Space

Interstellar space travel is one of the main draws of the fantasy genre. It has been more than a century that we as a whole race have fantasized about traveling to other star systems, discovering other worlds, colonizing them, finding new life forms, even waging wars with aliens but how close is it to reality? Is it even possible to colonize when one is limited by the physical “speed cap” that has been put upon us? Or is the speed of light even reachable for us? Well to keep it nice easy and short - no. Traveling with the speed of light requires an object to lose mass. The light is able to do it since photons have none of it. Light is composed of photons, which are massless particles. The theory is that it has speed and momentum but no mass meaning that the particle can achieve the long...

How is a human being affected by a space trip? Have you ever wondered what would happen if you traveled through time and space, far out in the universe? How would you change? Should you age? And would your family be there when you get home? Traveling in space is a milestone we humans have passed. But the question is when to make it something every day and something to explore yet beyond its limits. Today we don't really know what space is for. We do research, we create theories and we draw conclusions. But if you really think deeply, do we have any idea why and what we really want to know? From 1961 around 400 people have left the earth's atmosphere. The problem with traveling in space is that the body breaks down. Our body is weakened in weightlessness, which can lead to, for ...

As a child, one often wonders how large the Universe actually is. Does it continue forever in every conceivable direction? Our brains, understandably, have a hard time coping with infinity. Everything in our everyday lives, including really big objects like our entire planet, is of finite size. So maybe it feels easier to handle the idea of ​​a Universe of finite size. But if the Universe is of finite size, must there be some kind of "boundary"? But what is beyond that limit? More space and more stars? The unintuitive strikes back with force. But in the natural sciences - not least in astrophysics - we are forced to leave our intuitions early. How the entire Universe works is not governed by our own emotional and intuitive requirements. So the question of the size of the Universe mus...

When do we travel to Mars? Why don't humans go to Mars? Because it gets awfully expensive, technically difficult and very risky. We probably would have traveled by the end of the 20th century if only Mars had been a little more welcoming than a rusty desert. But if not for too long, humanity's greatest adventure finally begins. One of the drivers is Buzz Aldrin.  Another is entrepreneur Elon Musk who has breathtaking plans. NASA is planning a first manned Mars trip sometime in the 2030s. The conditions are there thanks to the new giant rocket SLS and the four-man capsule Orion. But private SpaceX and its dynamic boss Elon Musk are aiming to send people to Mars as early as 2024 with the rocket ITS, which is several times more powerful than both the SLS and the lunar rocket Sa...

After seven months of traveling through space, NASA's InSight mission has landed on Mars. The red planet does not seem to be far away anymore. The question now is: What should we eat there? Space solutions mean being extremely efficient with food, water, air, and energy - the same things we struggle with on earth. But it's not just space solutions that can make Mars flourish when we humans get there. Smartly designed hyper-complex, rich and improved nature-based cultivation systems have already transformed wasteland in Burkina Faso into sparkling and highly productive gardens with a variety of crops. It is an extremely fascinating research: Practical plant cultivation and food production created by the Sony Computer Science Lab in Tokyo and called "synecoculture". Can it be used on M...

With one hand on the lunar landing ladder, Neil Armstrong takes the historical step and puts his boot-clad foot on the lunar surface. On July 21, 196 he says the famous words: "This is a small step for a human being but a huge leap for humanity." For the first time in world history, man has set foot on the moon, and this is just the beginning of a whole new era. At least that's what most people consider this historic milestone. But there are also a few conspiracy theorists who claim that the lunar landings have never taken place. Everything is a single big scam, planned and executed by a colossal conspiracy consisting of the US government, the NASA space organization, the film industry and the media. The aim should be to increase US power and gain prestige. Nobody talked ...

When does man set foot on Mars? There is a lot of talk about Mars nowadays. Mankind has sent many robots to the red planet. However, no human has set foot on Mars. When is it time to go there, really? The short answer is: nobody knows. Nasa's plan The US Space Agency Nasa plans to send people to Mars in the 2030s. Before that, however, they want to send people to the moon to develop technology and train for the long trip to Mars. No man has been on the moon since 1972. The plan is to build a space station orbiting the Moon - the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. This space station will be developed together with the European Space Agency Esa, Russian Roscosmos, Japanese Jaxa and Canadian CSA. SpaceX plan The US space company SpaceX plans to send an unmanned rocket to Mars in 202...

Can life from Earth survive on Mars? Is there life on Mars and can life from Earth survive there? Well, at least microbes, fungi, lichens and mosses can survive under different space conditions. It shows biological experiments from the space station ISS, made by researchers in the international BIOMEX project. Life on Mars is a research topic that employs many researchers around the world. The international BIOMEX research team (BIOlogy and Mars Experiment) has done a feasibility study on how organisms from Earth can survive under Mars-like conditions. An overview of their results has now been published. The purpose of the BIOMEX project was to investigate how different biological samples (including different microbes, fungi, lichens, mosses and different biochemical substances an...

Man is working hard to colonize space, but it will not join an armada of shining spacecraft. We will proceed cautiously. Mankind is supposed to colonize space. But what will happen when we can't travel faster than the speed of light? We are referred to our own solar system because it would take too long to travel further into space. Just the idea of ​​building thunder-spacecraft that transport colonizers to various habitable planets and leave them there to cope there without the opportunity to communicate with the earth because of the distance seems crowded. Yet it is cherished by a large number of science-fiction writers. The result of those fantasies is that there are spheres of power formed by outsiders who have forgotten the earth or hate the earth that left them in the lurch,...

In science fiction films and space adventures, the story of the self-sacrificing astronaut who leaves his children on earth is often told to return several years later - much younger than the children. But is it at all related? Astronauts don't get younger by a spaceflight, but they age a little slower than people who stay on Earth. The faster a body moves, the slower the passage of time. This was shown by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity from 1905, and this has been confirmed in several different experiments. Time in space goes slower When astronauts move at high speeds, time goes a bit slower for them than for people staying on Earth. Astronauts do not notice any difference in time - for them, time goes exactly as it usually does. Only when they return ho...