45 Years Ago, Humans Took One Small Step On The Moon

45 years ago today - that is, July 20th - the human race left its first bootprint on a planetary body other than the Earth we'd been treading for the last few million years, as Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle lunar module's ladder and onto the dusty regolith of the Moon.

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong insisted he said, although the message back to Earth was slightly garbled.

It was an astounding achievement - coming less than 66 years after the Wright Brothers had made their first powered flight and less than a decade after President Kennedy had made his famous declaration at Rice University that the US would put a man on the Moon. It was such an achievement that even now some refuse to believe it took place.

Buzz Aldrin takes a hands-on approach to a Moon hoax moron.

If truth be told the Apollo 11 crew took risks that would probably not even be allowed by NASA today. On its way to the landing site Eagle missed its target, the guidance computer overloaded, and landed just within the allowable limits for fuel. Even getting out of the module was a squeeze, since the engineers hadn't taken into account the width of a redesigned spacesuit.

The Apollo missions took men further from Earth than they'd ever traveled before. Only men mind you – despite female pilots like Jerrie Cobb showing just as much proficiency in tests as the male astronauts NASA insisted that only military pilots could become astronauts back then. We've not sent humans of any gender any further since.

At the time of the Apollo 11 landing science fictions authors like Arthur C. Clarke were predicting lunar colonies by the 1980s and manned missions to Mars at the turn of the millennium. But these failed to come off thanks to a mixture of budget cuts, politics and advances in robotics.

One of the things NASA learned from the Apollo program was how difficult and costly it is to put humans into space and get them back safely. At the same time advances in computer technology and robotics made it cheaper than ever to replace fleshy explorers with digital ones, and that has been the path NASA has taken ever since for exploration.

Sure we had the space shuttle, and astronauts have been orbiting the Earth in low orbit on the International Space Station for nearly 14 years, and on US and Russian space stations before that. But that's been it for humans in space, now the machines have taken over.

There's a certain amount of sense in this approach. You can get a lot more science for your buck using machinery to do your exploring and there have been some notable successes, most recently the Curiosity rover that is currently meandering across Mars. Sending manned missions means less time on the surface than a robot, and a hell of a lot more risk.

It's unlikely that NASA will be putting men back on the Moon any time soon. It would be massively expensive to set up and even more so to supply, and there's not a lot of support for spending a few billion dollars on the project when we could be having foreign wars or banking bailouts delivering vital infrastructure on Earth instead.

That could change if China is serious about setting up a moon base. It's possible that's just chest puffing, but if it is true US politicians are likely to stump up the funding in the spirit of geopolitical competition. The same is true for Mars, particularly with players like Elon Musk getting in the game.

Musk said recently that SpaceX wouldn't exist without NASA and isn’t in competition with the agency. He wants to walk on the sands of Mars himself, and looks likely to do so. But he'll be relying on data from NASA to both land safely and stay alive once there.

The big advantage private operators like Musk have is that they can take a more relaxed view of human life. NASA will not countenance one-way missions, but the private sector will and there's a long list of people willing to make the trip already, not least former Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

You'd think that 45 years after the Moon landings humanity would have taken further strides into space, but 45 years from now it is perfectly possible that mankind will have established a colony on another planet or planetoid. It's certainly needed - you can't have a long-term civilization that stays on one planet after all – but it looks likely that the driving force behind such exploration won’t come from NASA. ®

NASA's New Star Trek-Like Spaceship 'Travels Faster than Light'

NASA, which is scheduled to plummet a flying saucer-like test vehicle towards Hawaii in a bid to assist future human expeditions to Mars, has unveiled a "faster than light," Star Trek-like spaceship that could make interstellar travel a reality.

The space agency's "warp ship" was cleverly crafted by NASA engineer and physicist Harold White, and "Star Trek" graphic artist Mark Rademaker. Images of the prototype design were revealed at a SpaceVision 2013 conference, and have been posted on Rademaker's Flickr page and Facebook account. Titled as "NASA's New Design for a Warp Drive Ship," it's no surprise that the images almost immediately went viral.

"The Flickr views went from 119 yesterday to 2 million today," Rademaker told NBC News.

Rademaker based his creation off the concept known as Alcubierre warp drive, an idea first put forth by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, which suggests that faster-than-light travel might be achieved by manipulating spacetime both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

What was supposed to be a contribution to the Star Trek Ships of the Line 2014 calendar has now been altered to a ring-ship design that could provide means for manned missions to Mars or other worlds.

"I could have walked away, but I wanted this to be really good, so I put in an extra three months of spare time, with the new images as the result," Rademaker said.

The hypothetical design, dubbed IXS Enterprise, includes a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble. According to White, iO9 reports, space vehicles equipped with warp drives could attain such remarkable speeds by making the empty space behind a starship expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction - passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.

White speculates that the innovative concept could take a spacecraft to the star Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks - even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

These ambitions have yet to be considered realistic, as scientists still haven't found a way to warp spacetime. However, according to The Space Reporter, NASA officials at Johnson Space Center said last year that White and his team could soon create a warp-drive interferometer capable of finding tiny warp bubbles in spacetime.

NASA’s ‘aquanauts’ to live underwater to test new tech

NASA will test out new space exploration technology – including some used for asteroid landings – by having its teams live on the ocean floor off Florida coast for extended periods of time in two upcoming summer missions.

The so-called ‘aquanauts’ will only get down to about 19 meters below, but that is enough to perform the crucial task of assessing new gear that will help the agency’s astronauts live in orbit more comfortably and even assist future asteroid landings and explorations.

