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NDTV
a day ago
- Science
- NDTV
"Space May Not Cooperate": Veteran Astronaut's Warning To Shubhanshu Shukla
New Delhi: As India readies to send its second astronaut into space, the international space community is watching with admiration and support. Among those cheering from the sidelines is European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who had spent over a year aboard the International Space Station in 2016-17 and 2021 and has trained alongside India's astronaut-designate Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla. Will Mr Shukla make a good astronaut, the veteran astronaut was asked. "Oh, I think he will. The four astronaut-designates from India, they are all fantastic people." Mr Pesquet, who met the Indian astronaut corps during their global training rotations, recalled their early interactions with warmth. "I was lucky enough to meet them a while ago. They were having some training in different locations across the world and then I was also training for my second mission and that's how we met. We've been friends ever since," he said. Mr Shukla, a decorated fighter pilot and test pilot, trained at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany-home to ESA's astronaut corps. "He came to Cologne, EAC, the home of the European astronauts for training," Mr Pesquet noted. "And if things go well, I'll be at the launch cheering for him." As India prepares to launch the astronaut-designate aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule for a fortnight-long mission to the International Space Station, questions about safety naturally arise. Mr Pesquet, who has flown on both Soyuz and Crew Dragon, gave a reassuring response. "No, it's not too risky," he said. "It's always calculated risk. You have to take some amount of risk to go to space. You know, it's not like sitting on your couch in front of the TV. It's a very different activity. But it's very controlled, it's framed really well by all the engineers and all the work that's been done." He emphasised that while zero risk doesn't exist, the Crew Dragon has proven itself. "There's never zero risk, it doesn't exist. But I think with the experience that the SpaceX engineers have building up on the Crew Dragon, it's more and more safe every day," he added. To Mr Shukla, Mr Pesquet offered heartfelt advice. "Trust your training, because sometimes, it's still an unexpected environment that you haven't been in. So trust your training, like you've been doing your whole life. Do the right thing. Keep calm. If things don't go the way it's expected-its space, you know, it doesn't always cooperate," he said. He encouraged Shukla to savour the experience. "Enjoy the ride. Try to make yourself some good memories. Look at the Earth, take pictures of your activities, of your crewmates, and it's going to go super fast. So be really conscious in trying to imprint those memories on your brain, because you're going to need them when you come back," Mr Pesquet advised. To Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the people of India, Mr Pesquet said, "Be part of the mission. Make sure that Shukla is supported, which I think is the case by the government, by ISRO, by the entire population. It's going to be a huge wave of national pride and hopefully happiness." And finally, to Shukla himself: "I wish you a very safe launch, very safe mission, and a happy landing. Enjoy the memory, and I'll see you soon when you're back on Earth." Mr Shukla will be part of the Axion-4 Mission, that is scheduled for launch on June 8 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida's Cape Canaveral.
New York Post
4 days ago
- Science
- New York Post
SpaceX Starship set to launch Tuesday as Elon Musk races to prepare for Mars mission next year
SpaceX is preparing for its latest Starship test launch Tuesday following back-to-back failures earlier this year — as Elon Musk hopes to have the rocket ready for a Mars mission next year. The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket is set to blast off from SpaceX's Starbase facility in Texas at 7:30 p.m. EST for its ninth test flight, with the company aiming to correct the failures of the last two tests that saw those rockets explode over the Atlantic Ocean. You can watch the launch live here. The pressure is on for the launch to succeed as Musk eyes a mission to Mars in 2026 using the Starship rocket to fuel his multi-planetary ambitions. President Trump's nominee for NASA, billionaire Jared Isaacman, has said he wants NASA to focus both on sending astronauts back to the moon and to Mars. 4 SpaceX's Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster preps for Tuesday night's launch in Starbase, Texas. REUTERS 4 Spectators gather near the Texas facility for a glimpse of the launch. AP Tuesday's test will also mark the first time SpaceX is attempt to re-use a Super Heavy booster rocket. The rocket was previously used for the seventh Starship test flight in January. Unlike with previous missions, SpaceX will not be attempting to catch the Super Heavy booster, with the rocket set to splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico during Tuesday's launch. That means one of the most spectacular aspects of the Starship launch — the 'Mechazilla' catch, when the booster returns to the launch pad and is caught by the arms on the launch tower — will not happen this time around. The Super Heavy booster is at the heart of Musk's ambition as SpaceX hopes to make the 33-engine rocket a reusable asset to make launches faster and cheaper to accomplish. 4 SpaceX saw back-to-back failures of its last two rockets, which blew up over the Atlantic Ocean. X @GeneDoctorB via REUTERS The rush is on to complete Starship for 2026, when Earth and Mars will be closer together, creating the ideal window for a trip to the red planet. Musk had boasted about the mission earlier this year, touting that the vessel would be ready with the Optimus robot in tow to explore Mars in late 2026. 'Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus,' Musk said in March. 4 Elon Musk hopes to have Starship ready for a trip to Mars come late 2026. REUTERS Musk has found his mission aligning with Isaacman, the New Jersey tech billionaire who flew on SpaceX's Crew Dragon last year for the first-ever civilian spacewalk. Isaacman has pushed a trip to Mars as a priority for the Trump administration, with the White House calling for $1 billion in funding for efforts to land on the red planet. SpaceX said it has addressed the issues that made the last two launches a failure, but added that Starship's initial tests will always be 'unpredictable' as they speed their way to developing the perfect rocket. 'By putting hardware in a flight environment as frequently as possible, we're able to quickly learn and execute design changes as we seek to bring Starship online as a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle,' SpaceX said in a lead up to Tuesday's launch.
