travels through a spring, a slinky, water, the Earth, a string, or even the air, all require an impetus for creating some initial displacement from equilibrium, and then the wave carries that energy through a medium towards its destination.

A series of particles moving along circular paths can appear to create a macroscopic illusion of... [+] waves. Similarly, individual water molecules that move in a particular pattern can produce macroscopic water waves, and the gravitational waves we see are likely made out of individual quantum particles that compose them: gravitons.

It makes sense, then, that as we discovered new types of waves, we'd assume they had similar properties to the classes of waves we already knew about. Even before Newton, the aether was the name given to the void of space, where the planets and other celestial objects resided. Tycho Brahe's famous 1588 work,De Mundi Aetherei Recentioribus Phaenomenis, literally translates as "On Recent Phenomena in the Aethereal World."

The aether, it was assumed, was the medium inherent to space that all objects, from comets to planets to starlight itself, traveled through. Whether light was a wave or a corpuscle, though, was a point of contention for many centuries. Newton claimed it was a corpuscle, which Christiaan Huygens, his contemporary, claimed it was a wave. The issue wasn't decided until the 19th century, where experiments with light unambiguously revealed its wave-like nature. (With modern quantum physics, we now know it behaves like a particle also, but its wave-like nature cannot be denied.)

The results of an experiment, showcased using laser light around a spherical object, with the actual... [+] optical data. Note the extraordinary validation of Fresnel's theory's prediction: that a bright, central spot would appear in the shadow cast by the sphere, verifying the absurd prediction of the wave theory of light.

This was further borne out as we began to understand the nature of electricity and magnetism. Experiments that accelerated charged particles not only showed that they were affected by magnetic fields, but that when you bent a charged particle with a magnetic field, it radiated light. Theoretical developments showed that light itself was an electromagnetic wave that propagated at a finite, large, but calculable velocity, today known asc, the speed of light in a vacuum.

If light was an electromagnetic wave, and all waves required a medium to travel through, and as all the heavenly bodies traveled through the medium of space then surely that medium itself, the aether, was the medium that light traveled through. The biggest question remaining, then, was to determine what properties the aether itself possessed.

In Descartes' vision of gravity, there was an aether permeating space, and only the displacement of... [+] matter through it could explain gravitation. This did not lead to an accurate formulation of gravity that matched with observations.

One of the most important points about what the aethercouldn't be was figured out by Maxwell himself, who was the first to derive the electromagnetic nature of light waves. In an 1874 letter to Lewis Campbell, he wrote:

It may also be worth knowing that the aether cannot be molecular. If it were, it would be a gas, and a pint of it would have the same properties as regards heat, etc., as a pint of air, except that it would not be so heavy.

In other words, whatever the aether was or more accurately, whatever it was that electromagnetic waves propagated through it could not have many of the traditional properties that other, matter-based media possessed. It could not be composed of individual particles. It could not contain heat. It could not transfer energy through it. In fact, just about the only thing left that the aether was allowed to do was serve as a background medium through which things like light were permitted to travel.

If you split light into two perpendicular components and bring them back together, they will produce... [+] an interference pattern. If there's a medium that light is traveling through, the interference pattern should depend on how your apparatus is oriented relative to that motion.

All of this led to the most important experiment for detecting the aether: the Michelson-Morley experiment. If aether really were a medium for light to travel through, then the Earth should be passing through the aether as it rotated on its axis and revolved around the Sun. Even though we only revolve at a speed of around 30 km/s, that's a substantial fraction (about 0.01%) of the speed of light.

With a sensitive enough interferometer, if light were a wave traveling through this medium, we should detect a shift in light's interference pattern dependent on the angle the interferometer made with our direction of motion. Michelson alone tried to measure this effect in 1881, but his results were inconclusive. 6 years later, with Morley, they reached sensitivities that were just 1/40th the magnitude of the expected signal. Their experiment, however, yielded a null result; there was no evidence for the aether at all.

