The International Space Station air leak was first detected in August 2018 when controllers in Houston and Moscow noticed a small pressure drop inside the station.

The crew aboard the ISS searched for the source and traced it to the Russian Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft docked to the station.

A 2-millimeter hole was found in the orbital module of the Soyuz, which led to air slowly leaking into space.

Cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev and astronaut Alexander Gerst quickly applied temporary fixes, including using tape and sealant to slow the leak.

It was determined that the hole did not pose an immediate threat to the crew’s safety, but a permanent fix was needed.

Russian ground controllers instructed the crew on how to repair the hole from the inside using additional sealant and gauze.

After the repair, ISS crew monitored air pressure and confirmed that the leak had stopped.

The exact origin of the hole remained uncertain, with some speculation that it may have been drilled from inside, possibly during manufacturing or testing on Earth.

An official Russian commission investigated the incident and considered both accidental damage and potential sabotage but made no public conclusions about its cause.

Despite the incident, the Soyuz spacecraft returned its crew safely to Earth some months later.

The air leak incident was a reminder of the vulnerability of life aboard the ISS and showcased the international cooperation and calm problem-solving of its crew.

The International Space Station air leak was first detected in August 2018 when controllers in Houston and Moscow noticed a small pressure drop inside the station.

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Content: Art Destined for Space Has an Earthly Impact

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Whether a painting or sculpture is made in orbit or forged on terra firma and launched to the stars, the minds creating the new genre of space-centric art are using this rare creative category to raise funds and awareness for important earthly causes.

With space quickly becoming both a tourism destination and an industrial commerce target, awareness of extraterrestrial art continues to grow among creators, buyers, and curators. Against the starry backdrop, Richelle Gribble co-founded Beyond Earth, an all-female artist collective to advocate for the planet’s biodiversity.

The group recently saw its first creation designed for space launched into the stratosphere—a sculpture built on Mars (or as close as Earthlings can come). Gribble served as an analog astronaut in a recent, all-female Mars mission simulation at HI-SEAS (the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation complex). While sealed within the habitat near Mauna Loa, Hawaii, as the mission’s science communicator and podcast host, Gribble tested and prototyped Living Light, a 16-foot sculpture designed by Beyond Earth to become the largest art installation to reach space.

“We teamed up with the spaceflight company Space Perspective to send the artwork up over 100,000 feet above Earth,” Gribble says. “Living Light combines biology, artificial intelligence, and aerospace technology to explore the connections between our planet and the boundlessness of space.”

According to Gribble, the Beyond Earth collective was founded in June 2019 with her partners, Elena Soterakis, director of creative productions, and Yoko Shimizu, director of technology and design.

“When I first met Elena in Brooklyn, she was running science art exhibitions and a biotech incubator,” Gribble explains. “I told her I wanted to train to become an astronaut and go to space so I could make art there. She was excited about that introduction and was inspired by it.”

A few months later, Soterakis contacted Shimizu, an artist and educator also working in New York. The Tokyo-born illustrator was exploring how gravity changes botanical growth.

“Elana realized she knew two artists that were really interested in space,” Gribble adds. “She thought this could make for a special platform to explore, and we decided to do collaborations based on the intersection of art, biology, and space.”

Gribble describes the three women of Beyond Earth coming together because of a need for more projects in space representing a feminine perspective. Their work is aimed at exploring the biodiversity of the planet to aid life on Earth.

After its launch, Living Light spent six hours in flight before descending back to Earth and landing in the ocean for recovery. Gribble’s HI-SEAS testing helped make sure the sculpture was resilient for space flight and tough enough to leave no debris in the environment upon its return.

“We’re now doing repairs on the piece to make sure it’s available for public view,” Gribble says. “We also want to share the story of how the work was created to amplify the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems. The inner organs of the design represent the summation of more than 1,000 species of ocean life.”

Gribble and her partners hope the Living Light project captivates viewers’ imaginations—inspiring more exploration of both deep space and deep oceans.

“We have some interest from prominent museums to display the sculpture,” Gribble says. “We’re planning the logistics of all that now. We plan to house the space artwork at a museum with other pieces inspired by the project displayed worldwide.”

While the women of Beyond Earth built a sculpture bound for zero gravity, Nicole Stott used a tiny painting kit in 2009 to create The Wave, a compact masterpiece made aboard the International Space Station and delivered to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum as the first watercolor rendered in orbit. Stott, 58, spent more than 103 days high above the Earth during her five missions as a NASA engineer. Her view of Isla Los Roques, Venezuela, from the ISS inspired her historic brushstrokes.

Now a working artist, philanthropist, and public speaker, Stott works to build on her notable space creation to promote such causes as pediatric cancer and art education for children.

“When I was considering retiring from NASA and taking myself out of that line waiting to fly to space again, I wanted to find a way to share the spaceflight experience,” Stott says. “I just kept coming back to that painting. Art seemed like the best way to connect with people who didn’t know much about the space station or how an international community came about to use space exploration to make life better on Earth.”

Stott now uses paintings of what she experienced on her missions to engage communities in the world of space exploration. That endeavor brought her in contact with the Space for Art Foundation and the Spacesuit Art Program. Founded by artist Ian Cion, the latter began with children participating in the Arts in Medicine program at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas and grew internationally through the cooperation of the ILC Dover space-suit company.

According to Stott, the Spacesuit Art Project brings together artists, astronauts, cosmonauts, space exploration professionals, medical staff, and children in hospitals, refugee centers, and schools to paint decorated spacesuits—including four that traveled to and from the ISS.

