ISS

Bow, nerds, and greet your king. Before this week, Richard Garriott was already geek royalty. The son of an astronaut, Garriott grew up in a NASA village, started writing best-selling videogames in high school, and has voyaged to the bottom of the ocean. Now Garriott has achieved the crown jewel of nerdom: he's in space.

The International Space Station maybe not be international for much longer. According to an NASA email leaked (by an undetermined source) to the Orlando Sentinel, the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010 will cede de facto control of the ISS to Russia. That control will come just as NASA finishes assembling the ISS in 2011.

Of all of the sophisticated technology powering the International Space Station, nothing brings the frustration of modern living back home to those of us on Earth more than a report of a broken toilet. Only the astronauts can't make an after-work run to the home repair store; they have to devise creative solutions while they wait for Saturday's launch of the space shuttle Discovery to bring them repair parts.

Yes, it ended well, but the rough-and-tumble landing that astronauts experienced recently as a Soyuz capsule on its way back from the International Space Station missed its landing target by 300 miles sure doesn't sound like something you'd want to do twice.

The European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle, Jules Verne, successfully linked up with the International Space Station yesterday. The ship's mission is to deliver cargo, fuel, water and oxygen. But yesterday's success is also a coup for ESA in that the space agency has finally joined "the club": Now Europe can get to the ISS on its own, without help from Russia or NASA.

When the shuttle retires in 2010, as many as 8,000 NASA contractors could lose their jobs. After a request from lawmakers, NASA released these numbers yesterday, but added that this could be a worst case scenario. The Kennedy Space Center would suffer the biggest losses, with 80 percent of its contract workers losing their jobs by 2011.

Japan's space agency gave it the OK. A famous astronaut says he'd get involved. They even tested a prototype in a wind tunnel. Still, it does sound nearly too off-the-wall to be true: Japanese scientists have teamed up with origami experts to design a paper airplane that could withstand re-entry and make its way from space back to Earth.

All reports suggest that the International Space Stations new robotic handyman will survive, and not freeze into a $209 million junk pile due to a power problem. Astronauts bypassed a faulty cable on Friday, and managed to get power to the robot arm, which will keep it warm, and ready for duty, in the deep cold of space.

The International Space Stations new robotic repairman, a $200 million Canadian robot called Dextre, should end up working just fine despite some early glitches, officials say. Dextre, an incredibly dexterous ‘bot with two flexible three-meter arms (hence, of course, the name), is designed to be a kind of maintenance machine on the outside of the ISS.

Soon, NASA's shuttle wont be the only workhorse servicing the International Space Station. In a little more than a week, it will be joined by the European Space Agencys Automated Transfer Vehicle, the Jules Verne, which is entering the final preparations before launch. The Jules Verne is the first of a series of such supply ships that will lift food, air, water, science supplies and other equipment to the ISS roughly once a year. ESA likens the ATVs to tugboats or river barges, albeit incredibly advanced ones.

If you have ever eaten in a Korean restaurant, you are undoubtedly familiar with the Korean pre-meal equivalent of bread sticks: kimchi. It's pickled cabbage and radish, it's delicious, and it's everywhere in Korean cuisine. So it would stand to reason that when the very first Korean astronaut blasts off to the International Space Station on a Russian-made rocket this April, his country's scientists would send him off with space-ready kimchi.

Finally. NASA astronauts installed the $2-billion science laboratory known as Columbus as a new wing of International Space Station on Monday. Yesterday morning, European astronauts officially opened the hatches, and began the process of bringing the computer, cooling and ventilation systems online.

Despite predictions of bad weather, the shuttle Atlantis did launch yesterday—and it was nearly a flawless affair. Some two minutes after yesterday's liftoff, at least three pieces of foam or other debris fell off the shuttle, and now the crew is preparing to inspect the outside of the ship for signs of damage, especially the wings and nose.

The shuttle, which was delayed for two months, will reach the International Space Station tomorrow and deliver the $2 billion Columbus laboratory, a major step towards the eventual completion of the massive rig.

Replacing a circuit breaker in a dark basement is one thing. But what if you had to climb around the outside of a spacecraft orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth to do it? This kind of dangerous maintenance work has become fairly common for astronauts aboard the International Space Station, where they spend as much time fixing the $100-billion-plus orbiting science lab as they do performing actual research.

If, late this month, you should happen to hear news reports of a man plunging toward Earth engulfed in flame, be assured that thousands of amateur-radio enthusiasts across the world are monitoring the situation closely. The “man” is actually SuitSat, a project conceived by the group Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) to get schoolchildren excited about space.

Astronauts on board the ISS will soon be disposing of surplus Russian Ormal space suits by releasing them into space.