The Michelson interferometer (top) showed a negligible shift in light patterns (bottom, solid) as... [+] compared with what was expected if Galilean relativity were true (bottom, dotted). The speed of light was the same no matter which direction the interferometer was oriented, including with, perpendicular to, or against the Earth's motion through space.

Aether enthusiasts contorted themselves in knots attempting to explain this null result.

All of these possibilities, despite their arbitrary constants and parameters, were seriously considered right up until Einstein's relativity came along. Once the realization came about that the laws of physics should be, and in fact were, the same for all observers in all frames of reference, the idea of an "absolute frame of reference," which the aether absolutely was, was no longer necessary or tenable.

If you allow light to come from outside your environment to inside, you can gain information about... [+] the relative velocities and accelerations of the two reference frames. The fact that the laws of physics, the speed of light, and every other observable is independent of your reference frame is strong evidence against the need for an aether.

What all of this means is that the laws of physics don't require the existence of an aether; they work just fine without one. Today, with our modern understanding of not just Special Relativity but also General Relativity which incorporates gravitation we recognize that both electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves don't require any sort of medium to travel through at all. The vacuum of space, devoid of any material entity, is enough all on its own.

This doesn't mean, however, that we've disproven the existence of the aether. All we've proven, and indeed all we're capable of proving, is that if there is an aether, it has no properties that are detectable by any experiment we're capable of performing. It doesn't affect the motion of light or gravitational waves through it, not under any physical circumstances, which is equivalent to stating that everything we observe is consistent with it's non-existence.

Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum.... [+] (Specifically, for the strong interactions.) Even in empty space, this vacuum energy is non-zero, and what appears to be the 'ground state' in one region of curved space will look different from the perspective of an observer where the spatial curvature differs. As long as quantum fields are present, this vacuum energy (or a cosmological constant) must be present, too.

If something has no observable, measurable effects on our Universe in any way, shape or form, even in principle, we consider that "thing" to be physically non-existent. But the fact that there's nothing pointing to the existence of the aether doesn't mean we fully understand what empty space, or the quantum vacuum, actually is. In fact, there are a whole slew of unanswered, open questions about exactly that topic plaguing the field today.

Why does empty space still have a non-zero amount of energy dark energy, or a cosmological constant intrinsic to it? If space is discrete at some level, does that imply a preferred frame of reference, where that discrete "size" is maximized under the rules of relativity? Can light or gravitational waves exist without space to travel through, and does that mean there is some type of propagation medium, after all?

As Carl Sagan famously said, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." We have no proof that the aether exists, but can never prove the negative: that no aether exists. All we can demonstrate, and have demonstrated, is that if the aether exists, it has no properties that affect the matter and radiation that we do observe.

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Ask Ethan: Does The Aether Exist? - Forbes

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

Since NASA ended its shuttle program back in 2011, flight enthusiasts have been looking to commercial companies to take up the mantle and make space transportation a reality for the general public. While there has been talk about colonizing Mars and supporting a space tourism industry in recent years, commercial travel is still very much in its infancy. How is it expected to advance and evolve in the 2020s?

The 2010s saw commercial space travel take a giant leap forward. Prior to 2012, the International Space Station (ISS) was solely the domain of government-operated vehicles, but that changed when Elon Musks company, SpaceX, arrived with its Dragon cargo capsule. This marked a shift from a private space industry centered on tech areas such as defense and aviation.

Secure World Foundations director of program planning Brian Weeden recently noted that the government was pretty much the sole driver of funding and activity under the old model. He added: Almost all the money would come from the government, and the government would have almost complete control over what was built.

SpaceX personifies the new age of commercial space, where a number of launch providers have tried to make travel into the unknown more accessible. These companies include Rocket Lab, founded in New Zealand, and the Washington-based Blue Origin.

The competition has been a key driver for innovation, and expert Bill Roberson believes that it has kick-started the space race after a few decades of relative stagnation. This points to an exciting decade, especially as the number of average weekly orbital launches from the US, as well as China, Russia and Japan, continues to increase.

