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A constantly updated collection of articles from PopSci about the efforts of private companies to get involved in space travel and exploration

A new documentary from NASA tells of the difficulties of sending an astronaut into cold, deadly space, plus how far we've come since Gemini 4. Since the days of the first "extra-vehicular activities", spacewalks have allowed mankind to walk on the Moon, build the International Space Station, and save the Hubble telescope. And we're not done yet. Future spacewalks will take us even farther-to asteroids orbiting the Moon, and eventually, Mars. Check out the documentary to learn more:

Today, Bill Nye launched a Kickstarter campaign to help gather funds for the project. While the May 20 test of the LightSail prototype is good to go, the CubeSat won't be sailing on this trip. The test is merely to see if the sail can deploy. The Planetary Society sill needs money for their primary mission in fall 2016, when they will launch the CubeSat high enough into space for some sun sailing.

One such method is the pad abort test; it's a failsafe the Dragon will use on the launch pad in case the area becomes unexpectedly dangerous. Let's say a booster falls off before liftoff, spewing fire everywhere. SpaceX can initiate the pad abort, which will carry the capsule and its crew to safety. Eight SuperDraco engines embedded in the walls of the Dragon fire up and rocket the vehicle away from the dangerous launch pad.
The May 6 test demonstrated how the pad abort test would work, jettisoning the Dragon off of a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. No humans were on board for the ride, but SpaceX just released a video of the procedure, from the point of view of the spacecraft itself. Take a look below, and learn about the different phases of the test here.

Just a week after NASA scientists announced their certainty of finding alien life within the next 20 years, a team of scientists say they've found no obvious signs of advanced extraterrestrial life after searching 100,000 galaxies.

"Curiosity, you are such an amazing space mission that we will sacrifice a thousand blog posts, a million gallons of newsprint even, in your honor. But can you do this? NASA's Cassini probe, not content to be forgotten in its faraway orbit around Saturn and its moons, has beamed back new natural-color images of the ringed planet that are absolutely breathtaking. Released yesterday, they show a very different planet than the one Cassini arrived at eight years ago."

One new power plant is aiming to change that. Copenhagen's new waste-to-energy plant, the Amager Resource Center built by the Bjarke Ingels Group will have both a ski slope and a rock-climbing wall on its modern exterior, while inside, household waste is incinerated and turned into energy. It's a relatively clean process, but still one that generates CO2.

And that's why it's not great news that bees haven't been doing so well in recent years. Last year, the United States lost 40 percent of its honeybee population, a devastating loss. No one is exactly sure what's causing the collapse, but climate change, pesticide use, disease, and habitat loss are all suspect. And other countries around the world are having the same difficulties. In Norway, which also noticed declines in bee populations, people are creating a 'bee highway' that gives bees a safe haven in the middle of the country's capital city.

ere's a crack in California. It stretches for 800 miles, from the Salton Sea in the south, to Cape Mendocino in the north. It runs through vineyards and subway stations, power lines and water mains. Millions live and work alongside the crack, many passing over it (966 roads cross the line) every day. For most, it warrants hardly a thought. Yet in an instant, that crack, the San Andreas fault, could ruin lives and cripple the national economy.

Cane toads in Australia have evolved to hop straighter and farther than ever before, Australia's ABC News reports. That means they're spreading faster than ever through Australia, sparking worries that they'll harm native species in places where they've never lived before. Twenty-six years after the debut of Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, it seems scientists are still struggling to control the large, poisonous toad.
Sugar growers released cane toads, which are native to Brazil, in Australia in 1935. They wanted the toads to eat cane beetles, a sugarcane pest. However, cane toads didn't eat cane beetles; instead they began killing off native species such as lizards and crocodiles, which would die after eating the toads. Sometime in the 1990s, a quirky documentary reporting on the cane toads' effects in Australia became popular-and made the chubby amphibians into the international poster children for what can go wrong with introduced species.

Here at Popular Science, we love space-and we know you do too. From seeing the nearly-true colors of Europa, a molten metal orb levitate in microgravity, or even a map of a distant protoplanet, pictures of and from beyond Earth are often the best way to journey to the final frontier.
To that end, this is your (almost) daily dose of amazing space imagery. Bookmark this page to see a wide variety of space-related eye candy, including photographs our home planet taken from orbit, stunning scientific visualizations, and of course, amazing astronomy images.

There's a new island in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to an underwater volcano eruption that's been going on for the past month.
The new island is in the Tonga archipelago--a group of islands southeast of Fiji. Scientists discovered it on January 16, about a month into the volcano's eruption. The volcano, called Hunga Tonga, has since stopped erupting.
The island is mostly made of ash and formed around the crater of the volcano, measuring a little more than half a mile wide. The before-and-after images, from the Pleiades satellite, gives a clear picture of how far the ash spread, extending toward on of the two islands that border the underground volcano.

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Update 5:53 p.m. Well that was quick. High upper altitude winds scrubbed the launch for tonight, so SpaceX will have to try again tomorrow. See you then!
Update 5:50 p.m. We're getting ready to roll! The SpaceX livestream is up and running, with some snappy elevator music to keep us occupied until we see what's going on at the launch pad.
Original story below:
For SpaceX tonight, it's time for round two of "catch the rocket."
The company will attempt to launch another Falcon 9 rocket at 6:05 p.m. ET. On board is the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a satellite designed to orbit the Earth and keep a lookout for incoming solar storms that can muck up communication and power systems.
DSCOVR has waited 17 long years to get into space, making this launch particularly exciting. But an extra-special part of this mission happens after launch: The majority of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt to safely land itself on an autonomous drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. If the feat is successful, it'll be a big step toward a future in which reusable rockets may become the norm.
Typically, most of a rocket is either destroyed or lost after it leaves the launch pad, never to be recovered. This makes space travel pricey because an entirely new rocket must be built for every launch. SpaceX hopes to change that paradigm by recovering as much of the rocket as it can for reuse in future launches. And that could drastically reduce the cost of spaceflight.
To save its rockets, SpaceX now equips them with "hypersonic grid fins." These pop-out devices slow and guide the Falcon 9 toward its target, and they're powered by a hydraulic system that releases fluids over time to control the descent. In a previous attempt to land a Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX apparently didn't store enough hydraulic fluid in the system. The result: The rocket hit its target a bit too hard:

Overall, Geyer and his team estimated that a small number of nations accounted for the most plastic trash found in the oceans. In fact, 20 countries were responsible for 83 percent of all of the world's mismanaged plastic waste going into the deep blue sea. China was deemed the big bad wolf of plastic waste, generating up to 3.5 million tons of marine junk per year. The United States ranked 20th, dumping about 110,000 metric tons per year.

Since its inception in 1958, NASA has accomplished some pretty spectacular feats of science. Our country has landed humans on the Moon six times. We've successfully put laboratories onto the surface of Mars, and we've flown by every single planet in our solar system, including the recently promoted asteroid-turned-dwarf planet, Ceres.
Despite decades of scientific and technological achievements, some people still think that funding NASA is a waste of money. However, when you do the calculations, it turns out we are actually getting a great value from this government-run agency.