“The start of my involvement with the Spacesuit Art program became the start of my next mission,” Stott says. “It allows me to combine the space exploration that I love, the art I want to do, and this aspect of healing with the kids.”

The program’s most recent suit, Beyond, includes artwork from at least one child in every country on Earth. Once completed, Beyond will participate in the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow to represent “our place in the universe and the connection between personal and planetary health.”

The crew aboard the ISS searched for the source and traced it to the Russian Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft docked to the station.

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Content: Russia to send the first film crew into space to make a feature film

Shane McGlaun - Oct 5, 2021, 5:02am CDT

Russia has announced that it will be the first nation to launch an actor and film director into space to shoot a feature film while in orbit. The actor heading into space is Yulia Peresild, and the director is Klim Shipenko. The duo will be accompanied by cosmonaut Anton Ahkaplerov and will constitute the crew of Soyuz MS-19.

Pereslid and Shipenko are making their first trip into space, but Shkaplerov will be on his third trip to the ISS. The actor and director duo will spend 12 days on the ISS before returning to Earth with a different cosmonaut. While aboard the space station, segments for a movie called “Challenge” will be filmed.

The movie is about a surgeon called to the ISS to try and save the life of a crew member with a heart condition. The actor and director said training for the mission was grueling, but both described it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to the ISS and film aboard the space station. Astronaut training was accomplished at Baikonur cosmodrome. While training was described as grueling, the actor and director were successful in completing the required training.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the training, according to Peresild, was trips in the aircraft used to simulate zero gravity. That aircraft goes into a steep dive giving passengers about 20 seconds of zero gravity. The training process for the crewmembers lasted four months.

Director Shipenko talked about being the first filmmaker in space and getting to experiment with lighting, camera settings, and other technical aspects of making a movie while in orbit. Russia sees becoming the first nation to send a film crew to make a movie in orbit as raising the prestige of its space organization. There was a competition between the US and Russia to see which nation would be the first to film a movie on the ISS.

Must Read Bits & Bytes

A 2-millimeter hole was found in the orbital module of the Soyuz, which led to air slowly leaking into space.

Title:

Content: This Filmmaker’s Next Doc Will Be Literally Out of This World

In a crowd, it would be very easy to lose track of Brendan Hall. The 28-year-old Brooklyn filmmaker has a very unassuming presence in a room, and he prefers it that way. As someone who makes documentaries, he would rather play observer, and focus attention on the subject at hand. Earnest and soft-spoken, he’s the one asking questions, for someone else’s life story, open to hearing something new and unheard.

But alas, on an extremely frigid February afternoon at the The Daily Beast’s office’s in New York, the tables were turned—and Hall found himself as the interviewee, not the interviewer as he is often accustomed to being. And that’s because sometime in the next year or so, Hall is going into space.

He’ll be riding around in SpaceX’s Starship for six days as he and eight others take a trip around the moon and come back to Earth in the first civilian moon mission ever. As a member of the dearMoon mission conceived and financed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, Hall will be part of a very small group of people who have had the privilege of going into space—and an smaller group who have had a chance to swing into lunar orbit and take a look at Earth’s only natural satellite as only Apollo astronauts have.

Hall is in very eclectic company too. The crew includes celebrities like DJ Steve Aoki and K-pop star Choi Seung Hyun (better known as TOP). Not everyone is an artist per se, such as Tim Dodd, a science communicator better known as Everyday Astronaut on YouTube; and backup crew member Kaitlyn Farrington, a snowboarder.

SpaceX’s Starship Explodes in Fireball Soon After Launch

Most of his crewmates were with him at Brownsville, Texas this week to watch SpaceX try to send Starship into orbit for the first time—which ended in a pretty wild explosion after the Starship failed to separate from the Super Heavy rocket (the launch marked the first time the two structures have ever been flown together). To be fair, SpaceX anticipated a roughly 50 percent chance of success, and afterward Hall would tell me that “seeing this test made me more confident than ever” in SpaceX and the dearMoon mission. “The energy has been really positive and exciting.”

“I’m still not completely sure why I was chosen,” Hall told me. But he’s adamant that he doesn’t intend for this opportunity to go to waste.

Not Your Average Origin Story

When it was announced in February 2017, dearMoon was a much different concept. Maezawa had bought a Crew Dragon mission (the capsule currently used to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and back) to take him and one friend on a trip around the moon. The mission was originally supposed to launch in late 2018, using a Falcon Heavy rocket. Few people thought the timeline was realistic, though, partly since Crew Dragon wasn’t even operational at the time (development delays meant the spacecraft would not even fly humans into space until 2020).

In 2018, it was announced that the mission would forge ahead much later using Starship, the interplanetary spacecraft that SpaceX hopes will one day take humans to the moon and Mars—and which has been under development in literally explosive fashion.

All the while, Maezawa kept changing his mind for who would accompany him on dearMoon. He expanded the crew to eight. In 2019, he publicly invited director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, First Man, Babylon) to come with him (Chazelle said he’d have to think about it, and eventually it was confirmed he wouldn’t be going). Maezawa then flirted with plans to make the mission a search for a “life partner,” soliciting applications from over 27,000 women for a chance to go with him on the mission. A “matchmaking documentary” would be filmed. Everyone was thoroughly creeped out, and Maezawa cancelled those plans in 2020.

