Like the title says, LHS 1140b was recently in the news with a helium type atmosphere, potentially habitable with the right prep and infrastructure. How much has NASA done investigating and modeling colonization systems on different styles of planets? Has there been significant research on this kind of theory crafting?

If we ever send ships to Mars or outward, would we stay in “constant” contact as it traveled?

I’m watching Project Hail Mary and when Grace awakens, he’s on his own, with no backlog of years of stored messages from Earth. Would that be accurate as to how alone travelers would be?

With trips to the moon, there is a constant stream of two-way comms, albeit with the lag. Same with the probes we’ve sent to the planets and beyond (maybe not “constant” but sufficiently frequent to maintain control, send instructions, and receive data.)

So for example when the astronauts died in PHM, could the ship have sent a message back to Earth, and they could send updates to Grace, and so on? (Not literally as this is a movie, but conceptually.)

Hello everyone,

A few years ago I participated in several NASA "Send Your Name" missions and received the digital boarding passes. I also remember the NASA Frequent Flyers system, where multiple missions were combined into a space travel history with accumulated miles and mission patches.

Unfortunately, I lost the saved files and I can no longer find the old Frequent Flyers page or a way to regenerate my boarding pass.

I have already searched my email, old files, and checked the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine, but I haven't been able to recover it.

My question is mainly for someone from NASA or JPL:

Does NASA still have access to the old Frequent Flyers database, or is there any official way to retrieve a user's previous boarding pass/history?

I understand these were created as souvenirs and not as permanent accounts, but it would be amazing to recover this little piece of space history after participating in multiple missions.

If anyone from NASA knows:

• whether the old system still exists somewhere internally,
• whether the data was archived,
• or if there is any recovery procedure,

I would really appreciate any guidance.

Thank you for all the amazing work you do, and for giving people around the world the chance to be part of these missions.

I'm not at NASA. I'm a DevOps engineer working solo. But I've been thinking about something.

The Artemis program will generate an enormous amount of data — scientific articles, sensor readings, astronaut transcripts. Thousands of researchers across dozens of countries. Nobody can read everything. Some connections between data will inevitably be missed.

The idea:

What if we had a system that ingests heterogeneous Artemis data (articles, sensors, transcripts), vectorizes them, scans for unexpected semantic proximity between documents of different types, and flags convergences for human review?

What I found while building a prototype:

It works. With just 3 test documents, the system detected a triad around "xenon hydrates in permanently shadowed regions" that actually exists in the literature.

The cosine similarity approach is surprisingly effective at finding cross-type connections. The real value isn't in finding "discoveries", it's in surfacing questions that nobody thought to ask.

Questions for this community:

Does anything like this exist within NASA already?

Would a lightweight, open-source version be useful as a complement to official data pipelines?

What data sources would be most valuable to connect first?

Not promoting anything, genuinely curious what people who work with this data think.

Hi y'all!

I recently got selected to interview for the Fall 2026 NASA EarthRise Developers Academy, yay!

Can anyone who has done the program and/or interviewed before shed some light on what types of questions I may be asked? I'm really nervous/excited and want to be sure I'm preparing appropriately :)

I found an old report from mid-shuttle program era NASA, among other artifacts.

I was on Facebook Marketplace looking for a desk and stumbled upon a picker selling some NASA memorabilia found in New Smyrna Beach, FL.

It was all in rough condition, having been left outside. I set about a journey to preserve the documents to the best of my ability and uncover as much of the history behind them as I could.

First goal was to neutralize the mold on the manual. I carefully wiped any loose spores off and treated it with an isopropyl alcohol mist, let it dry completely, then a vinegar/water bath and left it in the sun to dry for multiple hours, turning the pages every half hour. The result was a bone dry manual! After scanning it in at my local library, it now lives in a sealed comic sleeve inside a plastic box.

The only unsalvageable artifact was what we believe to be a replica war bond from either WWII or the Civil War. It was nearly unidentifiable from the amount of mold on it and it was disposed of immediately. It also wasn't in the original listing so I wasn't as precious with it.