Roberson notes: Private, commercial spaceflight. Even lunar exploration, mining, and colonization its suddenly all on the table, making the race for space today more vital than it has felt in years.

The renewed interest and competition in space has also made it a smart outlet for investment, which could spur further advances and milestones in both the burgeoning commercial sector and national security arena. Voyager Space Holdings, headed by founder and CEO Dylan Taylor, is a holding company that focuses specifically on acquiring and supporting hi-tech space companies.

Taylor believes that his philosophy centered on bringing the best capabilities of different companies under one banner will provide a platform for innovation to flourish. Being able to work at scale will also finally enable smaller companies to compete with bigger competitors, which is potentially transformative for space travel in general.

A major event on the horizon for commercialized space travel is the first-ever tourist voyage to the Moon, which is planned by SpaceX in 2023. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be the first civilian passenger to venture near the location where Neil Armstrong once uttered his One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind speech more than 50 years ago.

Maezawa, a 44-year-old fashion mogul, recently set up a planned match-making event with the view to sharing the experience with a significant other. The event is sure to garner huge publicity, both in the run-up to launch and during the trip, which will take place in the SpaceX Starship. The success of that event will surely have some impact on how commercialized space travel develops during the remainder of the decade.

Boeing also plans on shaping the industry during the coming years as it now has the capacity for space travel after receiving a contract from NASA. The aerospace giant recently unveiled its Fewest Steps to the Moon program, with the aim of building a lander on the Moon in order to shuttle humans back and forth. It wants these plans to come to fruition by 2024.

NASA recently announced that private individuals would be able to visit the ISS for the first time in 2020 in another move that appears to herald the start of space tourism in earnest. It is unlikely to be affordable for the masses in the foreseeable future though as just a single days visit to the ISS is rumored to cost around $35,000 per day.

Those high costs and uncertainty about whether commercial space can really hit the mass market mean that it will probably be hard to judge its success before the mid-2020s. Richard Branson once said that flying tourists would be commonplace by 2008, but the dates for commercial flights continue to be pushed back.

It is an exciting time for the commercial industry, especially with visionaries such as Taylor, Musk and Jeff Bezos buying into space travel, and it certainly has the potential to come on leaps and bounds during the next decade. However, the success of planned flights and other factors will be a key determining factor in how exactly everything unfolds before 2030.

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How Commercialized Space Travel is Expected to Advance During the 2020s - The Future of Things

Researchers at the University of Washington have announced early findings on a potentially revolutionary new type of rotating detonation engine which could help produce cheaper, lighter spacecraft. Theres just one small catch.

While the research is only in its infancy, the fuel-efficient rocket would, theoretically at least, be easier and cheaper to build than current space-faring rockets, paving the way for more space travel at a lower cost to the environment. For instance, it currently takes about 3.5 million pounds of fuel to send NASAs space shuttles into space.

A conventional rocket engine burns propellant and forces it out the back using a vast array of machinery and control nozzles to create thrust and launch the rocket skyward, without any unforeseen detours.

In the rotating detonation engine, however, the shockwave does all the work, without the need for complicated machinery in the engine to direct the thrust, after which a number of secondary combustion pulses follow to launch the beast skyward. At least thats the theory.

The problem is, for the time being anyway, the engine is too unpredictable to use.

Its made of concentric cylinders. Propellant flows in the gap between the cylinders, and, after ignition, the rapid heat release forms a shock wave, a strong pulse of gas with significantly higher pressure and temperature that is moving faster than the speed of sound, said lead author James Koch, a UW doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics.

The downside of that is that these detonations have a mind of their own. Once you detonate something, it just goes. Its so violent.

Koch and his team conducted a series of 0.5-second experiments captured using high-speed cameras at 240,000 frames per second to show exactly what happens when such engines fire, so they could then begin crunching the numbers and figure out how to replicate the power and efficiency minus the chaos.