All of that paved the path to the version of the mission that opened the doors for Hall. Maezawa decided to pivot the mission into something centered around arts and creativity: dearMoon would take Maezawa and eight working artists to the moon. “I'm very thrilled to have these amazing people join me on my journey to the moon and excited to see what inspiring creations they come up with in space,” a quote from Maezawa reads on the dearMoon website.

dearMoon has finally settled down and turned Maezawa’s quixotic ambitions into something somewhat realistic. Yes, Starship still needs to be proven out (and its explosive end on the April 20th flight test leaves much to be desired). But, at least Maezawa has his crew.

Hall will be the first to tell you he may not be the most obvious candidate for this kind of mission, given that his experience with filmmaking is more terrestrial than extraterrestrial. His teenage years growing up in Marlborough, Connecticut were spent filming his buddies doing skateboard tricks and venturing out into the lakeside wilderness. Later, when he attended New York University to study film, Hall took on as many freelance jobs as he could. “I was filming everything,” from sweet sixteen birthday parties to short films and clips for big foundations, he said.

In the middle of college, Hall began to intern at a couple production companies in LA. And that’s where his love of nature documentary filmmaking really solidified. Like many in the area, he loved the proximity to nearby hiking trails, as well as the opportunity to trek to national parks like Yosemite and Sequoia. He once visited the Grand Canyon and sat to watch the long sunset turn into a clear night sky lit up by the Milky Way.

“There was lightning cracking through the Milky Way and shooting stars everywhere,” he said. “It was just like magic on Earth. And that’s when I just realized that I love nature. I wanted to make films in nature and tell stories and try to travel.

“This is what makes me feel alive,” he added. “It makes me want to explore the world around me.”

One of the biggest projects of his career was his work on the 2017 documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg. Hall was flown out to Siberia to shoot scientists looking for wooly mammoth bones with Stewart Brand, and lived on an ice sheet in Greenland with Bill Nye for 10 days. Another very formative experience was actually part of a branded film project for General Electric, which sent Hall to the Brazilian Amazon to film a mobile medical complex treating indigenous tribes and giving them medical care.

That trip included flying in a Blackhawk military helicopter with two doctors and visiting indigenous tribe members in the middle of extremely remote areas. As the helicopter picked up individuals and flew them into the air, Hall could see the absolute wonder and bewilderment these people felt seeing their homes from high up in the air for the first time ever.

It was a moment Hall that stuck with him so much that he wrote about in his dearMoon application. “That there was a really special experience that happens in that moment, as a filmmaker, getting to capture people seeing something like that for the first time,” and something he anticipates getting to witness firsthand as he and his cremates fly into space.

These were experiences he never predicted he’d ever have. “I was just grateful, man. It’s still how I feel about all this space stuff.”

Selection Sunday

Hall recently directed Out There: A National Parks Story, a nature documentary about America’s public lands and the human stories that are immersed in these places. He’ll be debuting the film around festivals throughout the country later this year.

Out There stands in stark contrast to the project Hall intends to undertake when he jets off into space. But he’s also no stranger to the cosmos, having done night sky photography and timelapses since he was a teen. “Night sky photography has always been my happy place,” he said. “I don't do it for money, I just do it out of pure love for doing it.”

In submitting his application (which was open to the public), Hall wrote about his desire to make films that conveyed beauty and wonder to audiences, and to demonstrate how stories with a “human side” exist even in the most remote and uncharted places imaginable. And there was no bigger or rarer challenge than to do that with a film about space, made in space.

Still, Hall admits that he submitted his application to dearMoon in March 2021 mainly out of a whim. “I just never even considered going up there just because it felt so out of the realm of possibility,” he said. “I didn’t in a million years think I’d actually get selected.”

So he was pretty stunned when his application moved through the next stages, which were a series of Zoom videos with members of the dearMoon team, including a former JAXA astronaut, Naoko Yamazaki. “That’s when I realized this was getting to be a big deal.” Group interviews with other applicants followed, then medical and psychological interviews at the University of California, Los Angeles. . A few more in-person interviews followed in Houston, and then Europe.

“I just felt very comfortable during the process of being me, being Brandon,” he said. “There wasn't anything that felt cheesy or superficial about it. I’m not going to do it if this feels like a reality show for a game show, or if I’m having to beg them to take me. That doesn't feel like a healthy dynamic to put essentially my life on the line.”

Finally, around the Thanksgiving holidays in 2021, Hall had a Zoom call with Maezawa himself, in which the billionaire let Hall know he was going to space. “The whole world stopped for a moment,” Hall recalled.

He accepted the offer, of course. He really believes that good things can and will come out of the mission. For his own ambitions, he’s hoping to pursue what he calls a “longform film project”—a feature-length documentary, or a series. He’s not yet certain what that will look like, but he’s hoping to really capture what he said is the “uniqueness of this group of people” and their different backgrounds and experiences suddenly thrown into a tight-knit space. He hopes to make something that captures a sense of wonder and inspiration.

“We want to learn as much as we can, and then kind of open that door for other missions and other filmmakers, artists, whoever it is to get to have an experience like that to ensure their voice,” he said.

New Space, New Suspicions

Though there is an immense amount of excitement for the mission from space obsessives and passersby alike, dearMoon isn’t without its share of criticism. Some of it is a symptom of the times. We’re seeing more and more people go into space like William Shatner, Michael Strahan, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos, to name a few. But it’s still the ultra-wealthy who hold the keys. Maezawa has already been to space once, after buying his way onto a 2021 Russian mission to the ISS. SpaceX’s other tourist flights have all been financed by multi-millionaires and billionaires. And the lucky less-wealthy ones have been plucked entirely by the key-holders.

