NASA

At the gift shop in the National Space Center in Leicester England you can get a bag of space ice cream, or space strawberrys for £1.50 a bag.

Every space center is different and concessions charge various prices.

Actual space food sent up in the shuttle is very expensive since research and development costs are astronomical.

The period in which Our spacecrafts began to be placed in orbit around Earth - commenced on October 4th, 1957:

* THE SPACE AGE BEGINS:

• October 4, 1957. Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite is launched by the Soviet Union.
• October 7, 1959. Luna 3 takes the first pictures of the 'dark side of the moon' and transmits them back to Earth.
• April 12, 1961. Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.
• March 18, 1965. Alexey Leonov makes the first 'spacewalk' during the Voskhod 2 mission.
• December 21-27, 1968. The crew of Apollo 8 becomes the first humans to leave the Earth's influence, and orbit another world, the Moon. First spacecraft to perform a Trans Earth Injection (TEI) maneuver.
• July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, becomes the first human being to walk on the Moon.
• April 19, 1971. Salyut 1 is launched, becoming the first space station.
• December 3, 1973. Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to make direct observations of Jupiter, and was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt.
• July 20, 1976. Viking 1 lands on Mars and transmits pictures from the surface.
• April 12, 1981. The first reusable space ship, the Space Shuttle is launched for the first time.
• February 19, 1986. The first long duration space station, Mir, is launched. Staying in orbit for over 15 years, occupants set several records in human space endurance.
• February 14, 1990. Voyager 1 takes the first photograph of the whole solar system.[1]
• April 24, 1990. The first large space telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope is launched into orbit.
• November 2, 2000. The first resident crew enters the International Space Station, a large space station designed as a human habitat.
• September 2008. China performs their first space walk, three men total exiting their spacecraft.

Zero gravity does not exist. It is a term used to describe what is better labelled 'micro gravity' - the state of experiencing no apparent gravitational effects.

During free-fall, you experience something akin to micro gravity; you are subject to acceleration under the influence of gravity, but only the apparently up-rushing air provides a clue. Sealing yourself into an un-powered vessel or container before being dropped would give the game away quite quickly; as the container reaches its terminal velocity (when its air resistance, which quadruples when velocity doubles, reaches an equilibrium with gravitational acceleration) and you find yourself standing on its inner surface. As you are not subject to air resistance within the container, your body will attempt to continue accelerating while the container will not, and you will be pressed against its floor.

Micro-gravity can be simulated in an aircraft; flying in a specific arc under power allows the craft to maintain downward acceleration at a rate equivalent to gravitational acceleration for a short time, and its passengers experience free-fall within the confines of the craft without air resistance.

In a free-fall orbit, you also experience no apparent gravitational force. In fact, you are falling toward the Earth (or whichever planet you're orbiting), but with appropriate initial acceleration in the right direction, the arc described by your fall matches the curvature of the Earth - the ground falls away as quickly as you fall towards it and you appear to have no weight.

If you should find yourself stranded in space, many parsecs from any substantial body or mass, you would also experience micro-gravity; you are still subject to the forces of gravity exerted upon you by all the mass in the universe and could actually be accelerating in the direction of the greatest gravitational force. As the force of gravity falls off at a rate equivalent to the inverse square of the distance from the center of mass, forever dividing over distance (therefore always measurable as a non-zero number), anything that is visible and much that is invisible in the night sky is actually exerting its gravitational force upon you, and you are exerting your own gravitational force upon the universe.

Yes there is!

This is the article I found on NASA.gov

PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers have unmasked hundreds of black holes hiding deep inside dusty galaxies billions of light-years away.

The massive, growing black holes, discovered by NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, represent a large fraction of a long-sought missing population. Their discovery implies there were hundreds of millions of additional black holes growing in our young universe, more than doubling the total amount known at that distance.

Image right: This image, taken with Spitzer's infrared vision, shows a fraction of these black holes, which are located deep in the bellies of distant, massive galaxies (circled in blue). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique

+ Full image and caption

"Active, supermassive black holes were everywhere in the early universe," said Mark Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. "We had seen the tip of the iceberg before in our search for these objects. Now, we can see the iceberg itself." Dickinson is a co-author of two new papers appearing in the Nov. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Emanuele Daddi of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in France led the research.

The findings are also the first direct evidence that most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores.

For decades, a large population of active black holes has been considered missing. These highly energetic structures belong to a class of black holes called quasars. A quasar consists of a doughnut-shaped cloud of gas and dust that surrounds and feeds a budding supermassive black hole. As the gas and dust are devoured by the black hole, they heat up and shoot out X-rays. Those X-rays can be detected as a general glow in space, but often the quasars themselves can't be seen directly because dust and gas blocks them from our view.

"We knew from other studies from about 30 years ago that there must be more quasars in the universe, but we didn't know where to find them until now," said Daddi.

Image left: An artist's concept of a growing black hole. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Daddi and his team initially set out to study 1,000 dusty, massive galaxies that are busy making stars and were thought to lack quasars. The galaxies are about the same mass as our own spiral Milky Way galaxy, but irregular in shape. At 9 to 11 billion light-years away, they existed at a time when the universe was in its adolescence, between 2.5 and 4.5 billion years old.

When the astronomers peered more closely at the galaxies with Spitzer's infrared eyes, they noticed that about 200 of the galaxies gave off an unusual amount of infrared light. X-ray data from Chandra, and a technique called "stacking," revealed the galaxies were, in fact, hiding plump quasars inside. The scientists now think that the quasars heat the dust in their surrounding doughnut clouds, releasing the excess infrared light.

"We found most of the population of hidden quasars in the early universe," said Daddi. Previously, only the rarest and most energetic of these hidden black holes had been seen at this early epoch.

The newfound quasars are helping answer fundamental questions about how massive galaxies evolve. For instance, astronomers have learned that most massive galaxies steadily build up their stars and black holes simultaneously until they get too big and their black holes suppress star formation.

The observations also suggest that collisions between galaxies might not play as large a role in galaxy evolution as previously believed. "Theorists thought that mergers between galaxies were required to initiate this quasar activity, but we now see that quasars can be active in unharassed galaxies," said co-author David Alexander of Durham University, United Kingdom.

"It's as if we were blindfolded studying the elephant before, and we weren't sure what kind of animal we had," added co-author David Elbaz of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique. "Now, we can see the elephant for the first time."

The new observations were made as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, the most sensitive survey to date of the distant universe at multiple wavelengths.

Consistent results were recently obtained by Fabrizio Fiore of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy, and his team. Their results will appear in the Jan. 1, 2008, issue of Astrophysical Journal.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

Hope it helps!!!

All exploration of Venus to date has been by unmanned space probes.

Mariner 2 was the first NASA probe to flyby Venus in 1962, followed by Mariner 5 in 1967 and Mariner 10 in 1973 . There were many Soviet missions to the planet in the 1970s and 1980s, some of which landed probes there.

Pioneer Venus 1 orbited the planet from 1978 to 1992, mapping the surface, while Pioneer Venus 2, also launched in 1978, sent four probes into the atmosphere.

The Magellan mission (1989-1994) mapped and studied the surface from orbit.

The MESSENGER mission to Mercury (2004-2012) made two fly-bys of Venus, in 2006 and 2007.

Total Number of People Who Have Been in Space (USAF definition) - 474 Total Number of People Who Have Been in Space (FAI definition) - 468 Total Number of People Who Have Been in Earth Orbit - 465 Of these, 47 have been women.

I found all this information at http://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/stats.php