NASA has expanded its contracts with Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to design and develop new spacesuits, providing each company with an additional $5 million. Engadget reports: NASA has ordered a spacesuit from Axiom Space meant for use in Low Earth Orbit, specifically for spacewalks outside the International Space Station. The original contract for Axiom was for a spacewalking system that the Artemis III astronauts will wear on the lunar surface when they land on the moon. Axiom unveiled a prototype for its original order in March, showcasing a suit with joints that allow wearers to move around with ease and a helmet equipped with a light and an HD camera. Meanwhile, Collins Aerospace has received an order for a spacesuit meant for use on the lunar surface. The company was previously contracted to develop a spacewalking suit for use outside the ISS. In other words, each company has received a new order that mirrors the other's previous one.

Redundancy is an important part of space tech development. In this case, spacesuits meant for the same purpose developed by two different companies could ensure that astronauts will have something to use if the other one fails for any reason. That said, the new task orders are for the companies' initial "design modification work" -- they're essentially modifying their original suits for a new purpose -- and NASA wants to see them first before committing to their continued development. Axiom told SpaceNews that if NASA decides to push through with the new spacesuits' development, the full order will cost the agency $142 million over four years.

The international space station is equpped with four 39-foot blankets (11.8-meters), reports CBS News. The first one was delivered in December of 2000 — and now it's time for some changes: Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday and installed the fifth of six roll-out solar array blankets — iROSAs — needed to offset age-related degradation and micrometeoroid damage to the lab's original solar wings.

Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year. NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday.

The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings... As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA.

They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers.
"Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."

Artificial photosynthesis, inspired by the natural process that enables plants to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy, could be crucial for space exploration and colonization. By using semiconductor materials and metallic catalysts, these devices could efficiently produce oxygen and recycle carbon dioxide, reducing reliance on heavy and unreliable systems currently used on the International Space Station. ScienceAlert reports: As my colleagues and I have investigated in a new paper, published in Nature Communications, recent advances in making artificial photosynthesis may well be key to surviving and thriving away from Earth. [...] We produced a theoretical framework to analyze and predict the performance of such integrated "artificial photosynthesis" devices for applications on Moon and Mars. Instead of chlorophyll, which is responsible for light absorption in plants and algae, these devices use semiconductor materials which can be coated directly with simple metallic catalysts supporting the desired chemical reaction. Our analysis shows that these devices would indeed be viable to complement existing life support technologies, such as the oxygen generator assembly employed on the ISS. This is particularly the case when combined with devices which concentrate solar energy in order to power the reactions (essentially large mirrors which focus the incoming sunlight).

There are other approaches too. For example, we can produce oxygen directly from lunar soil (regolith). But this requires high temperatures to work. Artificial photosynthesis devices, on the other hand, could operate at room temperature at pressures found on Mars and the Moon. That means they could be used directly in habitats and using water as the main resource. This is particularly interesting given the stipulated presence of ice water in the lunar Shackleton crater, which is an anticipated landing site in future lunar missions.

On Mars, the atmosphere composes of nearly 96% carbon dioxide - seemingly ideal for an artificial photosynthesis device. But the light intensity on the red planet is weaker than on Earth due to the larger distance from the Sun. So would this pose a problem? We actually calculated the sunlight intensity available on Mars. We showed that we can indeed use these devices there, although solar mirrors become even more important. [...] The returns would be huge. For example, we could actually create artificial atmospheres in space and produce chemicals we require on long-term missions, such as fertilizers, polymers, or pharmaceuticals. Additionally, the insights we gain from designing and fabricating these devices could help us meet the green energy challenge on Earth.

"A Boeing official said Thursday that the company was 'standing down' from an attempt to launch the Starliner spacecraft on July 21," reports Ars Technica, "to focus on recently discovered issues with the vehicle." Starliner's program manager said they'd spent last weekend investigating the problems, and "after internal discussions that included Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun, the company decided to delay the test flight" carrying astronauts to the International Space Station. The issues seem rather serious to have been discovered weeks before Starliner was due to launch on an Atlas V rocket. The first involves "soft links" in the lines that run from Starliner to its parachutes. Boeing discovered that these were not as strong as previously believed. During a normal flight, these substandard links would not be an issue. But Starliner's parachute system is designed to land a crew safely in case one of the three parachutes fails. However, due to the lower failure load limit with these soft links, if one parachute fails, it's possible the lines between the spacecraft and its remaining two parachutes would snap due to the extra strain.