The researchers have since developed a mathematical model which they are poring over to begin the process of developing a functioning prototype engine which wouldn't plaster a crew against the rear of the spaceship.

Now I can take what Ive done here and make it quantitative. From there we can talk about how to make a better engine, Koch concludes.

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Its so violent: Scientists propose revolutionary new kind of engine for space travel, theres just one small catch (VIDEOS) - RT

Visiting the Audio Foundation and the Michael Lett Gallery, both just off Aucklands K Road, Tulia Thompson finds herself considering the galaxy and what it means to be human.

You have to imagine you are viewing these on a stifling hot February afternoon. There is a cacophony of men and machines, orange road cones and iron mesh-wire. Karangahape Rd is being dug up for the new transport hub.

I head through St Kevins Arcade, down the wide steps to the green lip of Myers Park, and around the corner. The Audio Foundation is an interesting find, both a leading space for experimental music and a gallery. You descend into the space down a long flight of concrete stairs with paint peeling from the metal railing, concrete walls painted in cream, mint and red. It feels properly abandoned. Theres no one at the reception, so when I slip into the first room, into near darkness, it feels like I could lie on the cool, concrete floor to observe the piece if I wanted to.

Sarah Callesens show Drawing, Synopsis and Song is a quiet exploration of our relationship with space, making visible the contribution of 17th century astronomer and mathematician Maria Cunitz. She was considered the most learned woman in astronomy since Hypatia of Alexandria.

Sarah Callesen Retrograde

Retrograde consists of three rotating thin wooden rods lit by a single stage-light on the floor; they remind me of meter rulers. Rotating slowly counter-clockwise; windmills come to mind as they make slow, whirring circles. Callesen intended them to turn retrograde, like Venus, but the low-fi AC motors freestyle. So this is the rotation of planets, in honour of a bright queen.

At times the outside enters again, a rhythmic pounding of bass, and the high-pitched screeching of machines as Karangahape Road is torn up and reordered.

In the next room, a projector close to the wall projects the Moon. A small black spot with a blur of red and green travels across it in a straight line. It reaches the end, the image shudders, disappears, blinks and begins again. The dots travel marks the Transit of Venus.

From Sarah Callesens Drawing, Synopsis and Song

A large black rectangle of card on the floor has names and distances written diagonally across it in white: Polina 21.6 Km. Pasha 7.2 Km. Qulzhan 7.9 Km. If you stand back and let your eyes blur it makes a pattern of uneven fretwork. I discover this because I kneel down by it and then stand up too quickly. I panic that I cant find a way in. I cant find supporting material to orient me. This piece is the sort of thing that makes some people hate artists their obscure provocations can feel exclusionary. But then I remind myself that I am, after all, an eccentric person who puts obscure references in her own writing. Im probably invoking a curse from the female gods, possibly Venus.

I chat to a lovely chap, Sam, who explains that these names and diameters are craters on Venus. Those with diameters greater than 20km are named after women who make outstanding contributions to their fields, under 20km are given female first names. All of these craters are named for women, by men. Fascinating! One of the craters is called Cunitz, and I wonder whether she would be delighted, or pissed off that she didnt do the naming. There is an iPad plugged into the wall showing images of the craters next to biographic information about the women they are named after. These pairings are strange and effective.

New Zealand poet Helen Rickersbys recent, brilliant poetry collection How to Live has a poem about philosopher Hipparchia in which Rickersby writes: Silence isnt always not speaking. Silence is sometimes an erasure. We dont know much about her, but we know she spoke. The erasure of women, both through institutional sexism and the retellings of history, still feels pervasive. We are back observing bodies colliding with uninhabitable spaces. Theres something potent about observing the silencing of women extended into space.

