international space station
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Space Drugs Factory Denied Reentry to Earth
After manufacturing crystals of an HIV drug in space, the first orbital factory is stuck in orbit after being denied reentry back to Earth due to safety concerns. The U.S. Air Force denied a request from Varda Space Industries to land its in-space manufacturing capsule at a Utah training area, while the U.S. Federal Aviation…
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NASA Wants a Giant Inflatable Bag to Collect and Throw Out Space Junk
Picking up the trash in space could be as easy as stuffing pieces of defunct spacecraft into a giant bag, closing it up, and tossing the pesky space junk into an orbital recycling plant. At least that’s what space startup TransAstra hopes to do with its inflatable capture bag. NASA recently awarded the California-based company…
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The ISS Has Higher Levels of Potentially Harmful Contaminants Than Most Homes
The International Space Station (ISS) has been home to more than 250 astronauts who have lived and worked on board the orbiting lab for months at a time. Unlike homes on Earth, however, the space station has been discovered to have higher levels of chemical contamination lingering in dust. A group of scientists analyzed a…
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ISS Experiment Hopes to Develop Air Conditioning for Future Habitats on Other Worlds
A group of engineers is testing an air conditioning system in space, seeing how two basic processes work in an environment with less gravity than Earth in order to design a system for future habitats on the Moon and Mars. The Flow Boiling and Condensation Experiment (FBCE) launched on board a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to…