The second issue involves P-213 glass cloth tape that is wrapped around wiring harnesses throughout the vehicle. These cables run everywhere, and Nappi said there are hundreds of feet of these wiring harnesses. The tape is intended to protect the wiring from nicks. However, during recent tests, it was discovered that under certain circumstances possible in flight, this tape is flammable.
Thanks to xanthos (Slashdot reader #73,578) for sharing the article.

The Japanese space agency (JAXA) and NASA plan to launch a satellite made of wood in 2024. The Independent reports: The high durability of wood in space was recently tested and confirmed at the International Space Station (ISS) by an international group of scientists led by those from Kyoto University. Their experiments showed wood samples tested at the ISS for durability underwent minimal deterioration and maintained good stability. Preliminary inspection, including strength tests and crystal structural analyses, of the wood samples was also done once they were brought back to Earth from the ISS by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.

Despite extreme conditions in space, including temperature changes and exposure to intense cosmic rays and dangerous solar particles for 10 months, tests found no changes in the samples, such as cracking, warping, peeling or surface damage, according to a recent Kyoto University statement. The retrieved wood specimens were tested and showed no deformation after space exposure and also did not undergo any mass change before and after space exposure, scientists said.

The international research group has determined that the satellite LignoSat, slated to be jointly launched in 2024 by Nasa and Japan's space agency Jaxa, will likely use Magnolia wood -- "Hoonoki" in Japanese. Magnolia, researchers said, has relatively high workability, dimensional stability and overall strength, making its properties ideal for the mission. Wood also has some benefits compared to complex alloys used in space vehicles, as it is environmentally friendly, easier to produce and can be disposed off better at the end of a satellite's life. Such wooden satellites may also be designed to completely burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere and even if small fragments did survive, they may decompose easily.

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: SpaceX confirmed Wednesday it signed a contract to launch the world's first commercial space station. The company also will perform manned space flights shortly after launching the station into orbit "no later than August 2025," SpaceX said in a statement. The Haven-1 space station is being built by Vast, a private aerospace company based in Long Beach, Calif. Its "mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space -- a future in which the human population and our resources expand far beyond our current imagination." Vast is solely funded by its billionaire founder and CEO Jed McCaleb.

SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 rocket to carry the Haven-1 station into orbit. Manned crews will then use the company's Dragon reusable spacecraft to get to the space station, docking for up to 30 days while in orbit. Vast plans for the initial module to become part of a larger 100-meter-long multi-module spinning space station with artificial gravity. SpaceX confirmed it also will provide crew training, as well as spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises. SpaceX also will conduct mission simulations, as part of the agreement with Vast. Crew selection is underway, the company said Wednesday, and will be announced at a future date.

schwit1 writes:

Crippled by war and sanctions, Russia now faces evidence that its already-struggling space program is falling apart. In the past three months alone, Roscosmos has scrambled to resolve two alarming incidents. First, one of its formerly dependable Soyuz spacecraft sprang a coolant leak. Then the same thing happened on one of its Progress cargo ships. The civil space program's Soviet predecessor launched the first person into orbit, but with the International Space Station (ISS) nearing the end of its life, Russia's space agency is staring into the abyss.

"What we're seeing is the continuing demise of the Russian civil space program," says Bruce McClintock, a former defense attache at the US embassy in Moscow and current head of the Space Enterprise Initiative of the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. Around 10 years ago, Russian leaders chose to prioritize the country's military space program -- which focuses on satellite and anti-satellite technologies -- over its civilian one, McClintock says, and it shows.

Russia's space fleet is largely designed to be expendable. The history of its series of Soyuz rockets and crew capsules (they both have the same name) dates back to the Soviet era, though they've gone through upgrades since. Its Progress cargo vessels also launch atop Soyuz rockets. The cargo ships, crewed ships, and rockets are all single-use spacecraft. Anatoly Zak, creator and publisher of the independent publication RussianSpaceWeb, estimates that Roscosmos launches about two Soyuz vehicles per year, takes about 1.5 to 2 years to build each one, and doesn't keep a substantial standing fleet.

