![]() ![]() Nasa’s space shuttle programme, which kicked off in the early 1970s by promising safe and affordable access to space, hoped to cost just a few tens of million dollars per launch. The ISS is the most expensive machine ever constructed with a price tag at around $150bn (£115bn). How much does it cost to send them up?Īstronomical. However, they have provided lifts for space travellers from 40 countries, including a member of the Saudi royal family and even paying customers, such as South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, aged just 28. Only three countries, China, Russia and the US, have human space programmes as it remains prohibitively expensive. Which countries have human space programmes? He and his twin seemed in similar shape – good news for future deep space missions. One big issue is that eye problems develop, but Kelly found his body recovered fast on return. But they need to wear a harness to keep them from floating off the treadmill. There is even a gym on the ISS where astronauts can keep their muscles – no longer needed to prop them up – from slowly wasting away. He doesn’t hold the record for the most extended foray into the void – that is claimed by Gennady Padalka, who spent two and half years of his life up there on several missions – but the Kelly experiment had a natural advantage over others: he has a twin.Ĭomparing their bodies throughout, scientists were able to assess how bones, muscles and other parts of the body deteriorate in space. Scott Kelly, a US former fighter pilot and long-time Nasa astronaut, spent a year bouncing around the cramped capsules of the ISS in an attempt to understand the long-term impact of space flight. What happens to the body in space?Ī lot, and until we properly understand how weightlessness affects humans, we won’t be able to send this era’s pioneers further afield to places such as Mars or wandering asteroids. There are three up there at the moment, speeding around the globe once every 90 minutes. Since 2000, humans have been living in space constantly. When it eventually fell to Earth (thankfully unoccupied) and burned up, our current space outpost, the International Space Station (ISS), was launched. What do we do there?Įven though we did not go back to deep space, humans have begun to live and work outside the Earth’s atmosphere, often conducting experiments on themselves to determine the effects of weightlessness, or microgravity, on the human body.īy 1986, the Soviet Union had launched the Mir space station. That’s where the vast array of communications and navigation satellites live, speeding at thousands of miles an hour to avoid plummeting back to earth. We imagine astronauts floating in free space or bouncing in moon craters, yet the majority of those lucky enough have instead spun around in low Earth’s orbit – between 99 and a few hundred miles high. In fact, no one has left the outskirts of the Earth since then. Apollo 11 touched down on our dusty grey neighbour on 20 July 1969.Ī total of 12 men walked on the moon over the next few years, all Americans, but no one has been back there since 1972. The Soviet Union pulled ahead with the first space walks, but US president John F Kennedy’s announcement that America would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s focused the space race squarely on that goal. Only a 10th of those have been women, in big part due to sexist policies by Nasa and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. Since then, more than 550 people have blasted themselves into the deep black abyss, although not all agree on how far up you need to go until you hit space, so there is no internationally accepted figure.
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