The missions will include extra-vehicular activities (EVAs), simulated spacewalks and other activities – all performed underwater, about 10km off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

Aside from the primary objectives, the assignments will also test for health and behavioral issues, as well as evaluate the usefulness of ‘telementoring’, in which the astronaut is given instructions by voice or video.

The Extreme Environment Mission Operations program (NEEMO) has taken charge of organizing the upcoming missions. Its project Manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Bill Todd, has admitted to journalists in a statement that, “It is both challenging and exciting for our astronaut crews to participate in these undersea missions in preparation for spaceflight.”

Todd explained that only the closest-matching conditions that accurately replicate the conditions astronauts are to face in space are good enough for the task, as “the extreme environment of life undersea is as close to being in space as possible.”

The EVAs, according to NASA officials commenting on the NEEMO 18 and NEEMO 19 missions, will“focus on evaluating man-machine work systems and EVA tools and techniques for exploration tasks in varying levels of gravity ranging from that of asteroids to the gravity of Martian moons and Mars itself.”

The NASA missions will actually be an international effort comprising Japanese, European and Canadian astronauts from their respective space agencies – all professionals and occupying key positions in their scientific fields.

Wearable technology: Who knows your body’s secrets?

Your sex life, illnesses, even your fertility – new tech can track what our bodies are up to, but some people may be revealing more than they realise, says Jacob Ward.

Jeff started having sex at two in the afternoon. Apparently it lasted a few hours, and he burned a total of 347 calories. We know because these facts were available to anybody on the internet, and it wasn’t clear if he realised.

Jeff was wearing a Fitbit, a web-connected wristband that measures exercise intensity so users can track the calories they lose. In 2011, this data also happened to be displayed on a website available to search engines, so many wristband wearers who had labelled their sex lives as exercise had the details broadcast to the world.

While the company behind Fitbit quickly plugged such leaks, the case served as an intriguing reminder that connecting our body’s activity to the internet can have unforeseen results.

A variety of wearable technologies and medical devices now monitor how much you weigh, what you eat, how fertile you are  – and crucially, much of that information can be shared with your social network, doctors, companies, or even complete strangers. Our physical activity is becoming virtual. While there are many benefits promised by putting your vital signs online, the question is how much of your body’s secrets would you be willing to share?

One of the first people to connect their daily activity to the internet was Steve Mann. Widely regarded as the pioneer of wearable computing, he created a series of backpack-mounted computers in the 1980s, which included video cameras and a heads-up display mounted over one eye, like a precursor to Google Glass. By the mid-1990s, Mann had created a portable wireless camera that he wore 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Called the Wearable Wireless Webcam, he streamed his day-to-day activities online, and its benefits soon became apparent, when Mann filmed a hit-and-run accident, with the footage later used to identify the guilty party.

Mann’s innovations focused more on how he engaged with the outside world, but the principle of wearing technology and logging activities paved the way for devices that track your body’s functions, before presenting – or exposing – them to the world.

For example, devices like Fitbit and Nike’s FuelBand record people’s motion and then send that information wirelessly to a website so they can keep track of calories burnt and so on. Some share it on Facebook or other social media sites. For many users there’s a clear allure – many so-called lifeloggers claim it improves their health and fitness, for example.

Wearable technology can also help us be more aware of our bodies in other ways. Wireless medical devices have made the world a lot smaller for those with chronic illnesses – for example, wireless blood glucose monitors and pacemakers allow doctors to remotely monitor their patients.

Or take a technology called Duofertility, a combination of skin patch and wireless monitor that allows its maker’s fertility consultants to remotely determine the most fertile days of a woman’s cycle, and advise on the best time to conceive. The company behind Duofertility claim its trials had the same success rate as an IVF cycle, which can be more expensive.

Wisdom of the crowd

In the future, some predict we might share even more. Researchers writing recently in the Journal of Medical Internet Research foresee patients using wireless medical devices and activity trackers to ‘crowdsource’ information and diagnoses about their body. This is already happening with crowdsourcing diagnostic websites such asPatientsLikeMe and CrowdMed, which allow people to share their mystery symptoms. PatientsLikeMe are already trialling data integration from wearable and implanted health devices. This is a future where, by bringing our bodies’ inner workings online, we could  tap into the wisdom of crowds to identify mystery ailments.

However, there may also be risks ahead – in particular, if people reveal much more than intended. Who should have access to your body’s information? For example, imagine health insurers’ delight when their customers start to upload – intentionally or otherwise – their movements, sexual activity, eating habits, or drug use. Do you go skydiving? How much red meat did you eat last week? How many sexual partners have you had? Insurers with this knowledge could charge you more, or simply refuse to cover you. Indeed, some are already concerned about health insurers misusing personal health information – it’s one reason why the UK National Health Service has decided to delay plans to share summarised patient records on an online database.

Another consideration is that no body exists in isolation. Your genes are the genes of your siblings and parents, for example. Some are now sharing the results of their genetic profiles online, on ancestry websites and forums, but there’s the possibility that they might mistakenly share information about somebody else who wanted to remain private. As science writer Virginia Hughes wrote: “Searching your genetic ancestry can certainly be fun… But the technology can just as easily unearth more private acts – infidelities, sperm donations, adoptions. Family secrets have never been so vulnerable.”

Broadcasting your body’s workings on the internet will inevitably be a fine balance between risk and reward. The returns for this technology could be significant, making us healthier and happier, but we may also have to accept our bodies becoming more public than ever before.

Source: BBC