Tomorrow, the watch begins for incoming 13,000-pound satellite UARS. Who would have thought the future would be so much fun? A world-wide alert for plunging space trash! Oh right, almost every science fiction author. "If you do come across what you suspect is a satellite piece, NASA doesn't want you to pick it up. The space agency says there are no toxic chemicals present, but there could be sharp edges." Yeah, NASA doesn't want you to SUE THEM for cutting your finger on their pointy space trash (after it lands on your house). In other news, UARS has done a lot of science up there in the last twenty years! Thanks UARS. Please don't kill me.

Last week, it was announced that NASA is partnering with Tor/Forge to put more science in their science fiction. We like the idea of keeping the brilliant NASA engineers busy now that they’re no longer firing shuttles into the cosmos, but we see more than one potential problem with this arrangement. READ MORE

Today the brave and wasteful decades of the American space program as we have known it come crunching to a halt. From its beginnings as wildly adventurous jaunts to its ghastly end as porters and bellboys to the International Space Station, 30 years and 135 space shuttle missions later, we are officially Done With Space Shuttling. We'll always have our little laboratory on the Station, and corporations are happy to do our transit for us, but space is now for the Europeans, the Japanese and the Russian nerd heartthrobs—goodbye, pencil-necked cutie Sergei Volkov, you second-generation cosmonaut! Now our machines are going to go to some asteroid and to the atmosphere of Jupiter and, most interestingly, our newest machine, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, which will orbit the equator and listen for black holes, and then later to triage with the other space machines to rise up and destroy us. FROM SPACE.

Characterization of the NASA's Space Transportation System, what we commonly call the Space Shuttle program, as nothing but a glorified Greyhound—even better yet, "space carpooling"—is common. Even today, as the shuttle program wraps up for good, it’s hard to escape a certain feeling of underwhelmed-ness, especially if you try to review all of the accomplishments of the program. (Give it a try.) What did the Space Shuttle do besides carry things back and forth? Well, obviously carrying things back and forth has its importance, but considering that our space program has long been a point of pride, what are the high points to which we can point proudly? READ MORE

In the great story of the privatization of all Americans services industries, we tend to pay more attention to things like health care and prisons. But a bit more than a year ago, the administration began budgeting to privatize space flight: "Obama’s plan calls for funneling money to private companies that are jockeying for NASA contracts," is how that was described. And now here they are, getting their cash: six companies have gotten $30 million each, including new startup "Moon Express," which apparently wants to help people go mine the moon. They basically think they can go dig platinum out of the moon, and I feel like I have already seen this dystopia. I know that many of us have some really negative feelings about the moon but I'm pretty sure we'll miss it (and/or "tides") when it's gone.

Were you ever at, I don't know, a Rite Aid or Penn Station or a Grateful Dead concert or a family gathering where you looked around and got to feeling like everyone else there was an alien from outer space? Well, you were probably right, according to Science. READ MORE

I have always been an amateur cosmologist at heart; the mathematical rigors of real physics have always bored and vexed me, but the conceptual ideas surrounding our universe are, well, more interesting than anything we could ever possibly invent ourselves. The trouble with storytelling is, I suppose, that all stories are like many other stories, and even the most extraordinary ones are so familiar that, by all rights, we shouldn't ever be in awe of them. Still, what seems the most pedestrian, the most quotidien, the most mundane has, somewhere in it, the threads of the fantastic. No matter how dull a life and its story seem, it is, after all, the result of the wildest and most unlikely circumstances: that this person—of all possible people—was ever born, that the Earth existed to allow that birth, that the universe ever burst into existence to accommodate this one, very small, planet. READ MORE

After several days of hoo-ha brought on by a vague NASA press release about mysterious life forms that will change how we see alien life, the story finally was published in Science and announced by NASA and so, okay, I'll bite. It turns out that a geomicrobiologist found a bacterium in a California lake full of arsenic, and the bacterium was full of arsenic too. The arsenic atoms were being used by the bug in place of phosphate atoms; and if you'd paid attention back when you were supposed to, you'd know that phosphate atoms are crucial to 1) DNA which is the molecule that makes up genes; and 2) ATP which is the molecule that provides cells' energy. So: genes and energy, about as basic as you'd want to get. READ MORE

"Scientists often think of celestial bodies as roundish, and this obviously is not—it's peanut-like. Mother Nature has once again pulled the rug out from under scientific ideas." READ MORE