While Roscosmos officials did not respond to interview requests, the agency has been public about its recent technical issues.

Plus this, which failed to make headlines here: "For crewed launches, Russia has long depended on its Baikonur spaceport in neighboring Kazakhstan. But the nation has charged costly annual fees, and in March Kazakhstan seized Russian spaceport assets, reportedly due to Roscosmos' debt."

An anonymous readers this surprising story from Mashable: When a Russian spaceship docked as a lifeboat for three stranded men at the International Space Station in February, one may have wondered if Sergei Krikalev, heading the rescue mission, felt any deja vu.

If that name doesn't ring a bell, he's also sometimes known as "the last Soviet" for his more than 311 days spent in space as the Soviet Union collapsed 250 miles beneath him in 1991. He was only meant to be at the Mir station for five months. Instead, he remained for close to a year, never abandoning the outpost.

Today, Krikalev, the former cosmonaut, is the executive director of human spaceflight for the Russian space agency. That means it's on his watch to make sure NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin get back home safely after their ship sprang a leak at the station in December 2022. The three marooned crew members were supposed to return this month. But their mission will now stretch for a year, until a new crew arrives to relieve them on a separate spacecraft in six months.

Krikalev's story of being stranded in space is now getting a perhaps overdue spotlight with a new podcast series called "The Last Soviet." And it's being told by another cosmonaut, Lance Bass.... Few may remember that boy-band member Bass almost made it to space on a Soyuz spacecraft himself. In 2002, he spent about six months, off and on, training in Star City, Russia, and was certified by Russia and NASA to fly a mission to the space station.

SpaceX is livestreaming coverage of its latest launch tonight. SpaceX and NASA were "preparing to launch a fresh crew to the International Space Station," reports CNN, "continuing the public-private effort to keep the orbiting laboratory fully staffed and return astronaut launches to U.S. soil

For this mission a reusable Falcon 9 rocket will eventually propel a Crew Dragon capsule into space — carrying six astronauts "from all over the world — two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates... to take over operations from the SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts who arrived at the space station in October 2022." They're expected to spend up to six months on board the orbiting laboratory, carrying out science experiments and maintaining the two-decade-old station.... During their stint in space, the Crew-6 astronauts will oversee more than 200 science-oriented projects, including researching how some substances burn in the microgravity environment and investigating microbial samples that will be collected from the exterior of the ISS.

They will play host to two other key missions that will stop by the ISS during their stay. The first is the Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will mark the first astronaut mission under a Boeing-NASA partnership. Slated for April, the flight will carry NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the space station, marking the last phase of a testing and demonstration program Boeing needs to carry out to certify its Starliner spacecraft for routine astronaut missions.

Then, in May, a group of four astronauts will arrive on a mission called AX-2 — a privately funded tourism mission to the space station. That mission, which will be carried out by a separate SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, will include former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, now a private astronaut with the Texas-based space tourism company Axiom, which brokered and organized the mission. It will also include three paying customers, similar to the AX-1 mission that visited the ISS last year.
"It's another paradigm shift," mission commander Stephen Bowen said in January. "Those two events — huge events — in spaceflight happening during our increment, on top of all the other work we get to do, I don't think we're going to fully be able to absorb it until after the fact."

Roughly 25 hours after the launch the crew capsule willdock with the space station. This will be SpaceX's seventh astronaut-carrying flight for NASA since 2020.

Russia launched a Soyuz spacecraft that will replace a capsule that sprang a coolant leak in December, leaving two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut without a ride home. CNN reports: Liftoff of the capsule, called the Soyuz MS-23, took place out of Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 7:24 p.m. ET, which is 5:24 a.m. Friday local time. The uncrewed spacecraft will spend about two days in orbit, maneuvering toward the International Space Station It's expected to dock with the Poisk module -- which is on the space station's Russian-run portion -- just after 8 p.m. ET Saturday.

