![]() ![]() If you look at our planet, temperatures are rising at extremely high rates. For Adam Arkin, Director of CUBES (the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space), the solutions to living on Mars and adapting to climate change are essentially the same.“Mars is an example of an already desertified planet. The technology needed to live off-world is critical to help us survive the climate emergency on this one. Some of you may be thinking, “Should we be spending time and money sending humans to Mars when our home world is in crisis?” This is a fair and necessary question. ![]() But to the intrepid explorer, Mars is the new frontier. There’s no breathable air or liquid water, and the atmosphere is a brisk -80 degrees Fahrenheit. And sustained living there isn’t easy either. At an average of 140 million miles from Earth, it’s not easy to get to. It was once a wild fantasy to think of Mars as a human destination. But beyond the thrill of peering at Earth in the distance while tottering along in one-sixth Earth’s gravity, the moon is a barren place with little to recommend it prolonged human presence.Enter Mars. It’s the most likely place that any of us non-astronaut humans will spend any extended time away from our home planet- especially if we could still order from Amazon on the moon. ![]() The ISS, a science laboratory spanning the length of a football field, orbits about 250 miles (400 km) above the Earth and has been continuously occupied for two decades, managed by a U.S.-Russian-led partnership that also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.Revolutionary food production and closed-loop biomanufacturing could transform human space travel and address the growing food crisis on Earth.Space tourism, once the domain of science fiction writers, is now an active pursuit of space-tech entrepreneurs. But Krikalev added that the temperature would rise rapidly if the hatch to the station were closed. NASA has previously said the capsule's temperatures remain "within acceptable limits" and that a recent test of the capsule's thrusters was performed without a hitch. Sending the stricken MS-22 back to Earth unfixed with humans aboard appeared an unlikely choice given the vital role the coolant system plays to prevent overheating of the capsule's crew compartment, which Montalbano and Krikalev said was currently being vented with air flow allowed through an open hatch to the ISS. The recent Geminid meteor shower initially seemed to raise the odds of a micrometeoroid strike as the origin, but the leak was facing the wrong way for that to be the case, Montalbano said, though a space rock could have come from another direction. Pinpointing the cause of the leak could factor into decisions about the best way to return crew members. No mention was made of possibly sending a spare SpaceX Dragon for crew retrieval. If MS-22 is deemed unsafe to carry crew members back to Earth, another Soyuz capsule in line to ferry Russia's next crew to the station in March would instead "be sent up unmanned to have (a) healthy vehicle on board the station to be able to rescue crew," Krikalev, Roscosmos' executive director for human spaceflight, told reporters. astronauts, Rubio and Josh Cassada, conducted a seven-hour spacewalk without incident on Thursday to install a new roll-out solar array outside the station, NASA said. The leak has upended Russia's ISS routines for the weeks ahead, forcing a suspension of all future Roscosmos spacewalks as officials in Moscow shift their focus to the leaky MS-22, a designated lifeboat for its three crew members if something goes wrong aboard the space station. Four other ISS crew members - two more from NASA, a third Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut - rode to the ISS in October via a NASA-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon and they also remain aboard, with their capsule parked at the station.
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