From Sarah Callesens Drawing, Synopsis and Song

There is an almost mechanical noise in this room; a sound recording taken in 1982 on Venus by Russian spacecraft Venera 14, looped with the sound recording from an earlier version of Retrograde. How strange that celestial bodies make sound. Not angelic chiming, but disorienting noises like wind and fierce waterfalls. The sounds are abrasive like an industrial site or furnace. At times I cant decipher the audio loop from the street sounds.

Callesens art is often visually stunning; beautiful, strange images sometimes paired with sound. So, I would have liked more aesthetically from her engagement with Maria Cunitz. I got the sense she was searching for her uncovering the imprints of her data, dusting it off from the invisibility accorded to it by men. But I didnt feel like she had found her; Maria herself remains fractal and diffuse. Maybe that is the point.

How disturbing that humankind has even extended its sexist ideas into space. What stayed with me was an impression that our mappings of space, and consideration of other bodies, are a partial, emotive picture of our own limited humanness.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Cleave Study (ii), 2019, anatomical human tongue cross-section, Xenophora shell

Up the road at Michael Lett Gallery is Zac Langdon-Poles Interbeing. The cool of the gallery is a welcome contrast to the pressing heat outside. The airy room has pristine white walls and warm wooden floors. On the left-hand wall, in Cleave Study (ii), a plastic, anatomical human-tongue meets a seashell. The shell has other small shells and bits of rock attached. Xenophora sea snails glue foreign objects to their shells for camouflage. My first thought are the tacky shell ornaments my grandmother had in the 70s.

Cleave Study (ii) also reminds me of that famous line from theorists Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus:an electron crashes into a language. Deleuze and Guattari were interested in how assemblages of disparate objects confound our imposed, rigid meanings. In contrast to the view language was our inescapable lens, Deleuze and Guattari argued that the materiality of the physical world was also creative and could disrupt language. So, the Xenophora shell is not just a metaphor for human art; Xenophora shells are their own art machines.

On the one hand, a human tongue here is cleaved to a pearlescent surface, but on the other its still plastic. There is something disturbing about plastic being made human meeting shell. I cant not think of ghostly plastic bags and sea-turtles. The tongue is a visceral metaphor for language, but tongues are also true to shell (the tongue of the oyster, say, or the tongue-like muscular foot of the Xenophora).

Langdon-Poles strength is the exquisite poetry he creates through assemblage quietly placing found objects together in a way that is both resonant and jarring. To cleave is both to join and sever. Cleave Study (ii) sets up the tension between human and nonhuman that pervades this collection.

Standing in the centre of the room, the first impression is that Majuro Atoll, Te Whanganui-A-Hei/ Cooks Beach, and Treptower Park, Berlin present stars in night-sky. I think of camping up north over Christmas, looking up to the glitter of the Milky Way. The expanse of it reorders your own perception of freedom. Yet as you adjust your eyes, you realise these images are not stars, that the spaces between are not star-like. Indeed, the images are enlarged prints of sand photograms, named for the beach that the sand has come from.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Te Whanganui-A-Hei / Cooks Beach 12.06.2019, 2019, sand photogram (1000% enlarged), made with sand from Te Whananui-A-Hei / Cooks Beach, Aotearoa New Zealand, archival hahnemhle fine art print.

The most impressive is Te Whanganui-A-Hei/ Cooks Beach where, enlarged 1000%, the light flares of the sand particles show shadowed depths and have a painterly quality.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Assimilation Study (detail), 2020, painted wooden shape-sorter blocks, hand carved Campo del Cielo meteorite, artist designed display case, acrylic, mdf, paint.

In Assimilation Study wooden sorting blocks, including a green star, are scattered in a display cabinet. One piece is slightly larger, a metallic triangle that is actually a hand-carved meteorite. It looks as if God has a toddler. If Langdon-Poles intention is that the meteorite is juxtaposed with the mundane, it looks too pristine to achieve it. But it is visually arresting. Im thinking about galaxies again.

