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On March 28, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly began a historic year in Space. Time follows Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, as they work the test the boundaries of long-term space travel.

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.

Kelly and astronaut Terry Virts discussed those things and more in one of at least four video chats TIME will conduct with the ISS during our exclusive Year in Space coverage. Phoning the station is not easy. It takes days of planning and at least an hour of sound checks before the uplink is made, and then long delays as questions and answers are relayed back and forth. It makes ordinary conversation a challenge.

Still, even in the 14 minutes the connection lasted-during which the station passed over Canada, the Great Lakes, Minneapolis, Denver, and Southern California-Kelly and Virts were surprisingly open, sharing their feelings about both the camaraderie and the sublime loneliness of being where they are. Kelly especially must be mindful of those feelings as he faces 10 more months of circling the Earth, while his family and friends and everything he knows lie 250 miles below him.

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.

Another month, another carbon dioxide record. This time the record extends beyond the rocky slopes of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, home to the most storied carbon dioxide record, and includes 39 other sites around the globe to paint a troubling picture of a greenhouse gas rise with no signs of slowing down.

A video talking about the need for the Doomsday seed vault. Also documents the process used to collect the seeds and store the seeds.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on the moon? What about Mars, or Venus or Mercury? We sure have and that's why we decided to find out what it might be like to live on other worlds in our solar system, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond in a new, weekly 12-part series.

For this series, written by Space.com contributor Joseph Castro, we wanted to know what the physical sensation of living on other worlds would be like: What would the gravity be like on Mercury; How long would your day be on Venus? What's the weather on Titan?

This quiz could be used as a building block for another quiz about the speed of light.

"Easy science experiments and science fair project ideas that make learning fun."

"There are just some things that are synonymous with "summertime snacks," and we can't think of a summer snack we enjoy quite as much as s'mores. But what would you do if you weren't allowed to have a fire or just didn't have the tools necessary for a fire? We came up with a pretty neat way to harness the heat and energy of the sun to create a solar powered cooker that makes a delicious batch of s'mores without a fire!"

"When you hear about a volcano erupting, what do you think is going on? If you're like us, you think of red hot chunks of rock being hurled thousands of feet in the air, flows of liquid magma, and plumes of smoke. That's not always the case. Some volcanoes erupt underwater and their smoking hot by-products are immediately cooled. With the Storm in a Cup, you can see what happens underwater on a smaller, safer scale."

"The Hubble space telescope has captured an image of a "barred spiral" galaxy that could help us better understand our own Milky Way. Most of the known spiral galaxies fall into this "barred" category - which are defined by the pronounced bar structure across their centres. The presence of this structure may be an indication of a galaxy's age"

"Astronomers are worried. It's not some new unexplained mystery of the universe or the upcoming launch of a space telescope that is unnerving them, though. The problems they currently face are much more down-to-Earth - and the future of space exploration hangs in the balance. The anxiety stems from the fact that astronomy, especially space-based astronomy, is just plain expensive. And with federal budgets tightening, the government will be less and less able to make huge investments in big science projects. "We may see in the next decade or so an end to the search for the laws of nature which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes," warned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg in January during the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas."

""I think that when people see Pluto (during the New Horizons flyby), they're going to figure out what a lot of planetary scientists have already figured out," Stern said. "Is that the outer solar system is teeming with small planets ... (Pluto) is admittedly a new "species" of planet if you will." "It's as if we had traveled the world and only found large dogs like the Labrador and never found the Chihuahuas. Well, would we say they're not dogs just because there's too many of them and we can't keep track of their names and they are smaller?""

"Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities - more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks - comets and asteroids - that wander interplanetary space in search of targets. Most asteroids are made of rock. The rest are metal, mostly iron. Some are rubble piles - gravitationally bound collections of bits and pieces. Most live between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and will never come near Earth. But some do. Some will. More than a thousand known asteroids are classed as "potentially hazardous," based on size and trajectory. Currently, it looks doable to develop an early-warning and defense system that could protect the human species from impactors larger than a kilometer wide. Smaller ones, which reflect much less light and are therefore much harder to detect at great distances, carry enough energy to incinerate entire nations, but they don't put the human species at risk of extinction."

"There could be many billions of planets not much bigger than Earth circling faint stars in our galaxy, says an international team of astronomers. The estimate for the number of "super-Earths" is based on detections already made and then extrapolated to include the Milky Way's population of so-called red dwarf stars."

"The BBC has created a very, very large infographic titled "How Big Is Our Solar System?" Scroll down (which is a little odd) and it will take you from the surface of earth to the far reaches of space. It's similar to a couple of other infographics: Scroll to see the ocean's deepest depths is an interactive infographic from The BBC. Scroll down the infographic and it not only shows you information about what is happening at that depth of the ocean, it also provides videos and images. "Our Amazing Planet: Top To Bottom," is another one, but there's no interactivity and it also covers above the ocean."

"Russia plans to send probes to Jupiter and Venus, land a network of unmanned stations on Mars and ferry Russian cosmonauts to the surface of the Moon - all by 2030. That's according to a leaked document from the country's space agency. Wired U.K. The cosmically ambitious plans were submitted to the government by the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) this month, according to a report in the Kommersant, Russia's business-focused daily newspaper. The document lays out a blueprint for the country's space industry to follow in the next 18 years, up to 2030. It's rare for Russia to set a deadline for its future space plans."

"Science and communism are inseparable! That is the basic message of this amazing collection of Soviet space propaganda posters that will be auctioned off on Apr. 22. Featuring Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, the first and second humans to reach space, along with Krushchev, and of course Lenin, these posters glorify the the Soviet Union's technological prowess and importance in the world, and in the universe. Many of the posters focus on the role the workers played in the space race, and the ordinary citizen's duty to feel immensely proud of Mother Russia's accomplishments. The posters have messages such as "Comrades! Soviet Land Has From Now On Become the Shore of the Universe!" or "The Tenth Planet Symbolizes the Victory of Communism!" and "Be Proud, Soviet, You Opened a Path from the Earth to the Stars!" One of my favorites is "Lenin Is With Us, Immortal and Majestic, the Thoughts, Words and Deeds of Ilyich Are Propagating Through the Universe.""

"From PayPal to electric cars to rockets, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk wants his company, SpaceX, to build America's next manned spacecraft. Scott Pelley reports."