The Soyuz MS-23 will be the return vehicle for cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, all of whom traveled to the space station aboard the Soyuz MS-22 capsule in September. Rather than flying with crew members aboard, the Soyuz MS-23 launched on Thursday with only a "Zero-G indicator," which can be any object that is left in the cabin and is designed to float freely when the capsule enters microgravity. For this mission, the indicator is a teddy bear tethered by a string inside the cabin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Vast Space, a company that emerged from stealth last September with the aim of building artificial gravity space stations in low Earth orbit, has acquired space tug startup Launcher, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The acquisition, a first for Vast, will give the company access to Launcher's Orbiter space tug and payload platform and its liquid rocket engine, E-2. Under the terms of the deal, Vast will also absorb all of Launcher's talent, including Launcher founder Max Haot, who will join as president. The two companies told TechCrunch that the deal has been in the works for months, with both signing a Letter of Intent to acquire back in November.

The deal could be a big accelerator for Vast; the company's founder, billionaire crypto pioneer Jed McCaleb, said Vast will use the Orbiter tug to test space station subsystems and components in orbit as soon as June of this year, and then again around October. Those two missions, which will be Orbiter's second and third flights, will also carry customer payloads. Vast will continue to operate Orbiter as a commercial product; Haot said they had more than five customer contracts and are signing more. Haot added that the space tug's abilities, like approaching and moving away from spacecraft and hosting payloads, as well as its technologies like flight software, avionics and guidance, navigation and control systems will complement development of the space station. "The two companies declined to provide much more detail about the upcoming missions using Orbiter, nor did they offer any detail about future timelines for development, partnerships or form factor of the station," notes TechCrunch. "But they did say that the first station the company sends to space will be zero G, with artificial gravity stations following."

More generally, McCaleb said that acquisitions are not part of Vast's larger strategy. "Acquisitions typically go pretty wrong," he said. "For the most part, the combined team now plus a few more folks, we'll be able to do quite a bit."

Russia's space agency will hold off returning three astronauts from the International Space Station as it works with NASA to investigate a coolant leak issue that impacted an uncrewed freighter spacecraft last weekend. The Register reports: The Progress MS-21 -- also known as the Progress 82 spacecraft -- arrived at the floating space lab in October 2022 carrying water and other supplies. After months of being docked to the station's Poisk module, the vehicle suddenly began spewing liquid coolant. On February 11, engineers at the Russian Mission Control Center detected a drop in pressure inside its coolant loop, but the station and the crew onboard are safe.

The Progress 82 spacecraft is currently being filled with trash and is scheduled to undock on February 17 and be disposed of over the Pacific Ocean. It began leaking coolant just as the Russian uncrewed Progress 83 cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the station's Zvezda service module. NASA and Roscosmos are now investigating the coolant glitch on Progress 82 as it's the second Soyuz incident of late after the Soyuz MS-22 began leaking in December. It's not clear what might have caused that malfunction, although one possibility that has been floated is that a micrometeoroid pierced an exterior radiator.

Yury Borisov, Roscosmos's director general, said cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, will have to remain onboard until March at the earliest while officials examine the coolant loop's depressurization, according to Reuters. Their space ferry had been due to launch on February 20 but that has been pushed back to March 10 at the earliest. "Officials are monitoring all International Space Station systems and are not tracking any other issues," NASA concluded.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia said on Wednesday it would launch another Soyuz spacecraft next month to bring home two cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut from the International Space Station after their original capsule was struck by a micrometeoroid and started leaking last month. The leak came from a tiny puncture -- less than 1 millimeter wide -- on the external cooling system of the Soyuz MS-22 capsule, one of two return capsules docked to the ISS that can bring crew members home.

Russia said a new capsule, Soyuz MS-23, would be sent up on Feb. 20 to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22, which will be brought back to Earth empty. "Having analyzed the condition of the spacecraft, thermal calculations and technical documentation, it has been concluded that the MS-22 must be landed without a crew on board," said Yuri Borisov, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and U.S. astronaut Francisco Rubio had been due to end their mission in March but will now extend it by a few more months and return aboard the MS-23.

"They are ready to go with whatever decision we give them," Joel Montalbano, NASA's ISS program manager, told a news conference. "I may have to fly some more ice cream to reward them," he added. The MS-23, which had been due to take up three new crew in March, will instead depart from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as an unmanned rescue mission next month. If there is an emergency in the meantime, Roscosmos said it will look at whether the MS-22 spacecraft can be used to rescue the crew. In this scenario, temperatures in the capsule could reach unhealthy levels of 30-40 degrees Celsius (86-104 degrees Fahrenheit). "In case of an emergency, when the crew will have a real threat to life on the station, then probably the danger of staying on the station can be higher than going down in an unhealthy Soyuz," Sergei Krikalev, Russia's chief of crewed space programs, said.