“It’s sort of interesting how these people are more less, like, selected for us,” Britt Duffy Adkins, an urban planner and the CEO of space urban planning company Celestial Citizen, told me. While access to space is opened to people who wouldn’t otherwise get the chance, it’s still the billionaire class that gets to decide. Even if there is a philanthropic arm, it’s still at their discretion.

“Earth is being told, ‘This is representative of society, of humanity,’ but the public doesn’t actually get to participate in that process,” she said. “We don’t actually know what the decision-making process behind it is, or what the rationale is. I have a fundamental problem with that power dynamic.”

Adkins does have a point, even specific to dearMoon. While Maezawa has selected under-the-radar creatives like Hall to join him, he’s also bringing with him some big names like Aoki—and it’s hard to dispel the notion that such celebrity status wasn’t a factor such picks. It also seems a bit strange to some that there aren’t any artists on the mission whose work is more closely tied with space, like a science fiction author might be.

Many on dearMoon also hail from countries that already boast regular access to space. As a general observation of the current industry, “very few people are going to space from countries that don’t necessarily have that same wealth and privilege and power dynamic in the space industry,” Adkins.

She isn’t sure exactly what kind of system could be implemented to make these processes more democratic, but she thinks it has to start with a bigger transparency over how these decisions are made over who goes up and who doesn’t. Otherwise, trying to say that a mission is being taken for the good of humanity as a whole feels mealy-mouthed.

Inside the Fight to Save Mars From Inheriting Earth’s Mess

And that raises the question over what the real point of dearMoon is. While Maezawa and SpaceX are promoting it to be a conduit by which to inspire new kinds of art and creativity, it’s not totally clear how this is supposed to be achieved.

That isn’t to say dearMoon is not a momentous endeavor on its own for the future of space travel. They are going to orbit the moon after all. “In one respect, it would be really a compelling shift—suddenly we had a crew of civilians that went [to the moon] and did it even before NASA sent an Artemis crew to the moon. So I think that in some ways, that would be a very paradigm shifting event,” said Adkins.

“The Most Incredible Honor”

The significance of what the first civilian mission to the moon might mean for space this century is not at all lost on Hall. “It’s just the most incredible honor filled with so much gratitude, and I can't even comprehend it.” During our conversation, he said he often thinks back to his maternal grandfather’s family immigrating to America as Russian Jews, and how in two generations his grandson is now getting the chance to go into space. And that’s a privilege he doesn’t take lightly.

On a personal level, besides getting to experience microgravity, Hall is most looking forward to understanding and seeing what space does to him at a spiritual and emotional level.

“I’ve thought a lot about like, why are we on this planet? What are we doing? And I just can't wait to feel that out there and ponder those things thousands and thousands of miles away,” he said. “A moment I’m thinking of a lot is when the surface of the moon fills out the window of our spacecraft. I can’t even imagine what that’s going to feel like.”

He’s especially bullish about the opportunity to share that with a crew he has quickly gotten to know, and whom he’s excited to take this venture with. As Hall tells it, the crew is aware of the kinds of critiques being lobbed at the current space industry these days. And they are trying to brainstorm ways to do something that can address those concerns.

“I know something we’re excited to do is represent great stewardship to the planet,” he said. “We’re going to figure out some really cool ways we can try to represent that.”

For now, however, the mission’s schedule is still in limbo. Officially, dearMoon is slated to launch before the year’s end, but almost nobody believes that timeline will hold. And the crew is still awaiting instructions for training. Hall has spent the last few months acclimating to a newfound mini-celebrity status and navigating the surreality of the experience. “I’m still finding that balance between being a crew member who’s public facing, and being a filmmaker, which requires me to stay as low-key as I can,” he said.

Thursday’s explosion hasn’t deterred him one bit. And Adkins hopes that SpaceX proceeds cautiously—for the crew’s sake, as well as the stability of the space industry.

SpaceX’s Starship May Finally Be Ready to Fly to the Moon—if It Doesn’t Blow Up

“Anytime we send civilians to space, I get very, very nervous,” she said. “A disastrous outcome would really change the narrative about how we think about space opening up to the masses more broadly. So I just hope that whatever timeline SpaceX pursues, I hope that they're making sure they're really ready before they proceed.”

Risks and all, Hall seems resolute in his decision, and is embracing the experience in its entirety—emotions and all.

“I was crying when the rocket got off the pad,” he said. “We all really believe this is actually going to work.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev and astronaut Alexander Gerst quickly applied temporary fixes, including using tape and sealant to slow the leak.

It was determined that the hole did not pose an immediate threat to the crew’s safety, but a permanent fix was needed.

Title:

Content: Press "Enter" to skip to content

NASA celebrates winners of second MarsXR virtual reality astronaut training competition

NASA has revealed the winners of the second MarsXR Challenge, a crowd-sourced competition designed to create realistic training simulations and scenarios that could one day be used by astronauts preparing for human-lead missions to Mars and the moon. Three teams shared the $70,000 top prize this year, which focused on playable scenarios involving extravehicular activity on the surface of Mars.

