Space

The first person to look into space with a telescope was Galileo, nearly 400 years ago.e Because fragrance is dependent on several environmental factors, such as temperature, humidity, and a flower’s age, flowers smell differently in space than they do on Earth. The fragrance of a variety of roses grown on the space shuttle Discovery was later replicated and incorporated into “Zen,” a perfume sold by the Japanese company Shiseido.l Space is flexible. It’s been expanding at a measurable rate since the beginning of time.c In the vacuum of space, there is no sound There is no sound in space.e In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bowman should have exhaled instead of inhaling before attempting to re-enter the ship from the pod after HAL locks him out. The vacuum of space would have damaged his lungs if they had been full of air.d In 1895 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an early Russian rocket scientist, was the first to propose the concept of space elevators, a type of space transportation system.g While Han Solo narrowly navigated a packed asteroid belt in the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back, in reality, asteroids have about 400,000 square miles all to themselves. Therefore, the chances of colliding with an asteroid are about one in a billion.d The first Earthling in space was Laika, a dog that was launched into space on the Soviet ship Sputnik 2 in 1957. After a week in space, the air in the capsule ran out and she died. After its orbit deteriorated, the craft left space and burned up, along with Laika’s body, as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.k When water boils on Earth, it creates thousands of little bubbles. However, in space, boiling water produces one giant, undulating bubble. Scientists believe this is due to lack of convection and buoyancy that accompanies gravity.l Space has been "stretching" since the Big Bang  The Big Bang theory rests on an idea called inflation theory, which holds that at a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated, or ran way with itself, doubling in size ever 10-34 seconds. The whole “bang” may have lasted no more than 10-30 seconds (one million million million million millionths of a second), but it changed the universe from something that could fit into a hand into something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger.c