"Aboard the International Space Station right now is a metal box, the size of a desktop PC tower," reports Popular Mechanics. "Inside, a nozzle is helping build little test parts that aren't possible to make on Earth."

The Washington Post reports: Backed by MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, astronauts on board the International Space Station on Friday completed a roughly 45-day experiment using a small microwave-sized box that injects resin into silicone skins to build parts, such as nuts and bolts. Now, after the parts travel back to Earth this weekend, scientists will evaluate the test pieces to examine whether they were made successfully — a process that could take weeks.

If so, it paves the way for astronauts to build huge parts that would be nearly impossible on Earth thanks to gravity and could upgrade space construction.It lets you build and modify space stations "quicker, cheaper and with less complexity," said Ariel Ekblaw, the founder of the Space Exploration Initiative. "It starts to unlock more opportunities for exploration."
The silicone skin is like a balloon filled with resin instead of air, an MIT engineer/researcher told Popular Science — with the resin then cured and solidified by a flash of ultraviolet light. (After which astronauts can cut away the silicone skin.)

The best part? The skin and the resin are both readily available off-the-shelf products.

NASA is exploring whether SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft can potentially offer an alternative ride home for some crew members of the International Space Station after a Russian capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbital lab. Reuters reports: NASA and Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, are investigating the cause of a punctured coolant line on an external radiator of Russia's Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is supposed to return its crew of two cosmonauts and one U.S. astronaut to Earth early next year. But the Dec. 14 leak, which emptied the Soyuz of a vital fluid used to regulate crew cabin temperatures, has derailed Russia's space station routines, with engineers in Moscow examining whether to launch another Soyuz to retrieve the three-man team that flew to ISS aboard the crippled MS-22 craft. If Russia cannot launch another Soyuz ship, or decides for some reason that doing so would be too risky, NASA is weighing another option.

"We have asked SpaceX a few questions on their capability to return additional crew members on Dragon if necessary, but that is not our prime focus at this time," NASA spokeswoman Sandra Jones said in a statement to Reuters. It was unclear what NASA specifically asked of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capabilities, such as whether the company can find a way to increase the crew capacity of the Dragon currently docked to the station, or launch an empty capsule for the crew's rescue. But the company's potential involvement in a mission led by Russia underscores the degree of precaution NASA is taking to ensure its astronauts can safely return to Earth, should one of the other contingency plans arranged by Russia fall through.

The Russian space agency is deciding whether it needs to send a rescue spacecraft to the International Space Station to bring home two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut after the Soyuz capsule that brought them there suffered a massive coolant leak. The Washington Post reports: Working with their counterparts at NASA, officials at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, are trying to determine if the vehicle is sound enough to bring the crew home, Sergei Krikalev, the executive director of Roscosmos's human spaceflight programs, said during a briefing Thursday. If not, the Russian agency would send up another Soyuz spacecraft that was to be used for another crewed mission to retrieve the crew. That spacecraft could be ready to fly up without any people on board sometime in February, a few weeks before the crew is set to return in March, officials said.

The crew that would fly home on the rescue craft would include NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and a pair of cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, who arrived at the station in September. Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and SpaceShuttle program manger, said he could recall of no other time when NASA or Roscosmos had been forced to consider sending up another spacecraft as a lifeboat to bring back a crew.

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: A Soyuz spacecraft (MS-22) docked at the International Space Station appears to have developed a coolant leak, according to NASA and various news sources. YouTuber Scott Manley has further background and explanation.

The cause and severity are presently not known. There is no immediate danger to the crew. The leak was discovered during preparations for a planned spacewalk, which has since been cancelled. This Soyuz is the return spacecraft for three of the ISS' residents, but after this failure a replacement spacecraft may need to sent up.

Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Wednesday at China's space station for the first in-orbit crew rotation in Chinese space history, launching operation of the second inhabited outpost in low-Earth orbit after the NASA-led International Space Station. Reuters reports: The spacecraft Shenzhou-15, or "Divine Vessel", and its three passengers lifted off atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre at 11:08 p.m. (1508 GMT) on Tuesday in sub-freezing temperatures in the Gobi Desert in northwest China, according to state television. Shenzhou-15 was the last of 11 missions, including three previous crewed missions, needed to assemble the "Celestial Palace", as the multi-module station is known in Chinese. The first mission was launched in April 2021.