Scientific American
08-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
This Soviet Spacecraft Will Soon Crash-Land on Earth
A defunct spacecraft from the former Soviet Union that has been stuck in space for more than half a century is, at last, about to come home. Kosmos-482 was launched on a voyage to Venus in March 1972 as part of the Soviet multimission Venera program. Thanks to a rocket malfunction, however, it never escaped Earth orbit. Most of its launch debris fell back to our planet's surface within a decade—but a half-ton, three-foot-wide, spherical 'descent craft' remained in a high elliptical orbit that looped from 124 miles to 6,000 miles in altitude. Ever since, it's been spiraling out of control back down to Earth, slowly losing altitude during its lower passes as it bleeds off momentum against the tenuous wisps of our planet's upper atmosphere. Sometime in the next few days (no one can say exactly when), over some part of our planet (no one can say exactly where), that doom spiral will end as Kosmos-482 dips down into lower, thicker air and begins a final, fiery plunge through the atmosphere. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Such uncontrolled reentry events are relatively common and rarely merit much notice. Typically, in such cases, the spacecraft merely streaks across the sky as an artificial meteor as it breaks apart and burns to ash at high altitude. What makes Kosmos-482 different is that its descent craft was encased in a titanium heat shield so that it could endure a brutal atmospheric entry at Venus—and thus it has a very good chance of reaching Earth's surface more or less intact. 'Because it has a heat shield, it's likely to come down in one piece until it hits the ground,' says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, who closely monitors spaceflight activity and helped identify the stranded spacecraft's strange situation some 25 years ago. 'So you've got this half-ton thing falling out of the sky at a couple hundred miles an hour, which sounds scary. I mean, it's a bit like a small plane crash, right? That's not great.' Should We Worry about Kosmos-482? The chances of anyone being killed or injured by Kosmos-482 are decidedly low. 'I'm not too worried,' says Marco Langbroek, a scientist at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, who has spent years tracking the spacecraft's decaying orbit. 'There is a risk, but it is small—in the same ballpark as that of a meteorite fall.' Other troubling, recent reentry events have carried greater risks, Langbroek notes, such as falling debris from rockets launched by China and by the U.S.-based private company SpaceX. In February an upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket showered Poland with several chunks of debris. And in recent years large, deliberately jettisoned components of the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft have fallen on Australia, the U.S. and Canada. In several launches, worrisomely hefty debris also reached Earth from uncontrolled reentries of the core stage of China's Long March-5b heavy-lift rocket. And even the International Space Station shed debris that ended up falling on a house in Florida. While various claims of property damage and emotional distress have been made, so far none of these events has physically harmed anyone. When and Where Will Kosmos-482 Fall? In short, no one really knows. As of this writing, Langbroek forecasts that Kosmos-482's reentry will occur on May 10, shortly after 3:30 A.M. EDT. But this estimate, he notes, comes with a 14-hour fudge factor on either side. The closer the spacecraft gets to its point of no return (its first contact with sufficiently thick air to hit the brakes on its orbital velocity), the more certain the forecasts will become. Another recent estimate, from the private Aerospace Corporation, predicts a reentry a few hours earlier, albeit with an 18-hour uncertainty. One complicating factor in these predictions is the fluctuating puffiness of Earth's atmosphere, which can swell or shrink based on how much it's being battered by solar wind and other space weather events. Given its current orbit, the spacecraft's potential landing area encompasses most of Earth's surface between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude. This means it could make landfall anywhere in Africa or Australia, in most of North or South America, or in broad swaths of Asia or Europe. Or, most likely, it may instead splash down somewhere in the vastness of the global ocean that lies between those latitudes. All these uncertainties serve to compound the problem of forecasting Kosmos-482's exact impact point. Because the spacecraft will be moving at some 17,000 miles per hour whenever it begins to plow through thicker air and slow down, even a slight discrepancy in its predicted versus actual position at that point would result in a large change in its final destination on the spinning Earth below. What Happens Next? Whether intact or fragmented, in the likely event that the Kosmos-482 descent craft reaches our planet's surface, it will be considered the property of Russia. 'Legally, as the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is responsible for the object—and any damage it might do,' Langbroek says. And because of its titanium shell, he expects that the spacecraft may only suffer slightly from its impact. 'Basically, what we have here is a time capsule with 53-year-old Soviet technology returning to Earth,' he says. 