Tag: ISS

With awesome kits like the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo 11 lunar lander, LEGO continues to give space geeks reasons to bust out their wallets. Now, thanks to a great design concept submitted by a LEGO Ideas contributor, we’re about to get another sweet LEGO space model. Based on a design by Christophe Ruge (aka “XCLD”), this amazing LEGO creation lets you build a detailed model of the International Space Station. The 864-piece kit (set number 21321) includes the ISS’ working laboratory and living quarters at its center, surrounded by eight double solar panel arrays, each of which can be tilted.

NASA, the International Space Station, and DoubleTree by Hilton made a giant leap for snacking in outer space by challenging engineers, astronauts, and bakers to build and test the first zero-gravity kitchen to cook cookies in space.

If you’re in a dark enough place, and are patient enough to shoot lots of long exposure photos, you can capture some impressive star trail photography right here on Earth. The result are images which basically show the movement of the Earth relative to the stars around us.

Astronauts get all the cool robot toys, and the folks on board the International Space Station have a new robotic companion now. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has released the first images shot by the “Int-Ball,” a spherical camera that floats around alongside the rest of the crew in their zero-gravity environment. It looks cute enough to be in a Wall-E movie.

When I was a kid all I wanted was to be an astronaut. Like 99.9% of all kids with that dream, it never came true for me. About as close as we normal folks can get to being an astronaut on the International Space Station is watching this awesome new video from NASA. The video was produced by Harmonic just for NASA and takes us on a 4K fisheye exploration of the ISS, module by module.

Astronauts have to work out for at least two hours per day or they can experience muscle or bone density loss. I can only assume not working out for a few days means that their bodies will quit on them in the exact way that Rigby’s did in that episode of Regular Show where he refused to eat a salad. While the ISS has space for larger bits of workout gear, the Orion capsule set to eventually take a crew to Mars won’t. 

If there were ever a reason to put Forrest Gump on the ISS, this would be it. NASA sent up a pair of special paddles to the space station that allow astronauts to play ping-pong with water globes.

It has to be strange living on the International Space Station for months at a time. Every time I see a video from inside the ISS, I think about how there are no true floors or ceilings .

Space is a hard place for humans to survive. We constantly need water, food, and protection from radiation, and then there is the little fact that space has no air, food, or water just floating around for us to use.

Astronauts on the International Space Station get up to some cool experiment. Sometimes these experiments have limited scientific value, but look really cool. Take this video from the ISS shot with a fancy RED 4K camera. Astronaut Terry Virts first uses a syringe to drizzle a big orb of water into the room.

European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Alexander Gerst has been living in the International Space Station in the past five months. He’ll be back here later this month, but he sent his Halloween treat on time: photos of the ISS’ research center at bedtime.

Growing up, I really wanted to be an astronaut. Since I was only eight and had little chance of actually making it into space I did the next best thing and drank lots of Tang. I learned quickly that one of the downsides to being an astronaut was crappy breakfast drinks and freeze-dried ice cream.

The International Space Station was a massively expensive construction project. Part of that huge cost was the expense of getting the individual modules into space. Those things were massive and very heavy. In the future, astronauts in space might not need a hard construct to live in.

Ever get the feeling that you’re being watched? Well, you probably are. From space. NASA worked with high school students to design the International Space Station High Definition Earth Viewing or ISS HDEV, an experiment that lets anyone with Internet access watch our lovely planet live from space.

NASA has announced that it is set to send the OPALS – or Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science – device to the ISS. What that means is that NASA is sending a laser up to the ISS that can be used to send messages including HD video back to the Earth with more bandwidth and speed than conventional methods.

Gamers and game developers alike are excited about the potential of the Oculus Rift headset and the Virtuix Omni walking surface. But these virtual reality devices have applications beyond gaming. The Human Interfaces Group of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used both devices to make simulations of space environments.