Space

To Boldly Litigate

Last year Christie’s auction house dropped jaws when it tractor-beamed in more than $7 million in bits for a massive Star Trek auction featuring props, costumes, and a little box to keep your dignity in. Now Brent “Data” Spiner himself has apparently confirmed that some of the items were not authentic. Ted Moustakis got ripped…

No More Russian Space Tourism

It may have been a burgeoning industry, but space tourism is going to flame out after 2008 in Russia. Due to international agreements, Russian officials say next year is the last for civilians to pay wads of cash to zoom up to the space station. So if you’ve got your hopes set on seeing the…

World’s Fastest Lens Tracks Mega-Lightning

South Korea’s first astronaut will take action shots of the “mega lightning” in the Earth’s stratosphere. Mega lightning starts 9 to 12 miles above the Earth, and shoots upwards into space, reaching the upper mesosphere 60 miles up. (Internet whackjobs claim this “super lightning” destroyed the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.) Ko San will use…

Santa Claus vs. Neo in the Martian Matrix

The 1964 holiday film Santa Claus Conquers The Martians has the distinction of constantly being named one of the worst films ever made. It also contains the acting debut of Pia Zadora, although that may be unrelated to its critical status. Instead this film was all about bringing “freedom” to poor Martian children who have…

The Sun Hurls Continent-Sized Blobs of Gas at Us

Newly-discovered x-ray jets literally blanket the face of the sun, launching continent-sized blobs of superhot gas outwards at 200 million miles per hour. Which is just about 5% of the speed of light, and makes us second-think the chances a spaceship like the one in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine might have of getting close to that…

Suicidal Russian Space Junk Plunges Into Earth’s Atmosphere

Sturdy, car-sized space freighter Progress 26 was launched off the International Space Station on Saturday, filled to the brim with trash — basically, all the crap (literally and figuratively) the crew had been accumulating for weeks. Progress 27, another uncrewed freighter, will be arriving with fresh food and supplies from Earth for the ISS cosmonauts.…

The Ultimate Necessity of Space Travel (1959)

Philip N. Shockey wrote a piece for the March-May, 1959 issue of Space Journal titled, “The Ultimate Necessity of Space Travel.” Shockey makes the case for a trip to the moon and eventually further into space as a necessity brought about by the eventual destruction of Earth a few billion years from now. That trip…

Wikipedia is No Place for Alien Civilizations

George Dvorsky reports over at Sentient Developments that the Wikipedia community has deleted a perfectly reasonable entry on astrosociobiology, “the speculative scientific study of extraterrestrial civilizations and their possible social characteristics and developmental tendencies.” People like Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson are counted among the ranks of astrosociobiologists, as are countless scifi creators. Luckily, Dvorksy…

Russian Space Rocket Looks Totally Old-School

The Soyuz-FG launcher sticks to a 1950s snub-nosed aesthetic, even though it was built in 2001. The Soyuz is preparing to launch Dec. 14 from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome. Image by STR/AFP/Getty Images.

A Mutant, A Failed Utopian Experiment, and French People

The trailer for the French scifi film Eden Log shows you something that looks like H.R. Giger creation crossed with the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek: The Next Generation. We aren’t sure what that thing is supposed to be, but we hope this dark holiday release doesn’t devolve into a creature chase. Director Franck Vestiel…

More Evidence for Water on Mars

Spirit, one of the Mars rovers, accidentally kicked up some dust with its unsteady wheel the other day, and revealed a possible history of water-saturated land on Mars. The wheel-kick laid bare some white sand deposits whose mineral composition is nearly pure silica — the kind of thing normally left behind by hot springs. Image…

First Shot Of Predator Homeworld

It’s been three movies already, and we’ve never seen where the Predators come from. They’re always busy hunting down humans or Aliens on Earth, so it’s about time we visited their pad. Apparently, as the above picture shows, it looks like a funky extraterrestrial version of Easter Island. Maybe they’ve been spending the extra time…

Voyager 2 Could Be First Object to Escape Solar System, Meet Aliens

The Voyager 2 probe could be the first man-made object to travel outside the solar system in a few years, which may or may not result in it being discovered by sentient life and then sent back to “join with its Creator”. V’ger 2 actually lost out to V’ger 1 in terms of crossing the…

Saturn: Hot Or Not?

You can vote for the sexiest image of Saturn and its moons from the Cassini space probe, until Dec. 30. You even get to rate every space photo from 1 to 10, bringing a whole new meaning to “science porn.” This pic shows the “dragon storm” on Saturn, a disturbance so fierce it kicked up…

Space Age Splendor

Last nights’ space shuttle Atlantis liftoff was delayed until Saturday due to engineering problems, but the shuttle herself looked all tarted up and ready to dance. This was Atlantis as she was on the launch pad last night, ready to carry a new laboratory to the International Space Station. Ah, the glamour. Image by Nicholas…

Building An Ice Castle On Mars

Martian architecture will have to be different from any existing styles on Earth, say 53 percent of respondents in this poll at NewMars. But weirdly, 15 percent believe that we’ll build in “a mixture of Greek and Roman style” on Mars. And another 9 percent each believe we’ll build in an “Egyptian” or “Celtic” style.…

The View of Space They Didn’t Want You to See

We’re sick of those fake airbrushed artist’s interpretations of Venusian lightning. Instead, io9 is bringing you RAW UNEDITED pix from space! This photo, issued yesterday by the European Southern Observatory, shows what it was like for young galaxies in the early universe. Over at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Charlie Petit complains that news about…

Lady Antelopes Kill for Sex

Science isn’t all about sex, pollution, cutting up brains, and going to outer space, but given today’s headlines we can just pretend that it is. Turns out the time-honored “dudes fighting over a lady” thing isn’t really that common outside the human world. If you look at how most species behave in nature, often the…

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Space Opera

What do Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Star Wars, the anime Robotech, and the novels of Iain M. Banks all have in common? They’re space operas, part of the scifi subgenre that goes back to the 1930s and includes practically any cool outer-space story with lots of awesome ships and intergalactic battles. Now critics (and a new…

Alien bacteria may have seeded life on Earth, says the latest issue of Scientific American. Not only that, but alien bacteria may be among us right now, breeding happily.