Now, in China, a potato astronaut will be the country’s first living organism to land on the Moon. The mini-ecosphere will also allow for natural light to reach the potato astronaut and assist its growth.

I would like to take a moment to critique a certain strain of futurology.

There seems to be this thing where people imagine something that would look really cool, and predict that if we work hard on it for fifty years, we’ll be able to pull it off. And then fifty years later, when barely any work has been done on it at all, they start looking for someone to blame.

Missions to Mars. Lunar colonies. Giant floating solar power satellites. Undersea domes. Ten mile high arcologies. Humanoid robots.

Whereas real technology doesn’t advance by heading in the direction of something that looks cool, unless some government or tycoon is throwing lots of money in the direction of coolness. Real technology hill-climbs towards things that are useful and profitable.

Why haven’t we colonized space yet? For the same reason we haven’t colonized Antarctica. It’s very cold and not a lot of fun and if you go outside you die.

SpaceX has been working to make its rockets partially reusable since as early as 2011. Up until now, practically all orbital rockets have been expendable, so they’re basically thrown away once they launch into space. That means an entirely new rocket — which can cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to make — has to be built for each mission to orbit.

SpaceX’s strategy has been to land its rockets after launch in an effort to fly them again and again. That way the company can partially save on manufacturing costs for each mission.

• The aircraft has 385-foot wingspan and, powered by six Pratt & Whitney engines used on Boeing 747 aircraft, has a maximum takeoff weight of 1.3 million pounds.
• The Stratolaunch's wingspan is the largest in history, blowing away the previous record-holder (Howard...

A pretty good overview of earth asteroid collisions!

Did you know New Jersey is home to a radio observatory? It's located in Wall Township, a stones throw from where Karl Jansky's observations revealed radio emissions from a celestial source in the Milky Way outside our solar system.

A team of volunteers from InfoAge, The Ocean-Monmouth Amateur Radio Club, and Princeton University reconfigured the TLM-18 antenna system as a radio telescope.

The TLM-18 currently has feeds at 1296 MHz and is equipped for remote observation by institutional and advanced amateur research

InfoAge Space Exploration Center