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Sabotage aboard the International Space Station? MORE evidence of 'drilling' has been found in the docked Soyuz spacecraft, Russia claims The ISS experienced a drop in pressure due to an air leak overnight to August 30 A top official in Moscow claimed last week the damage was caused by a drill Now Russian sources say more extensive evidence of 'drilling' has been found Alarming new traces of 'drilling' have been found on a Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, Russian sources revealed today. Moscow had already hinted at possible sabotage over damage found to the Soyuz MS-09 and...

NASA wants to build another space station, but this one won’t live in a close orbit around Earth. Within the last year, NASA has begun planning for a much smaller astronaut outpost in orbit around the Moon, a new destination dubbed the Gateway. The idea is for this space station, which will be a fraction of the size of the International Space Station, to serve as a place for astronauts to live and train for excursions to and from the lunar surface. A crucial piece of hardware needed for this Gateway will, of course, be habitats — spaces for a...

Late last week, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station woke up to some distressing news: There was a leak somewhere on the station, and air was escaping into space. After an extensive search, the leak was finally found and plugged with tape and gauze, and the air pressure inside the station has been stabilized. But now that the crisis has passed, there’s a new concern for the astronauts and the space agencies that manage the station. How exactly did that hole get there in the first place? At first, the theory was that a stray micrometeorite collided with the...

Several days ago it was reported that astronauts found a hole in the Russian segment of the International Space Station that was leaking air. One of the astronauts plugged the hole with his own finger before sealing the hole with a nylon ribbon to stabilise pressure on board the ISS. The hole posed no threat to the crew, but it had to be fixed. According to updated information, the 2-millimeter (0.08-inch) hole appeared in the spaceship when the Soyuz was being built. Reportedly, an employee made a mistake, but it was decided to fix the problem with the help of...

by Jeff Foust — August 30, 2018 Soyuz MS-09 The ISS crew traced the leak to a small hole in the orbital module, the top section of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft. Credit: NASA WASHINGTON — As the crew of the International Space Station worked Aug. 30 to fix, at least temporarily, a minor air leak, the incident illustrated the growing orbital debris risk to the outpost and strains in American and Russian approaches to ISS operations. NASA, in a statement early Aug. 30, said that controllers first noticed a minor drop in air pressure within the station at around 7...

Pressure sensors detected a depressurization in the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday night. The crew had to search for a leak, which was eventually traced to the Russian space capsule docked with the station. The leak was found in the Soyuz craft, which is docked with the ISS, reported Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin. The official said air was being sucked out through a 1.5mm fracture, which may have been caused by a micrometeorite impact. “The crew safety is not in danger,” he said. “The spaceship will be kept, a repair kit will be used.” Rogozin said the malfunction...

A small air leak was detected on the International Space Station Wednesday night (Aug. 29) but does not pose an immediate danger to the astronauts currently living aboard the orbiting laboratory. Flight controllers on Earth began to notice signs of a slight pressure drop in the orbiting laboratory around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT), while the six crewmembers of Expedition 56 were sleeping, NASA officials said in a statement today (Aug. 30). Because the pressure loss was "very small," flight controllers determined that the astronauts and cosmonauts "are in no danger," officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) said in...

“If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred. A fully reusable vehicle has never been done before. That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.” --Elon Musk

Nine astronauts have new travel plans aboard commercial space capsules, with their mission assignments announced earlier today (Aug. 3). Five of those astronauts flew aboard the United States' last set of spacecraft to travel to the International Space Station (ISS), the space shuttles. But while the newly announced crews are excited to once again launch from Florida instead of Kazakhstan, they aren't very nostalgic for the hardware of the shuttles themselves. During the press announcement of the new astronaut assignments, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine asked two veteran astronauts to compare their new rides to the shuttles they flew more than...

A huge amount of "UFO" videos were posted to YouTube this weekend regarding an object seen in the morning twilight skies over Florida on Friday morning. Popular UFO channels like Third Phase of the Moon reported it as a UFO incident. The real cause? A SpaceX launch of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule to orbit to deliver cargo and supplies to the International Space Station for CRS-15. Despite some who think that "SpaceX is FakeX" and that all of spaceflight is a hoax (including a number of Freepers), the real hoax is the belief that this was...