The spacecraft docked with the station more than six hours after the launch, and the three Shenzhou-15 astronauts were greeted with warm hugs from the previous Shenzhou crew from whom they were taking over. The Shenzhou-14 crew, who arrived in early June, will return to Earth after a one-week handover that will establish the station's ability to temporarily sustain six astronauts, another record for China's space program. The Shenzhou-15 mission offered the nation a rare moment to celebrate, at a time of widespread unhappiness over China's zero-COVID policies, while its economy cools amid uncertainties at home and abroad.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) says a team of researchers fabricated the results of an experiment, led by one of its astronauts, that sought to simulate daily life on board the International Space Station (ISS). JAXA stated that it would subject astronaut Satoshi Furukawa to disciplinary action over data tampering, Japanese media reported. The experiment in question, conducted between 2016 and 2017, involved 40 participants who were confined to closed environments to simulate what astronauts experience during spaceflight.

The participants spent about two weeks at a facility in Tsukuba, a city northeast of Tokyo, after which time their stress levels and mental well-being were to be assessed by the overseeing researchers. Or at least, that was the plan. Instead, the two researchers responsible for conducting the interviews fabricated the data, compiling psychological assessments without actually having done the interviews and rewriting the diagnosis of the participants, according to NHK World-Japan. The researchers also claimed that three of them had conducted the interviews, when in fact it was just the two.

JAXA began investigating the results of the research in November 2020 upon noticing that something wasn't quite right with the data, and subsequently suspending the 190 million yen ($1.4 million) experiment. The researchers involved claimed that they were too busy to dedicate enough time towards the data gathering for the experiment, according to to JAXA vice president Hiroshi Sasaki and as reported in Kyoto News. The Japanese space agency will reprimand 58-year-old astronaut Furukawa, who was overseeing the experiment as project supervisor. However, since Furukawa was not personally involved in fabricating the data, his upcoming mission to the ISS in 2023 will not be affected. JAXA also stated that it would look into returning the grant it had received from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for the experiment.

About an hour ago SpaceX began tweeting video highlights of their latest launch — a NASA-commissioned resupply mission for the International Space Station.

- "Liftoff!"

- "Falcon 9's first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship"

- "Dragon separation confirmed; autonomous docking to the Space Station on Sunday, November 27 at ~7:30 a.m. ET"

You can watch the whole launch on SpaceX's web site. But CNN explains that SpaceX "has launched more than two dozen resupply missions to the space station over the past decade as part of a multibillion-dollar deal with NASA. This launch comes amid SpaceX's busiest year to date, with more than 50 operations so far, including two astronaut missions."

And yet this one carries something unique. (And it's not just the Thanksgiving-themed treats and solar arrays to boost the space station's power...) Nutrients are a key component of maintaining good health in space. But fresh produce is in short supply on the space station compared with the prepackaged meals astronauts eat during their six-month stays in low-Earth orbit. "It is fairly important to our exploration goals at NASA to be able to sustain the crew with not only nutrition but also to look at various types of plants as sources for nutrients that we would be hard-pressed to sustain on the long trips between distant destinations like Mars and so forth," said Kirt Costello, chief scientist at NASA's International Space Station Program and a deputy manager of the ISS Research Integration Office.

Astronauts have grown and tasted different types of lettuce, radishes and chiles on the International Space Station. Now, the crew members can add some dwarf tomatoes — specifically, Red Robin tomatoes — to their list of space-grown salad ingredients. The experiment is part of an effort to provide continuous fresh food production in space.... The space tomatoes will be grown inside small bags called plant pillows installed in the Vegetable Production System, known as the Veggie growth chamber, on the space station. The astronauts will frequently water and nurture the plants....

The hardware is still in development for larger crop production on the space station and eventually other planets, but scientists are already planning what plants might grow best on the moon and Mars. Earlier this year, a team successfully grew plants in lunar soil that included samples collected during the Apollo missions. "Tomatoes are going to be a great crop for the moon," Massa said. "They're very nutritious, very delicious, and we think the astronauts will be really excited to grow them there."