Space Travel

A lengthy trip to Mars, which exposes astronauts to a combination of cosmic radiation and weightlessness, could result in permanent kidney damage, according to a new study. It's the largest analysis to date on how spaceflight affects kidney health.

Warp drives are among the more plausible of science fiction concepts, at least from a physics perspective. Now, a group of scientists and engineers has launched open-source software that lets you design and test scientifically accurate warp drives.

In order to survive long trips to other planets, astronauts are going to have to eat more than just easily-stored TV dinners and ramen noodles. With that fact in mind, scientists recently created what they determined could be the ideal fresh-food meal for space travelers.

Space travel places great stress on the mind and body. With an eye on its implications for future space travel, a new study is the first to examine how flight involving exposure to significant changes in g-forces impacts the functioning of pilots' brains.

The secrets of the mysterious EmDrive thruster – which stumped both NASA and Chinese research teams by delivering measurable thrust without a propellant – have finally been unlocked. The thrust comes from ... drum roll ... repeated experimental error.

Faster-than-light “warp drives” may be theoretically possible, but they usually involve exotic physics well out of our reach. Now an astrophysicist has outlined a hypothetical design that could allow FTL travel using conventional physics.

ESA is looking at using the world's thinnest known material to build lighter, more efficient solar sails. By making sails out of one-atom-thick graphene sheets, the space agency aims to make sails capable of propelling unmanned interstellar missions.

Most oxygen in the universe isn’t in the form that we need to breathe: molecular oxygen, or O2. Now, researchers at Caltech claim to have created a reactor that can turn carbon dioxide into molecular oxygen, which could help us fight climate change here on Earth or generate oxygen for life in space.

An examination of the tissues ​of rodents that orbited the Earth in a Russian spacecraft revealed that the reduced load on their joints caused the breakdown of cartilage and signs of arthritis-like degradation​.

The lack of gravity in space means that muscles begin to waste away, and scientists have been studying these health effects on Earth with extended bed-rest experiments. In the latest, those beds will be put in a centrifuge to mimic artificial gravity, to see if that can help offset the issues.

Several experiments have shown that the EMDrive can generate thrust from basically nothing – in apparent violation of Newton’s Laws of Motion. Unfortunately, a German team has now built and tested their own EMDrive, and found that environmental factors may have been responsible for false positives.

At this moment, two Voyager probes are speeding out into the unknown each carrying a "golden record" with information about our planet, our many different languages, our sciences and arts. But if a new theory about life in the universe is correct, those records may never find an audience.