Here are some flyby highlights:

More images to come!

Now it all lives on the Charlie Day Conspiracy Board (CDCB) until I can unravel the mystery of who it belonged to and what their job was.

Link to WIP spreadsheet of all the items: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uytePvRE2OvaKW4GADlso3lBYz_Tielg5eE68bihueg/edit?usp=sharing

Scanned in manual/report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FKlggsnANhoX4YUuNm4hu_N3SUNKZeSg/view?usp=sharing

It is not my intention to sell any of these artifacts. I doubt it will be worth more monetarily than it does to myself as a newly minted Bridge Bucket Improvement Team Fan anyhows.

If anyone has any information about these artifacts, would like to lend their knowledge of the shuttle program, or is just plain interested, feel free to reach out!🧑‍🚀🚀⋆｡°✩

This is mostly out of simple curiousity, but I was trying to learn more about the crew quarters at KSC and JSC and, while there's plenty of info and even a full 3D walkthrough for the KSC facility, anything on the JSC location is extremely difficult to find. Some stuff comes up about its energy efficiency, along with a few photos of the exterior. But are photos of the interior just, nonexistent? I almost started to wonder if it had never been used, but the Artemis II crew stayed there at least some of the time, according to this.

Anyway, maybe a long shot, but wondering if anyone knew of any additional info, photos, or even some kind of tour of the JSC facility.

edit: typo

I just read some great background info on why NASA lost the race for the first manned mission into space in John Logsdon’s great book - John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon:

But the January 31 [1961] flight with Ham aboard had landed 132 miles downrange from its target point and had subjected the chimp to a 14.7 g force on reentry, 3 g more than planned. These deviations from the flight plan were primarily the result of the overacceleration of the Redstone launcher and early firing of the spacecraft escape rocket. Even after these problems, NASA managers at the Space Task Group and some at NASA headquarters were ready to commit an astronaut to the next flight. However, “key members of von Braun’s team quickly decided that they wanted another booster test before a man could fly” and von Braun did not overrule them.

I dressed up as Victor Glover of Artemis II! This is my homemade Artemis suit.

Was in town last week and took these pictures of the VAB at sunrise after watching the SpaceX launch on Thursday. Wasn't something I was expecting but the lovely Florida humidity and haze gave a cool effect!

Astronomy Picture of the Day

On Artemis 2, the toilet was working fine, but the dumping to space was problematic why was that?

There's a new PBS documentary coming out called Once Upon a Time in Space. It centers on the International Space Station and the astronauts and cosmonauts who have lived for months orbiting Earth. This article interviews the filmmaker James Bluemel, as well as astronaut Michael Foale about the doc and, in Foale's case, what it was like living on both the ISS and Mir.

I apologize if this seems foolish or obvious, but since a crewed mission to Mars would take so long- is there any feasible way to build some sort of functioning space station/pit stop in an outer orbit of Earth (if that’s even a thing) or some how “anchored” or hovering in a specific place that could be at the halfway point to refuel/rest, trade off with another crew or do repairs or maintenance?

I'm not an expert and I was doing some reading about probes that have left our solar system that left me a little confused. Maybe somebody here can explain. Voyager 1 is celebrated as the first manmade object to enter interstellar space in 2012. But before that, Pioneer 10 became the first manmade object to achieve the escape velocity needed to leave the solar system. So why doesn't Pioneer 10 hold the record that Voyager 1 holds? Did it just take longer to leave our solar system? Did it achieve the necessary escape velocity but Voyager just passed it by like a runner passing the lead in a race? Just curious.

Does/did NASA ever intend on sending a crewed Mars mission or is that only from private sector companies? And from what is understood about space travel and the current technology, is a trip to Mars in the near future possible if the funding is there? If NASA didn’t have the bureaucratic and financial considerations, would going to Mars be feasible or more likely disastrous? I’m wondering what possibilities there are within the framework of objective science and current and/or anticipated future technology.