Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company strapped two employees into a fueled rocketship for practice, but pulled them out shortly before sending the capsule to the edge of space Wednesday with only a test dummy.

The crew rehearsal in West Texas brings Blue Origin closer to launching tourists and others into space.

Blue Origin wanted to see how well a crew could get in and out of the capsule. The pretend astronauts also tested seatbelts and radio links before the 10 1/2-minute flight, and went back to the capsule following touchdown to climb aboard for recovery practice.

And you think you've had a bad head cold.

Getting sick in space is no joke. You're stuck, surrounded by the most advanced equipment in the world, most of which is useless if you need a medicine you didn't think to bring.

Even taking a pill has its problems as the constant radiation breaks them down.

Professor Volker Hessel is a researcher at the University of Adelaide who has sent medicine up to the International Space Station (ISS) to test how pills survive in space.

The plan is to understand how we can make space drugs that can last the 3-year trip to Mars.

In space, no one can hear you sneeze

Astronauts are extremely fit for a reason. Space is incredibly stressful to human bodies. Microgravity means astronauts lose 1–2% of their bone mass each month.

Radiation also changes astronaut DNA.

This drone hauled a model of the Juventas CubeSat high into the air, as a practical test of the antennas designed to perform the first radar sounding of the interior of an asteroid.

The shoebox-sized Juventas will be transported to the Didymos double-asteroid system by ESA's Hera mission. Once it flies freely in space, Juventas will deploy a cross antenna to perform a low-frequency radar scan up to 100 m deep within the smaller of the two asteroids, Dimorphos. Such low frequencies result in long wavelengths of around 6 m, too long for most indoor measurement facilities.

"To verify the antenna characteristics, we performed this aerial test with the support of the Hexapilots drone company," notes Martin Laabs of the Chair for Radio Frequency and Photonics Engineering of Technical University Dresden in Germany.

"For the most accurate measurements of the antennas' radiation properties, they had to be as far away as possible from other objects, so the Juventas model was hung 10 m down from the drone, which was flown up to 50 m into the sky.

Lunar exploration firm iSpace said Wednesday it will transport a United Arab Emirates unmanned rover to the Moon next year, as the Gulf state seeks to expand its space sector.

The UAE—made up of seven emirates including the capital Abu Dhabi and freewheeling Dubai—announced in September 2020 that it planned to launch the "Rashid" rover by 2024.

The rover "will be transported to the Moon on iSpace's lunar lander" during a mission in 2022, the Japanese company said in a statement.