This was the second year of the competition, which is a collaborative effort between NASA, HeroX, Buendea and Epic Games. Game developer Buendea is involved because of NASA’s extensive gamification work, and also because many of the winning scenarios this year almost seem like video games in that they involve exciting and unexpected scenarios taking place on Mars. Most of the winning scenarios also enable players to be scored like in a video game based on their crew’s effectiveness in completing each challenge. Epic Games contributed its Unreal Engine 5 graphical engine, which allowed for the creation of an incredibly realistic environment that mimics over 400 square kilometers of Mars almost perfectly. This includes full Martin days with bright orange hues of sunlight and cold nights filled with deep blues seeping across the landscape as the sun sets. The testbed also has realistic weather conditions happening across hundreds of square miles of virtual Martian terrain.

While the original challenge last year was more of a proof of concept, this year was more about creating realistic scenarios that future astronauts could actually one day use for training. For example, at a press conference last week with the winning teams, NASA officials suggested that the new scenarios might eventually be integrated with the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog — or CHAPEA — taking place at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The CHAPEA exercise has a crew living and working in a 3D printed environment that mimics a Mars habitat. NASA officials suggested that scenarios like the ones created in the recent MarsXR challenge could be used with VR headsets to allow CHAPEA volunteers to journey outside their habitat to perform various simulated missions on Mars.

The MarsXR challenge this year was divided up into two parts. The first challenged participants to create virtual reality scenarios by describing them using storyboards. The winning scenarios of part one were then submitted for use by teams in the second part to be made into actual, playable VR scenarios. All told, there were 3,700 participants this year divided up into 272 teams.

“We are thrilled by the growing success of NASA’s second challenge to support extravehicular activity research for the surface of Mars. The dedication and creativity of our innovator community have exceeded all expectations in this challenge,” said HeroX Vice President of Customer Success Kyla Jeffrey. “Our ongoing collaboration with NASA boasts a series of remarkable competitions that will continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”

The three winning teams this year included Team Overheat, which also won the challenge last year. They were joined by Team SpaceLux and Nataliia Savchenko’s Team. At the press conference last week, all three teams shared YouTube movies of their VR scenarios in action.

The winning scenario from Team Overheat this year centered around an understandable problem here on Earth: a broken down vehicle. However, if a rover breaks down on Mars, it can quickly become a life-threatening situation depending on how far away it is from a safe habitat. In the Team Overheat mission, crews must quickly load up repair tools and mount another vehicle for a quick rescue. Crews are rated on how efficiently they are able to get the broken down vehicle back up and running.

The winning entry from Nataliia Savchenko’s Team is much more peaceful. It involves having astronauts use some of the realistic tools they will be equipped with on a real Mars mission in order to look for interesting rock samples that have been previously spotted by drones or other surveillance tools. And because the Unreal Engine 5 is so realistic, it even involves having the rock collecting crews compare photographs of the area where the targeted samples reside on their tablets with the actual terrain to confirm their location. That is only possible because of the realistic nature of the VR landscape. Crews in the rock collection scenario are rated on their accuracy and the speed of their collection process.

The final winning entry from Team SpaceLux is more of a mini-scenario that is designed to be inserted into any larger mission to give astronauts a bit of a dangerous surprise. It involves a crew member whose spacesuit springs multiple leaks. With precious oxygen quickly draining out of their suit, it’s up to the rest of the crew to find and repair the leak before their partner passes out or dies from a lack of oxygen. At the press conference, members of Team SpaceLux said that their scenario presented a realistic situation that can happen at any time, and which future astronauts need to be prepared to face.

For example, imagine going out on a rock-collecting mission like the one presented by Nataliia Savchenko’s Team, and then experiencing a life threating emergency, something that is a constant danger on a planet like Mars. According to Team SpaceLux, being able to experience something like that in a VR scenario will make future astronauts more prepared for unexpected situations.

Both NASA and HeroX representatives said that the Mars challenges would likely continue in the future, although details about next year’s challenge were not yet available. NASA officials did say that they liked how this year’s Mars challenge was configured into two tightly integrated parts mutually supporting each other, and that future challenges would likely be similarly designed.

NASA has other non-Martian challenges ongoing right now as part of their NASA Tournament Lab. For example, one with a $345,000 top prize asks the public for suggestions about how to better manage vegetation growth clogging irrigation canals, while another with a $30,000 top prize is looking for ways to make commercial airplanes run more efficiently with less pollution.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

source: NextGov

Russian ground controllers instructed the crew on how to repair the hole from the inside using additional sealant and gauze.

After the repair, ISS crew monitored air pressure and confirmed that the leak had stopped.

The exact origin of the hole remained uncertain, with some speculation that it may have been drilled from inside, possibly during manufacturing or testing on Earth.

Title:

Content: Salina Educator Soars to New Heights

A Salina educator is back from a once-in-a-lifetime experience after participating in NASA’s prestigious Lift Off Summer Institute.

NASA’s Texas Space Grant Consortium and the University of Texas Center for Space Research sponsored the program, and selected teachers to increase their knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and math through space education.

Teachers apply for LiftOff and are selected competitively. Pam Kraus of Salina was selected to participate.

Workshops at the program are organized around an aerospace or space science theme drawn from NASA’s diverse engineering and scientific research programs. The weeklong institute features a series of workshops, hands-on activities, field investigations, and presentations by NASA scientists and engineers working on various missions.

Educators selected came together June 25 – June 30 to conduct experiments, hear from NASA subject matter experts and astronauts, and network with other educators while sharing innovative lesson plans and ideas.

