In Brief:

NASA orders another astronaut flight

Tuesday, August 2, 2016 - 18:13 StudyHall.Rocks

Artist's concept of SpaceX spacecraft docking at the station.

Image: NASA.

NASA wants SpaceX to take on a second manned mission to the International Space Station, as the space agency works toward again launching U.S. astronauts from home soil.

Two crew missions also have been ordered from Boeing Co., according to NASA. And previously, SpaceX was to do one crew mission. Both Boeing and SpaceX have been building and testing spacecraft to carry out tests and launch missions for the agency.
NASA's space shuttle program ended in July 2011, leaving American astronauts dependent on Russian spacecraft for transportation to the station. In 2014, NASA announced that it would award a total of $6.8 billion in contracts to the two companies to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX is building four Crew Dragon spacecraft -- two for testing and two for flight tests in 2017. The company is also modifying a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will carry as many as four crew members, along with cargo.

SMALL STARS AND LIFE: Scientists say life is likely to develop on other planets in the distant future.
“The higher a star's mass, the shorter its lifetime,” notes a release on the Harvard University website. “Stars larger than about three times the sun's mass will expire before life has a chance to evolve.”
But smaller stars glow for 10 trillion years, and thus the probability of life developing on their planets will grow over time.
See the paper here: Relative Likelihood for Life as a Function of Cosmic Time.

Study: Life elsewhere could be extinct

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