Two astronauts floated outside the International Space Station Thursday and installed two new cameras on the front of the lab complex that will provide views of commercial crew ships during final approach and docking. The spacewalkers also replaced a faulty high-definition camera and closed a door that was jammed open on an external instrument. Floating in the Quest airlock, Expedition 56 commander Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold switched their spacesuits to battery power at 8:06 a.m. EDT (GMT-4), kicking off what turned out to be a six-hour 49-minute excursion. It was the fifth spacewalk overall for Arnold and the ninth...

An Orbital ATK Antares rocket will launch a commercial Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station from Virginia's Eastern Shore before dawn on Monday, and the launch could be visible to potentially millions of spectators along the U.S. East Coast. The Antares rocket is scheduled to launch at 4:39 a.m. EDT (0839 GMT) on Monday (May 21) and should be highly visible across the East Coast of the United States, weather permitting. The mission, called OA-9, will launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to deliver more than 3 tons of supplies to...

On Monday, a cargo delivery to the International Space Station will carry old-fashioned sextants, E. colibacteria and lasers that will create a temperature 10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space. … CAL is sending the space station an experimental physics package that holds an "ice chest"-like compartment filled with lasers and electronics; the interior will be able to reach a temperature10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space, according to a NASA statement. Within this instrument, the researchers will use laser cooling techniques and magnets to slow down atoms until they are almost entirely motionless. By studying...

Let's see how long this thread lasts, the mods pull everything I post that offends or upset the delicate little flat earth and science hating snowflakes that have taken over FreeRepublic these days. Here's a simple method anyone can use to measure the altitude, size, and velocity of the International Space Station by capitalizing on a lunar transit (where ISS is silhouetted against the moon within a narrow corridor - you can find opportunities on transit-finder.com). Anyone can do this with a friend using a good high magnification camera like a P900 or other long focal length telephoto lens on...

Okay, a composition of various pics and videos, but really well done... Clickee here! This 4K / UHD video is created from a many photos taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The video has been recomposed to cover the same amount of time it would have taken the ISS to pass over this part of the Earth.

In this Sept. 16, 2014 photo provided by NASA, astronaut Jeanette Epps participates in a spacewalk training session at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. In June 2018, Epps was supposed to be the first African-American to live on the International Space Station, but on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2018, NASA announced it was pulling her off the mission for undisclosed reasons. (Robert Markowitz/NASA via AP) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ NASA has bumped an astronaut off an upcoming spaceflight, a rare move for the space agency so close to launch. Astronaut Jeanette Epps was supposed to rocket away in early June, and would have...

A Japanese astronaut who is living on the International Space Station says he has grown 9cm (3.5in) since arriving there just over three weeks ago. Norishige Kanai wrote on social media he was worried he would not fit into the seat of the Russian Soyuz vehicle that is due to bring him home in June. Astronauts grow an average of between two and five centimetres in space. This is because of the absence of gravity which allows the vertebrae in their spines to spread apart. Mr Kanai tweeted: "Good morning, everybody. I have a major announcement today. We had our...

Today, operations in space are more routine and the competition between states is more diffuse. While generally still important in international politics, prestige plays only a small role in the current international dynamic. To be clear: There is still competition between the U.S. and rising powers. However, unlike the Cold War, which was a battle of opposing political philosophies, here we see competition primarily over economic and strategic opportunity. Another significant difference between the Cold War space race and the current one is that the playing field isn’t level as it was during the Cold War. The U.S. today has...

NASA astronauts successfully sequenced the DNA of microbes found aboard the International Space Station, marking the first time unknown organisms were sequenced and identified entirely in space. Previously, microbes had to be sent to Earth for analysis, and this new sequencing marks an important step in diagnosing astronaut illnesses and, someday, identifying any DNA-based life found on other planets... ... As a part of the Genes in Space-3 mission, astronauts on the space station last year touched a petri plate to surfaces on the space station and grew the bacteria found there into colonies, which NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson used...

President Donald Trump signed his administration's first space policy directive today (Dec. 11), which formally directs NASA to focus on returning humans to the moon.