Liftoff 2023’s theme was “Planetary  Defenders”. The workshops provided teachers a rare – and for most, unique – opportunity to spend a week working with professional scientists and engineers at the cutting edge of space exploration. From looking for potential asteroids or comets that might impact Earth, to protecting our home planet, NASA’s Planetary defense research is critical to our assessment of future impact hazards, for developing spacecraft missions that will assist us in protecting our home and increasing our understanding of the world around us.

In the next few years, NASA will increase our understanding of the structure of asteroids to help scientists and engineers create solutions to remove potential, future threats of impact. Planetary defense research is critical to assessment of future impact hazards and helping us understand asteroids,  the leftover remnants of our solar system. These missions will help answer the questions:

  • Can humans deflect asteroids?
  • Could we stop an asteroid from hitting earth?
  • How likely is it that an asteroid could hit earth?
  • What are the components of an asteroid?

The LiftOff workshops prove that the excitement teachers, and more importantly, their students, feel about earth and space science can be used to enrich STEM education and inspire the next generation of explorers.

Fred Haise – Apollo 13 Lunar Module Pilot – shared with LiftOff participants about his time as a test pilot and astronaut.

An official Russian commission investigated the incident and considered both accidental damage and potential sabotage but made no public conclusions about its cause.

Title:

Content: NASA wants to be your new favorite streaming app

NASA is taking a page from big time TV streaming services as it revamps its multimedia offerings. The agency relaunched its longstanding NASA TV service – now called NASA plus, with a new mobile app to go with it. For more, Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu spoke to Rebecca Sirmons, executive producer for NASA TV.

Interview Transcript:

Jared Serbu Okay, Rebecca, a lot of multimedia assets to talk about here today, but let’s start with NASA plus. How should people think about it differently than the NASA TV that we’ve come to know and love over the last many years?

Rebecca Sirmons Well, NASA plus is NASA’s new official ad free, on demand streaming service. Kind of like, a Netflix, but NASA. So it has some of the greatest stories ever told all in one place. You know, one of our taglines is we’re putting, you know, the universe at your fingertips. So, it’s premium content. It’s the official home for live broadcasts, and tons of NASA’s infamous archival that goes over decades. So, I’m really excited to have it all in one place where people can find it.

Jared Serbu And what was kind of the inspiration for the for the idea that you needed to relaunch this? And in essence, I mean, it could because it’s not just a rebranding of what you had been doing before. It’s, I think it’s more of a transition from linear content to more on demand. Is that about right?

Rebecca Sirmons Yep, so when I got here, you know, I come from the private sector. I’m a TV person, right? I was a television executive for almost 20 years out in L.A., and I came out here and I was honored to take this task on, and I knew it was going to be a massive effort. The great news is I didn’t have to do it by myself. We had tons of content already there. It was just a matter of going around and collecting, all of this amazing content that they have been making for years now. Also looking at some of the future missions and what we have coming up and also like current activities as well, looking at, okay, how can we make an amazing documentary? How can we tell this NASA story through the resources that we already have? You know we didn’t go out. I didn’t have a budget. We didn’t have a budget to do this. It was a matter of what can we do? What can we work with? You know what we already have? And it’s, you know, it’s incredible. The difference between, you know, linear TV and what we have now is that everything’s on demand and you can watch it when you want to watch it. It’s free, there’s no subscription required. There are obviously no ads. And it’s one of the things that I’m personally proud of is its family friendly, right. Like there aren’t that many places you can go to. As far as a streaming service is concerned, that’s family friendly 100%. So, something that I’m really excited for the future generation to see.

Jared Serbu And the new relaunched app is one way people can get access to NASA. Plus, I must say the app the UX is better than most commercial streaming services apps that I’ve seen.

Rebecca Sirmons Thank you. Wow.

Jared Serbu It really is. I mean, talk a bit about how you approach that and what you prioritized as you decided to, redo the app.

Rebecca Sirmons Yes. And I will say it’s a tremendous, team effort. You know, I’m going to give a shout out Jason Townsend, who, you know, was kind of leading the overall team for the app development, you know, as well as the web modernization. You know, there were several things happening at once. I was brought on to do NASA plus. So, handling kind of all the overall layout and the content and kind of getting new stuff on there, treating it as it were, like a network. Right. And then of course, we had our web modernization team. So, it’s been tested. They went through, several changes over the years. But this is something that we can all be proud of. And yeah, it’s about, you know, kind of stepping into the times and really showing people that we know what’s cool and we’re going to do that.

Jared Serbu Talk about how you went about developing this with no budget. Was this pretty much all internal? Did you have some contract support? How do you go about it?

Rebecca Sirmons Internal? I mean, it’s a lot. You know, it’s funny coming from the private sector. I worked in documentaries. To start out, you literally you learn how to do something with nothing. And the thing that we have at NASA is talent and we have creativity. I will say it’s the most creative place I’ve ever worked already, hands down. Because you’re, you know, you kind of have NASA it, right? You have something, you’re like, okay, how can we do this? And so, it’s looking okay. We have an amazing team here. So, I can go to that team and say, here’s what I need to do. Let’s try and figure out how to get there. And I was able to do that. I mean, working across the enterprise at NASA, I mean, there’s centers all over. It isn’t just a headquarters here. I’m working with Goddard, I’m working with Johnson. Kennedy, you know, all the centers were part of this. And so that was kind of the most beautiful thing about this, is really seeing the enterprise come together, you know, because we all wanted this to happen, and, so it’s something that we’re really proud of as an agency.

Jared Serbu And you said earlier, this is mainly a new way to present a ton of content that you already had and make it more accessible. I wonder, though, having these new channels and content delivery mechanisms, does it change the way NASA thinks about how it creates new content or create new opportunities for you to make new stuff?

