Project Mercury

Designing an X-Wing Fighter

Hey Oscar Wilde! - Designing an X-Wing Fighter

Abandoned remains of the Russian Space Shuttle

World Of Mysteries: Abandoned Remains of the Russian Space Shuttle Project Buran

Broken Bells "Ghost Inside" video

Watch Mal Reynolds' ex-wife dismantle her own body, piece by piece

Apollo 11 launch in slow-mo

The launch of the Apollo 11 Saturn rocket in super-slow 500fps motion? Gimme that!

The Presurfer: Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch

Space Battleship Yamato

First teaser trailer for a live-action version of Space Battleship Yamato, which was an immensely popular 80ies anime series about a spaceship built into a WWII era battleship. Don't get too excited just yet.. projected release date is in December 2010.

SPACE BATTLESHIP ヤマト 公式WEBサイト 主演・木村拓哉

Golden record

I give you my new obsession: the Voyager 1 space probe. This exceptional spacecraft was launched in 1977 and toured nearly the whole solar system, exploring Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune and its moons, and has become the farthest man-made object, reaching a distance of nearly 17 billion kilometers (or 15 light hours) from Earth, traveling at a speed of around 45 km per second.

This space probe is still functioning and receiving commands from Earth, and will probably be functional until 2025, when its power source will run out.

Included with the spacecraft is the so-called Golden Record: a phonograph record that includes instructions on how to play the content, which is made up from music and sounds and images from Earth. I found the NASA page that has many of the images available, which is pretty freaky if you take a look at them (see top of post)-- these are the images which are supposed to help an alien civilization understand about mankind. Makes you wonder who selected these pics and how..

Voyager - Scenes From Earth

A much better insight about humankind can be gathered in the comments of the NASA blog though: in the poll "What would you put on a new Golden Record?", there's the usual cornucopia of dumb, asinine, funny, creepy, and stupid comments of any page or poll on the Internet, ..pretty funny.

342: send a rubix cube, that will confuse the little critters.

338: If you have oil we may be able to come to some sort of arrangement.
Best Regards
Earth

328: I would add the book Battlefield Earth, with the comment, we do not want things to go this way.

274: voyager space is very nice probe.. because this probe, explore the solar system...

What Would You Put on a New Golden Record

50 years of space exploration

National Geographic published a map to keep track of all space missions in the last half century. Sean McNaughton created this handy infograph that includes all missions in the solar system and also the Voyager and Pioneer probes that have already put billions of kilometers between Earth and them. The full-size map is available here.

Map of the Day - National Geographic Magazine

The complete book of space travel

Check out these fine illustrations by Virgil Finlay (1914-1971) in The Complete Book of Space Travel by Albro Gaul, published in 1956. I can't help myself marveling at the part-retro, part-naïve art depictions of how the author thought space travel in the future would look like.

The first space pilot has already been born. He is probably between ten and sixteen years of age at this moment. Without doubt both he and his parents listen to radio and television programs dealing with much space adventure but with few accurate facts. This book is designed to outline the facts of space travel, and the conditions we expect to find in space and among the planets and stars. These facts alone are sufficiently exciting, since they are factors in man's greatest single adventure - the exploration of the universe.

Golden Age Comic Book Stories: Virgil Finlay 1914 ~ 1971

Photographer Documents Secret Satellites — All 189 of Them

Wow. I told you people, they are out there! Who? Who cares.. spies of course. Also check the second link at the bottom - it will lead you to a real cool google mashup which allows you to track any satellite in real time! Awesome...

BERKELEY, California -- For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.
His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.

"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says."

Wired: Photographer Documents Secret Satellites -- All 189 of Them

CHECK OUT EVERY BLOODY SATELLITE IN REAL TIME HERE
(you can even track the toolbox they lost on the ISS)

Ancient spaceship on the moon

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