Cancel your plans for the next three minutes and forty nine seconds and watch this video instead. I never normally post time lapse videos on their own, but this video of views from the International Space Station at night, made by Knate Myers, has just become my new favourite. It is made up of photographs [...]

I’ve been a freelancer for over 20 years. It’s not quite accurate to say there aren’t benefits. There are; they just don’t include health care and employer-matched IRAs. The benefits are such things as not having to use an alarm clock or wear pants everyday, if you don’t feel like it. You can.  But you don’t [...]

Sitting here in New York after a night of listening to the roar of hurricane Sandy I, along with everyone else here, am feeling a little bit worn. And I’m lucky, many people are still in the midst of dealing with a very real disaster in the city and the states up and down the [...]

As the docking attempt between the Dragon cargo vehicle and the International Space Station gets underway, here are some of the latest images, plus the LIVE stream to the Dragon/ISS docking at the bottom! [Note: recorded video of final moments of capture by ISS arm now added below] …and shortly before this fly-under took place [...]

Chris Hadfield is an astronaut for the 21st century. The Canadian former fighter pilot and current commander of the International Space Station has shown a supreme mastery of social media. He has hosted an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit from space and has filmed several hugely popular YouTube videos demonstrating what it looks like [...]

As the brash, stylish new kid on the block, SpaceX was sure to win its share of admirers. But last week’s launch hiccup showed that the private space operator, helmed by Elon Musk, has a few issues to work out, just like stodgy old NASA. Don’t get me wrong: SpaceX has done unbelievably impressive things. [...]

Spaceflight is hard on the body, but, even so, a new study has found that the tiny nematode (or roundworm) Caenorhabditis elegans appears to age more slowly in space than on the ground. Whether the same is true of human tissue remains to be seen, although many genes in the millimeter-long worm have analogues in [...]

Two future experiments set to take flight aboard the International Space Station have some unusual creators: teenagers who won the first YouTube Space Lab video competition today, sponsored by YouTube, Lenovo and Space Adventures. Students around the globe entered two-minute videos describing their idea for tests to conduct in low-Earth orbit. Judges, including NASA, ESA [...]

This timelapse video of photographs taken from the International Space Station between August and October is just stunning: The photographs were taken by astronaut Ron Garan, whose photographs were the subject of a Compound Eye post from a few weeks back. In them you can see the aurora (both Borealis and Australis), pinprick cities, and [...]

This is the third of a three-part series that looks back at the 30-year history of the U.S. space shuttle program. Before the 1986 Challenger disaster made safety paramount and new constraints had been established, the shuttle could carry fueled upper-stage rockets to launch space probes, which embarked for planetary destinations. From low orbit to [...]

This is the second of a three-part series that looks back at the 30-year history of the U.S. space shuttle program. Any summary of the shuttle program cannot go on without mentioning 14 lost astronauts and two doomed vehicles—Challenger on launch in 1986 and Columbia on reentry in 17 years later. Both events punctuated periods [...]

  This is the first of a three-part series that looks back at the 30-year tenure of the U.S. space shuttle program. "The orbiter is a completely different vehicle than anything that has ever flown in space. It was a work platform, a spacewalk platform, a construction site with a robotic arm, a laboratory, a [...]

It took space shuttle Discovery several months to get off the ground on its final mission, but the shuttle’s landing came off without a hitch. Discovery touched down on schedule, just before noon March 9, putting an end to its 26 years of service, in which the orbiter made 39 trips to space and logged [...]

Three-time shuttle veteran Mark Kelly, husband of wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, will fly once more. Kelly will resume training with the rest of his crew for the STS-134 mission, currently scheduled for April 19, NASA announced February 4. He had been on personal leave, and his status as commander of the penultimate space [...]

Colonel Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut, a former mission specialist on STS-74 who also performed multiple EVAs on STS-100, and, for a few hours longer, the well-loved commander of the International Space Station mission 35. He has been a great inspiration for space travel via every type of social media (with the assistance of [...]

Beautiful. Stunning. Hypnotic. Only a few of the words to describe this video posted by Christoph Malin, an outdoor journalist and cinematographer. And watch, at about 1:42 you’ll see Comet “Lovejoy” rising. From beneath the video: “This Video was achived (sic) by “stacking” image sequences provided by NASA from the Crew at International Space Station. [...]

Last year, I told you about a contest that allowed teens to submit an experiment to be done on the International Space Station. Winners were chosen and now they are eagerly awaiting the result of their experiments! More details from the folks at Space Lab: This is “the culmination of the YouTube Space Lab competition [...]

Science communication has seldom had a better champion than Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield who just returned to Earth last night. Astronauts tweeting and talking from space is not a new phenomena, and though interesting scientific experiments abound way up on the ISS, they weren’t what caught the public’s imagination this go round. It was [...]