Rebecca Sirmons Absolutely. So, I mean, already, you know, when I first started this job, I looked at, I was like, okay, well, obviously we’re going to need to figure out, you know, distribution and how we’re all working to do differently, you know, and, and so that’s that those methods are have already been established from day one. Now it’s more of, okay, how do we create content differently? You know, as far as, you know, putting together outlines, creative, you know, and going through and looking at it from like a more premium, point of view, because it’s all about storytelling and it’s how we tell that story, and the great thing that I’m extremely grateful for every day is the fact that we have talented people here already, you know, and that they did this not me. I just know how to kind of pull the levers, you know?

Jared Serbu I know it’s early days since the launch, but what kind of audience feedback have you gotten so far? Were you able to see anything in analytics that shows that you like this better?

Rebecca Sirmons So that’s something that I’ve been tracking daily, and we’ve gotten some great feedback. Obviously, there are little bugs here and there. That’s just how it is. That’s tech, you know. But as far as feedback, everybody loves it. You know, I will say as a parent, just hearing people say, oh my gosh, there’s a place there’s kids’ content, there’s NASA, kids’ content. I’m like, yes, you know, schools are watching it. You know, I was talking to a pediatric doctor recently. They’re like, oh, yeah, I actually showed kids at the hospital this. It’s incredible. The launch was, was seamless and now we’re looking at it as any, you know, streaming platform does. Okay. What can we move around. What can we make more effective? How you know, how do we look at this moving forward. And so that’s something that we’re constantly monitoring.

Eric White Rebecca Sermons is executive producer for NASA TV now NASA plus speaking there with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu. You can find this interview at Federal News network.com. Search the space Hour coming up. Whether you like it or not, the US is definitely in a new space race. This is the Space Hour on Federal News Network. I’m Eric White.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

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Despite the incident, the Soyuz spacecraft returned its crew safely to Earth some months later.

Title:

Content: Constellation Episode 2 Recap: Joanna's Escape Explained

By Klein Felt Posted:

Episode 2 of Constellation on Apple TV+ offered fans their first hints at the series' mind-bending premise.

Starring Noomi Rapace and Breaking Bad alum Jonathan Banks, Constellation is a head-spinning thriller following an astronaut who - after an accident aboard the International Space Station (ISS) - seemingly finds herself straddling two different realities.

The sci-fi thriller has dropped three episodes so far, offering fans just a glimpse at what is to come, as Noomi Rapace's Joanna is left alone on the ISS to fend for herself.

What Happens in Constellation Episode 2?

Constellation Episode 2 set up more reality-splitting subplots in the cold Swedish wilderness while also following Joanna as she completed her mission aboard the International Space Station.

On the Frozen Tundra

Episode 2 (titled "Live and Let Die") starts and ends in the same place as Episode 1 before it, following Noomi Rapace's central astronaut on a separate plane of action in a snow-painted Swedish landscape.

The episode starts with Joanna carrying her daughter Alice (played by Davina Coleman) through the snow with no recollection of how the young girl got there.

The pair enter the warm cabin from Episode 1, with Joanna drawing a bath for her hypothermic daughter.

This is when the series' signature shifts in reality start to happen yet again, with Joanna seeing two versions of Alice during this sequence. One is sitting calmly in the bath, which Jo can see in the mirror, and the other wakes up and walks into the living room from her bed-chamber.

This, of course, startles Joanna, as she races to see if the version of her daughter she placed in the bath moments earlier is still there. With the other pajama-clad Alice in tow, the former astronaut discovers that the bath is, in fact, empty and that version of Alice is gone.

Stranded in Space

The series then cuts back to the space station, where audiences left Joanna in Episode 1. Following an accident and the successful use of the mysterious matter-creating CAL device aboard the ISS, Jo is left on the in-orbit laboratory alone.

With only 6 hours and 45 minutes left of oxygen on the station, Rapace's Swedish astronaut is racing against the clock to finish her work on the ISS, replace the batteries on the Soyuz 1 evacuation capsule, and hopefully make it off the station without descending into madness.

This is when Joanna loses all contact with mission control on the ground, making her Earth-bound collaborators wonder if she is even alive up there.

On Earth, audiences learn more about the priorities of Jonathan Bank's Henry Caldera. The astronaut-turned-quantum physicist makes it known that he needs the CAL experiment device back on Earth as soon as possible.

The CAL device is Caldera's life's work, and - if it was successful in its mission of creating a new state of matter - he needs it now, even if that means sending up another team of astronauts just to retrieve it.

Back in orbit, Joanna is struggling. She has realized that for her to transfer batteries from the ISS to the Soyuz capsule, there simply is not enough time. This causes her to improvise a bit, tying together multiple battery cells to get the job done in as few trips as possible.

On her trip from one end of the space station to the other, Joanna hears a mysterious clanging. She goes to look and finds the severed arm of her now-deceased crew member Paul, who tragically died during the ISS accident seen in Episode 1.

She goes to grab the arm, and it inexplicably grabs back. For a split second, Joanna comes eye to eye with her fallen comrade before jumping back to the reality of the space station.

Welcome to the Party, Bud

Cut back to the ground, and audiences are introduced to Henry Caldera's brother Bud. After being referenced previously by the leader of the Russian Space Program Irene Lysenko (played by Barbara Sukowa), this is the first real look the series gives the viewer of Bud.

