Three items related to living in space:<\/p>\n
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Brief profiles of an impressive set of 12 candidates for the Mars One<\/a> mission to Mars:\u00a0Who will represent Massachusetts on Mars? It could be any of these 12 people – masslive.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Andrew Rader, 35, just moved to Los Angeles from Lexington, Mass. He was named “Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All” on the Discovery Channel reality show of the same name. He has a PhD in aerospace engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked on several Canadian space missions and wrote a book called\u00a0“Leaving Earth: Why One-Way to Mars Makes Sense.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n (This is a one-way trip. Everyone who wants to go has to be willing to live and die on Mars.)<\/em><\/p>\n Rader works for\u00a0SpaceX\u00a0as a “mission integrator” planning launches. He said he couldn’t go into any more detail, but he had a lot of insight into what a Mars colony would need to thrive.<\/em><\/p>\n “Mars has the potential to be turned into a second Earth in the next thousand years or so,” he said. “It’s the most important thing we can do as a species at the beginning of the 21st century.”<\/em><\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Speleo-biologist\u00a0Penelope Boston co-founded the Mars Society<\/a>. She talks in this interview about her participation in the 12 month\u00a0Mars Arctic 365 Simulation<\/a>\u00a0on Devon Island<\/a> in northern Canada, about her research and adventures in deep caves, about\u00a0lava tube caves on\u00a0Mars and t<\/span>he possibility of\u00a0of subterranean life there, about planetary protection, and\u00a0a number of\u00a0other interesting topics:\u00a0Life on the Subsurface: An Interview with Penelope Boston – BLDGBlog<\/a>.<\/p>\n The first time I did any serious caving was actually in\u00a0Lechuguilla Cave<\/a>. It was completely nuts to make that one\u2019s first wild cave. We trained for about three hours, then we launched into a five-day expedition into Lechuguilla that nearly killed us! Chris McKay came out with a terrible infection. I had a blob of gypsum in my eye and an infection that swelled it shut. I twisted my ankle. I popped a rib. Larry Lemke had a massive migraine. We were not prepared for this. The people taking us in should have known better. But one of them is a USGS guide and a super caving jock, so it didn\u2019t even occur to him\u2014it didn\u2019t occur to him that we were learning instantaneously to operate in a completely alien landscape with totally inadequate skills.<\/em><\/p>\n All I knew was that I was beaten to a pulp. I could almost not get across these chasms. I\u2019m a short person. Everybody else was six feet tall. I felt like I was just hanging on long enough so I could get out and live. I’ve been in jams before, including in Antarctica, but that\u2019s all I thought of the whole five days: I just have to live through this.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n But, when I got out, I realized that what the other part of my brain had retained was everything I had seen. The bruises faded. My eye stopped being infected. In fact, I got the infection from looking up at the ceiling and having some of those gooey blobs drip down into my eye\u2014but, I was like, \u201cOh my God. This is biological. I just know it is.\u201d So it was a clue. And, when, I got out, I knew I had to learn how to do this. I wanted to get back in there.<\/em><\/p>\n —<\/p>\n This sort of technology should aid in\u00a0keeping people breathing in settlements on Mars and elsewhere:\u00a0Man-made ‘breathing’ leaf is an oxygen factory for space travel – CNET<\/a>\u00a0–<\/p>\n Royal College of Art graduate\u00a0<\/span>Julian Melchiorri<\/a>\u00a0has created the first man-made, biologically functional leaf that takes in carbon dioxide, water, and light and releases oxygen. The leaf consists of chloroplasts — the part of a plant cell where photosynthesis happens — suspended in body made of silk protein.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three items related to living in space: — Brief profiles of an impressive set of 12 candidates for the Mars One mission to Mars:\u00a0Who will represent Massachusetts on Mars? It could be any of these 12 people – masslive.com. Andrew Rader, 35, just moved to Los Angeles from Lexington, Mass. He was named “Canada’s Greatest … Continue reading A dozen Mars-One candidates + Penelope Boston and caving on Mars + Artificial leaf makes real oxygen<\/span>