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Earth 4 May 2021
Worldspec/NASA/ Alamy
You may have heard that we are all stardust, but that isn’t strictly true. There are about 20 different elements in the human body, most of which were made inside ancient stars. There’s oxygen, which makes up about half of your body’s mass but only a quarter of its atoms, and then carbon, accounting for another 12 per cent. And just after that, there’s hydrogen, the only element in your body that wasn’t made inside a star long ago and flung into space by a supernova explosion. The hydrogen atoms in your body, accounting for a little over 10 per cent of you, were formed much earlier during the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago.
How the space race changed Soviet art
By Stephen Dowling27th April 2021
The space race – rockets, satellites, record-breaking cosmonauts – was a way for Soviet artists to adopt avant-garde ideas under the cloak of propaganda.
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It stands outside the gates of the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, the giant trade-show-meets-amusement-park intended to show off the might of Soviet industry and science. It was built at a time when the USSR was leading the space race. A time when, to quote the submarine captain in the movie The Hunt for Red October, the world trembled at the sound of our rockets . The Monument to the Conquerors of Space is cosmic art on an out-of-this-world scale.
Roscosmos, NASA celebrate historic launch anniversaries while looking to the future
April 12, 2021
Today, Roscosmos is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Vostok-1 mission, which launched Yuri Gagarin and the first human spaceflight, while NASA simultaneously commemorates the 40th anniversary of the first launch of the world’s first reusable spacecraft, when John Young and Bob Crippen embarked on the most ambitious test flight in history aboard the shuttle Columbia.
The anniversaries arrive at a crucial turning point in space exploration, as more and more emphasis shifts to the commercial development of the space industry as well as the establishment of multiple, sustainable destinations both in and beyond Earth orbit.