Just like some of the occurrences that have been happening to Joanna up in space, the connection between Bud and Henry seems a bit off. Bud (who is also played by Jonathan Banks) is a former astronaut who was a member of the Apollo missions of the 1970s.

Audiences catch up with him as he is aboard a space-themed cruise, of which he is a guest of honor. Bud is here to take part in a panel debate about whether astronauts ever actually went into space, and is visibly shaken hearing the news of Joanna and the accident on the ISS.

Having lost the rest of his crew during his mission to the moon, forcing him to navigate his way back to Earth on his own, Joanna's plight resonates with the retired astronaut.

The Journey Back to Earth

Following the short introduction to Bud, the series then jumps back into space. Joanna's minutes are numbered, and she knows it.

After hours of work, a few hallucinations, and completely losing contact with mission control, Jo finally gets power restored to the Soyuz 1 evacuation capsule.

With a fully charged shuttle, dwindling oxygen supplies, and the CAL experiment in hand (thanks to a recorded message from Earth instructing her to grab it), Joanna finally begins the undocking process of the evac capsule.

She flicks a few switches, does some calculations  - as her reentry will be unaided by mission control - and hits undock.

However, not everything goes to plan. As the capsule begins to undock from the ISS, one of the six bolts locking the vessel in fails to release.

This causes Joanna to panic. Looking at the manual, she discovers the only way to release the sixth and final docking bolt is within the space station, requiring two people to do so.

With the reality of the situation starting to set in, something mysterious and bizarre happens. Cutting to the interior of the ISS itself, audiences see a shadowing figure lumbering towards the bolt-release control panel.

Then, without explanation, the sixth bolt finally releases, sending Joanna on her path back toward Earth's atmosphere. As she looks back at the space station behind her, Joanna sees a corporeal shadow looking out the observation window back at her.

With no time to think about what just happened, Joanna sets off towards Earth, entering the atmosphere, and causing a full-blown search party to be deployed to find where her capsule has landed.

"You Forget How the Earth Smells"

Back on Earth, the mission control search party finds the downed astronaut and extracts her - along with the CAL device and the body of the now-dead Paul - from her mechanical confines.

Joanna is reunited with her husband Magnus and daughter Alice and is ready to start their lives again.

Before they can fly off to begin their recuperation, audiences see Joanna experience one more reality-blurring hallucination. Sitting aboard a military-style helicopter the exhausted astronaut reaches for her daughter and holds her for a moment only for her to quickly disappear and show back up again.

As the family flies away, Jonathan Banks' Henry Caldera is seen ogling over the CAL device. He takes a look at the results the ISS experiment yielded, and likes what he sees, observing what he calls some sort of interference effect, with the device possibly containing matter from two different realities.

To close the episode, the series cuts back to the snowy Swedish cabin seen at the start of Episode 2. Joanna continues to question the Alices that seemingly popped up out of nowhere, replacing the one she had set in a bath.

Not getting anywhere, Rapace's series protagonist, grabs the girl by the arm, declaring they need to find "other [Alice]" as they head out into the snowstorm on their mission.

Who Helped Joanna In Constellation Episode 2?

While Constellation Episode 2 offered up plenty of questions worthy of head-scratching, no detail will produce more theories than Joanna's escape from the ISS.

She should not have made it off the station after the Soyuz 1 capsule locked up during its undocking sequence.

Yet, something helped the thought-to-be-doomed Swedish astronaut.

The series clearly showed something aboard the space station despite Joanna very clearly being the last human on board.

There is no way of knowing, at this point, who it was that helped her out in her ISS launch, but there are a couple of theories for who it could have been.

The number one culprit is Paul. Yes, Paul died during the ISS accident seen early in Episode 1, but there is a possibility that a version of him is still present on the space station in some form.

As Joanna experienced when she grabbed Paul's severed hand during Episode 2, Paul could be stuck in the kind of reality-shifting limbo that Joanna seems to find herself in.

He was the only other astronaut present during the CAL experiment which looks to be the cause of Joanna's bizarre predicament. So who is to say that Paul also is not experiencing the same sort of strife and helped a friend out?

The other option for who it could have been is Joanna herself. If what is happening to Joanna (with her hallucinations and seeing doubles of various people/events) is her being stuck between two realities, then the person to hit that release button could have very well been another version of her that breached the interdimensional void as well.

Only time will tell, though, as Constellation looks like it is going to slow-play its biggest mysteries. One can only hope the answers are satisfactory when they do eventually come.

[ Constellation Apple Series Explained: The Meaning of the Show's Cryptic Plot ]

Constellation is now streaming on Apple TV+.

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Silo Season 2 Release, Cast and Everything We Know About Apple TV+ Series

Severance Season 2: Release, Cast and Everything We Know So Far

Godzilla 2023 Apple TV Show Reviews: Critics Share First Reactions

How Apple Gave Godzilla His Own Show on a TV Budget (Exclusive)

- In This Article: Constellation
Release Date
February 21, 2024
Platform
Actors
James D'Arcy
Jonathan Banks
Noomi Rapace
Genres
- About The Author: Klein Felt
Klein Felt is a Senior Editor at The Direct. Joining the website back in 2020, he helped jumpstart video game content on The Direct. Klein plays a vital role as a part of the site's content team, demonstrating expertise in all things PlayStation, Marvel, and the greater entertainment industry.

The air leak incident was a reminder of the vulnerability of life aboard the ISS and showcased the international cooperation and calm problem-solving of its crew.