On April 14th, Space X’s Dragon spacecraft launches towards the International Space Station. If you remember from last year maybe, Space X became famous for being the first private space company to be contracted by NASA to deliver cargo to the ISS. This comes as a relief to space enthusiast and normal people who were sad, and distressed, as Congress continually cut funding from NASA on a yearly basis. Now that the private sector has jumped in on space exploration, the stalling of humans discovery of the natural world has come to an end. The experiment for which Space X has been called upon this time is both very interesting and vital to the future of manned exploration. See, the thing is, space travel isn’t all that healthy. Our bodies simply made to not feel the relentless tug or gravity, and the constant free fall of orbit does some weird things to Astronauts. Coupled with the much larger amounts of radiation received by our zero G scientist flying above us, perfectly healthy astronauts can return to Earth a bit out of whack. But this shouldn’t worry you, overall they’re fine. However these effects provide us with data to study the way humans are affected by space travel, and this knowledge will help us out in the long term when the human race turns its attention to the outer reaches of space. Dragon is also bringing some plantlife up to the station, that the astronauts will be growing in order to further study plant growth in space. Both of these studies could ultimately be vital if you believe like me that our long term survival might be contingent on our ability to blast of this, our most precious of rocks and land on a new one, however far away.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140414103310.htm