I walk down white-painted concrete stairs into the narrower, cellar space of the building. Three prints show sand photograms at a one-to-one scale, making you wonder about the production of these images. They are made from putting sand on top of photograph paper. The place names as titles seem almost idiosyncratic, but then I think about Langdon-Pole travelling between these places. Did he go around collecting buckets of sand? Apparently, curator Andrew Thomas tells me, he gathered small handfuls from each place. Thomas notes previous works stemmed from the flightpath of migratory birds.

Sand is ground rock or shell. A quick look at the NIWA website tells me that the density and grain size is determined by the source. The process of becoming sand takes hundreds of thousands of years. So sand is already in motion, moved by tide across expanse. It is a journey that is immense, already glittering and star-like. And these images trace an alternate journey, via Zac Langdon-Poles pockets and transposed through exposure to light, that make me rethink our part in it; the grand scale of time and space confounds us.

Zac Langdon-Pole, Orbits (Cast Dandelion, Rainbow Obsidian), 2019, anatomical orbital human eye models; resin-embalmed dandelion paperweight; rainbow obsidian sphere; screws.

In Orbits, a dandelion paperweight is fixed into the socket of a plastic, anatomical model of an eye. Other versions use rainbow obsidian or petrified sequoia-wood, which creates an inky iris, an almost anime look. They are both grotesque and beautiful.

Langdon-Poles work manages to have a trueness to the ideas he explores while also being beautiful. I dont think art should have to be aesthetically pleasing, but there is a real joy in this marriage of substance and form.

Thinking of the materiality of space data in Callesens work and the travels of materiality in Zac Langdon-Poles, I would say that both displace humanness the way we think we are the centre of everything. But theres a strange doubling back of what it means to be human through examining our limitations. A meteor becomes a childs block, the ancient journey of sand is reordered into human memory, and planetary data is transformed into art object

But still, this universe, writhing alongside us. Theres a poem called My God, Its Full of Stars! by Tracy K. Smith from her stunning Pulitzer-winning collection Life of Mars where she grapples with her fathers work building the Hubble telescope.

We saw to the edge of all there is

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Sarah Callesens Drawing, Synopsis and Songand Zac Langdon-Poles Interbeingare both on until Saturday February 29.

The Spinoff Weekly compiles the best stories of the week an essential guide to modern life in New Zealand, emailed out on Monday evenings.

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My God, Its Full of Stars! Two Auckland art shows on bodies colliding with space - The Spinoff

But it gets more interesting. Alcor has two options. The first is a whole-body process that preserves the entire body in a cryo-protectant. The second is the brain and brain stem only.

Why would someone only want their brain and brain stem preserved? Presumably, if we have the technology to bring someone back by repairing the damage from whatever killed them, by that time we might also have the technology to clone a new body using the deceased persons DNA.

Again, weve already made tremendous advances in cloning. While therapeutic cloning is still in its infancy, there is no theoretical reason why we couldnt create a new body without a brain and simply implant the new brain into the cloned body. And with advances with CRISPR, its conceivable the body could come with some sophisticated upgrades.

Those upgrades would come in handy if we plan on going to a new planet like the one in Avatar 2. Imagine having the ability to create a fully customizable body using yourDNAto meet the requirements of any planet you visit. Its the ultimate in life extension.

While there are still technological hurdles to overcome like repairing the aging brain, imagine being able to grow your customizable avatar in transit while your current body is in suspended animation headed towards a different planet a hundred light years away.

I must say, the futures looking bright.

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'Freezing' our bodies is the key to long-distance space travel but can we do it? - The Next Web

I know that Elon Musk does many questionable and sometimes outrageous things, but remember that one time when he launched a Tesla Roadster into space using SpaceXs Falcon Heavy rocket?

Yep, that outrageous thing. The launch was a year ago, on 6 February 2019. That Roadster with his its lone occupant a spacesuit-wearing mannequin named Starman is probably still out there.

According to the experts, the sporty red car is still cruising through our solar system. And theres a simple way for you to keep track of the Roadster and Starman too.

