Haven't we already figured out what happens to animals if we blast them into space? Isn't sending them up there now just asking for trouble? Like, taking the chance that they will pass through some cosmic gamma rays and come back as super-rodents bent on revenge? I mean, that is my understanding of how space travel works. I could be wrong. Anyway, if nothing else it seems kind of cruel, although I guess it is probably better than living in Russia.

"Screw this planet crap, I'm just gonna go crazy and load myself up with moons." —Pluto

If you're married and old enough to have endured whatever horrors requiring "work on the marriage," space tourist/rich person Dennis Tito has a great plan: He wants to send an adult married couple on a 501-day round-trip flight to Mars. This could be you, and also your spouse!

A tycoon announced plans Wednesday to send a middle-aged couple on a privately built spaceship to slingshot around the red planet and come back home, hopefully with their bodies and marriage in one piece after 501 days of no-escape togetherness in a cramped capsule half the size of an RV.

Young, inexperienced people have no idea what it's like to spend [...]

Guess what people on the Internet have discovered? Life on Mars! But it is not, according to current theories, Martian. It's a … ground squirrel, or perhaps a regular Martian rock that looks a little like a ground squirrel from a certain angle and a certain light. The very large NASA image from the rover Curiosity is here, so you can spend the next hour or so looking for Waldo the Martian Ground Squirrel, or you can just accept the conclusion of this UFO blog:

A lot of people are emailing me saying that this squirrel was part of a NASA experiment to test how long it [...]

"In our expedition to Mars, let our healthy young males take along some healthy young females to serve as their sexual partners. (Of course it would also help if they could operate a radio transmitter and take dictation.) These women would accompany them quite openly for this purpose. There would be no secrecy about this. There would be nothing dishonorable about their assignment. They would be women of the kind we ordinarily speak of as 'nice girls.'" —Don't worry, this is from 1956. Nobody thinks this way now.

"Astronomers have discovered a planet twice the size of Earth made largely out of diamond which is orbiting a star that is visible with the naked eye." I am ashamed to admit that I know a Jennifer Aniston joke goes here.

"An explosion caused by a meteoroid impact on the moon a couple of months ago was visible from Earth with the naked eye, according to Science@NASA. But don’t worry if you didn’t catch it — it was only noticeable for a moment." —Ugh, they are totally right about the way desensitization happens. It used to be that a simple video of the moon getting walloped by space would have kept me sated for days, but after years of poring over each and every frame of hot rock-on-moon action it barely registers; I need something considerably more graphic and extended to excite me now.

"Wanna buy a piece of the moon?"

The heroic Iranian monkey who supposedly rode a rocket into space last week returned to Earth with strange new powers. For instance, the monkey's distinctive face mole was completely gone when the creature was photographed by government officials upon landing. The creature's white-blonde hair had changed to brunette, too, much like the hair of Moses changed from black to white after he spotted the Hebrew God cowering under a bush. What other mutant powers could the Persian primate have developed while exposed to dangerous gamma rays or whatever, in orbit?

The Times of London doubts the superhero animal's mysterious changes occurred in space. Could the sneaky Iranians have [...]

The wonderful news that NASA is deliberately crashing two space probes into the moon is tempered somewhat by the fact that this is actually an attempt to be a more careful steward of that useless satellite's surface. While we have been using the moon as a garbage dump for years—because that's the only thing it's good for—now the agency is concerned that the junk we quite rightly chuck onto that stupid rock might "come to rest in a historically significant place, like on Neil Armstrong’s footprints." You can IMAGINE how I feel about that. PAVE THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING ALREADY.

“The discovery that our nearest neighbor has rocky planets is the story of the decade. I’d bet $100 that there are other planets that are there as well.” —Yale astronomer Debra Fischer, on the recent discovery that there is a planet of roughly the same mass as Earth in the Alpha Centauri solar system, a mere 4.4 light years away. Now, sure, this is exciting—because where there is one small, rocky planet, there are often others and there is a habitable orbit zone around 65 million miles from Centauri B. (There are three stars in the Alpha Centauri system.) But, come on, not even the most devout reader [...]