Lifeboat Foundation

The formal handover of the Chinese payload to NanoRacks at the Space Life Sciences Lab in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photo credit: NanoRacks.

Small effort, big gains

Clearly, a lot of progress has been made toward making the space lab more analogous to the Earth lab in the past few years, and NanoRacks has played no small part in those improvements. Despite the challenges that still remain for microgravity research, some truly significant work has been accomplished. With just a little more investment, Carruthers believes, much larger gains can be made.

Continue reading “From fruit flies to Boy Scouts: A brief history of science in space” »

Definitive evidence that our moon, both cold and dark, has water ice at both of its poles.

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• Jackson Ryan

OSRAM, a high-tech global lighting company, is developing better ways to grow vegetables both on Earth and in outer space. Here’s a peek at their CES offerings.

Microgravity is ideal for making a range of materials, but will space manufacture ever be cost effective?

Were you lucky enough to see it?

Forget highway billboards… the future of ads might be floating in SPACE.

Researchers have discovered a highly unusual vertically-oriented protoplanetary disk orbiting around a four-star system.

In 2018, scientists announced the discovery of a extrasolar planet orbiting Barnard’s star, an M-type (red dwarf) that is just 6 light years away. Using the Radial Velocity method, the research team responsible for the discovery determined that this exoplanet (Barnard’s Star b) was at least 3.2 times as massive as Earth and experienced average surface temperatures of about −170 °C (−274 °F) – making it both a “Super-Earth” and “ice planet”.

Based on these findings, it was a foregone conclusion that Barnard b would be hostile to life as we know it. But according to new study by a team of researchers from Villanova University and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), it is possible – assuming the planet has a hot iron/nickel core and experiences enhanced geothermal activity – that this giant iceball of a planet could actually support life.

Continue reading “Geothermal Heating Could Make Life Possible on the Super Earth Planet at Barnard’s Star” »

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