'If it could be recovered, this would be true 'space archaeology!' To quote Indiana Jones, 'It belongs in a museum!'' Assuming any material is recovered, however, international law dictates that the decision to study or display any of it would be Russia's to make. For Asif Siddiqi, a space historian at Fordham University, who is one of the world's foremost scholars of the Soviet space program, the return of Kosmos-482 is a literal 'object lesson' about the wealth of archaeological artifacts preserved in space. 'Low-Earth orbit is a kind of archive of the cold war space race,' he says. 'It's amazing how much stuff is out there waiting to either occasionally intrude upon our thoughts—or, if we're super ambitious, for us to retrieve to actually put in a museum.... There are all sorts of things—spy satellites, failed probes, used-up stages, secret weapons, who knows—silently orbiting the Earth, their batteries used up, film exposed, radios burnt out. And not all of it is benign: there are a whole bunch of abandoned nuclear reactors from the Soviet radar ocean reconnaissance satellites still orbiting the Earth. The people who designed and built all this stuff are mostly dead and gone. But their handiwork is out there.' Although each individual uncontrolled reentry event poses low risks, McDowell says, we must be cognizant of 'the continued rolling of the dice' that these events collectively represent. 'This is part of the environmental legacy of the cold war,' he says. 'There's all this rubbish left in space that's now, decades later, coming down. And this is simply what these long reentry timescales give us, right? Here we are, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and suddenly these things from the 1970s are knocking on our door for attention again.'
Al Etihad
07-05-2025
- Health
- Al Etihad
Abu Dhabi medical team gears up to monitor blood sugar levels of astronauts in space
7 May 2025 19:57 A. SREENIVASA REDDY (ABU DHABI)A team of Burjeel doctors led by Dr Mohammad Fityan is preparing to monitor blood glucose levels of astronauts on the Axiom-4 (Ax-4) scientific mission to the International Space Station (ISS).The Burjeel-led study aims to explore glucose metabolism and aspects of diabetes in microgravity. Ax-4 is a planned private spaceflight to the ISS, operated by Axiom Space in partnership with SpaceX and NASA. Scheduled for launch on May 29, the mission will carry four astronauts from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon the 14-day mission, the crew will conduct around 60 scientific studies from 31 countries, with the Burjeel study among them.'We will study the effect of the space environment on glucose metabolism in the body. This can enhance our understanding of diabetes as well as other metabolic diseases that affect blood sugar levels,' said Dr Fityan said in an interview with Aletihad.'On Earth, it's difficult to isolate the effects of gravity, muscle use, and posture on glucose regulation. In microgravity, changes in muscle mass, fluid distribution, and circadian rhythm provide a new lens through which we can study how glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity are regulated,' he all crew members will wear monitors. 'One or more astronauts will be wearing glucose monitors for the entire mission,' he said. 'A dedicated research team and laboratory experts at Burjeel will monitor real-time health data from the ISS,' he study will also examine insulin stability in space. 'Insulin pens will be sent on the flight, but astronauts will not use them. We are testing the viability and stability of insulin in the space environment.'Burjeel will also send lancets, needles, and point-of-care blood glucose machines. 'Blood samples will be taken during the flight to validate glucose levels,' said Dr Fityan, who is currently serving as Director of Medical Education at Burjeel Holdings and is also its Chief Medical Fityan, a US citizen of Iraqi origin, is a double board-certified physician in Internal Medicine and Obesity Medicine. He has also served as an Assistant Clinical Professor and Student Clerkship Director in the United States. He noted that current spaceflight protocols exclude insulin-dependent diabetics. 'NASA has excluded insulin-dependent diabetics from travelling to space. There are no official exclusions for non–insulin-dependent diabetics, but so far, no astronaut with diabetes has travelled to space' said Dr Fityan, who will be present at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the day of the proposed launch. 'By understanding blood glucose patterns, validating glucose monitors' reliability, assessing insulin stability, and evaluating data transmission, this research will help ensure the safety of astronauts with insulin-dependent diabetes in future missions.'Dr Fityan believes the findings could benefit Earth-based care as well. 'These findings may help us uncover novel regulatory pathways or early biomarkers for insulin resistance, potentially leading to preventive interventions long before diabetes manifests,' he added: 'The study may also evolve glucose monitoring tools optimised for low-activity or remote settings, benefiting patients on Earth through wearable tech and telehealth innovations.'Ultimately, Dr Fityan sees the Ax-4 study as a stepping stone toward more inclusive space missions. 'Understanding how glucose regulation is affected in non-diabetic individuals in microgravity is the first step toward assessing what might happen in those with impaired glucose metabolism.' 'In the long run, studies like Ax-4 can help rewrite the criteria for spaceflight eligibility—not by lowering standards, but by developing technologies and protocols that make space more accessible for people living with chronic conditions like diabetes.'