Simply head over to Where is Roadster, a website created by programmer Ben Pearson to keep track of the vehicles location. According to the site, the vehicle is currently near Mars.

That means its roughly 298m kilometres from Earth, travelling at a speed of approximately 2985 kilometres per hour.

Starman is on a trajectory to pass through the Red Planets orbit, but it will never actually reach the Red Planet or enter its atmosphere, as intended.

The Tesla and its driver is expected to continue orbiting the sun as part experiment and part art project. There may even be a Musk Museum of Crazy Things by then.

Two years in space wouldnt have been kind to the Tesla Roadster, because well, the car was designed for Earths atmosphere, and the vast expanse of space.

The vehicle was initially launched by SpaceX to demonstrate the Falcon Heavy rockets capabilities. The Tesla Roadster launch was its maiden voyage.

Musk wanted to prove that the rocket could propel something in space which would be capable of reaching Mars. Well done, Super Heavy, mission accomplished.

If all is going according to plan if space hasnt destroyed it yet, or Starman wasnt abducted by aliens that sporty red car is still out there and will continue orbiting the Sun.

Probably. Researchers calculated that the Roadster will have a fairly close encounter with Earth in 2091. If Starman is ever to set foot on Earth again, that would be the perfect time to send out a recovery craft.

According to Pearsons data, the Roadster has clocked more than 1.6 billion kilometres of space travel and is well into its second orbit around our Sun.

Back in 2019, anorbit modelling study predicted a 6% chance of the Roadster crashing into Earth in the next 1m years. The same study found that theres a 2.5% chance the car will crash into Venus.

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Elon Musks Roadster is probably still cruising through space, two years on - The South African

Will mankind, who is attempting to travel between systems in the universe, find a precaution to prevent the passengers from traveling on the ship from getting old? Lets discuss a little bit about this issue.

One of humanitys biggest dreams is to travel between star systems in the depths of space. But, as you know, star systems are very far apart, and when compared to the life span of a person, the duration of this journey can make a huge difference.

Thanks to the time dilation when high speeds are reached, someone who goes fast is getting slower than others. Still, even if a spaceship with humans reaches 90% of the speed of light, human life still looks like a grain of sand compared to the duration of that journey.

Is the solution to this situation to put people to sleep?Today, it is not possible to reach the speed of light with its technologies. So scientists have to find a solution to prevent the aging of those who travel on the spaceship. This solution is none other than the sleep solution that we often see in science fiction movies.

There is enough technology available today to create a solution that passivates the human body and prevents aging. A technique called bio-vitrification has been used in organ transplantation for some time. This technology, which has been used for decades, has the opportunity to facilitate space travel in the future.

Biovirtification reduces the aging of human tissue to a minimum by using a liquid that protects it from freezing effect, to almost 0. The liquid used serves to prevent the formation of ice crystals that cause cells to break down.

Although this technique is used in organ transplantation, it has not been tested in humans yet. But some companies, such as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, offer services that protect the human body so that one day it can bring back dead people. Although these companies have not yet brought back any people, they have returned several simple organisms from death.

Protecting the brain or protecting the body?Some hospitals can also take patients to cool down to extend the time required in emergencies. Although this process is not the same as bioventilation, it is almost similar. As a result, if all known are combined one day, healthy and long-lived individuals may emerge.

So would you like to sail to even more interesting points? The company Alcor, which we just mentioned, offers people two options: First, to cover the whole body with a liquid that protects it from freezing and to protect the whole body; secondly, only protect the brain and brain stem.

So why does a person only want to protect his brain and brain stem? Because if one day manages to fix a harm that ends their life, a new clone body can be created with the use of DNA of a person who died until then. Of course, there is a very long way to go until humanity reaches this point. Although the cloning technology we are talking about is being developed today, humanity may not yet be ready for cloning a human body. By the way, we strongly recommend the 1997 movie Abre Los Ojos

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Will It Be Possible to Sleep People in Space Travel? - Somag News