Indian Express
06-05-2025
- Science
- Indian Express
How a private US spaceflight will help power India's first human mission Gaganyaan
The Axiom-4 space mission from the United States, which is flying India's Shubhanshu Shukla among four astronauts to the International Space Station, has scheduled several experiments the results of which would help Indian Space Research Organisation execute its own manned spaceflight, Gaganyaan, two years later, ISRO chairman V Narayanan said on Tuesday. There are at least seven experiments, relating to impacts on human health and growth of crops in microgravity environments, which ISRO has designed for the mission, keeping in mind their utility for the Gaganyaan mission, Nayaranan said. 'The Axiom-4 mission is expected to go up in the first week of June. The final date is not yet finalised. The mission is going to carry out several experiments — biological experiments, science experiments. This mission will provide first hand experience to our astronauts to work in the space environment, perform experiments, collaborate with others. All this is going to feed into our own Gaganyaan programme. Our key goal right now is to successfully carry out the Gaganyaan mission. All our efforts, including the experience we gain from the Axiom-4 mission, are geared towards that,' Narayanan said at a press conference in Delhi. The Axiom-4 mission is being operated by a private US company Axiom Space, in partnership with NASA and SpaceX. Three other astronauts, one each from the United States, Poland and Hungary, would be travelling to the International Space Station (ISS) with Shukla who will be piloting the Crew Dragon spacecraft of SpaceX. The Indian participation in this mission is a result of an agreement between ISRO and NASA to carry an Indian astronaut to the ISS. Other than Shukla, the mission will fly former NASA astronaut and the director of human spaceflight at Axiom Space Peggy Whitson as the commander, Polish astronaut Sławosz Uznański and Hungarian Astronaut Tibor Kapu. All the three countries outside the US — India, Poland and Hungary — are sending their astronauts to space after a gap of 40 years. Shukla, who will pilot the Axiom-4 mission, would follow in the footsteps of Rakesh Shama who went to the now-decommissioned Salyut-7 Orbital Station on-board Russian Soyuz T-11 rocket in 1984. ISRO's director of human spaceflight centre D K Singh said Shukla would be able to eat moong dal halwa, mango nectar and different types of rice during his flight, in addition to the standard foods that NASA usually supplies to its astronauts. Narayanan said India was spending Rs 550 crores for the mission which includes costs like training, equipment, and experiments that will be performed. One of the experiments relates to the study of the growth rate, cellular responses, and biochemical activity of cyanobacteria — a group of bacteria that are known to produce energy through photosynthesis just like plants. There is growing interest in studying this microorganism as it may offer the key to deep space exploration and long term presence of humans on the moon or other planets: a self-sustaining system for oxygen production without need for resupply from earth. Another experiment would look at the impacts of spaceflight on germination and growth of sprouts in space. There is another experiment to study the impact on crop seeds as well. Earlier this year, cowpea seeds sent by ISRO on board the experimental platform on the last stage of PSLV germinated in space. Then there is an experiment that will focus on the growth, metabolism, and genetic activity of microalgae. Microalgae again are being studied for its potential as a sustained oxygen generation system as well as a food source in space. Another one will study the revival, survival, and reproduction of Tardigrades — an eight-legged, micro-animal sometimes referred to as moss piglets. These are extremely resilient animals, known to live in extreme conditions on earth. They are known to survive exposure to temperatures, pressures, air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation that would kill other species. NASA has also sent these micro-animals to space to better understand how they weather these extreme conditions. ISRO has also planned an experiment to study the impact of using electronic displays on the physical and cognitive functions of astronauts. It will also study the potential of skeletal muscle dysfunction in space and treatments that can help treat that condition. Shukla and other astronauts will participate in a range of other experiments that are already ongoing in the ISS, ISRO officials said.
