Surly Bonds, Slipped.

“‘My plane flew right past the shuttle!’ she posted on Twitter, along with the photos, under the name @Stefmara.” By way of a friend, and as also seen at Cryptonaut, a New Jersey woman captures the final flight of the Endeavor from her window seat.

Only one more launch left after this one: That final mission, STS-135, will return July 20th, thus ending — only for now, hopefully — manned space flight at NASA, exactly forty-two years after the moon landing. (Unless, of course, we somehow get our act together.)

Space-Time in a Bottle.

“‘This is an epic result,’ adds Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis…’One day,’ he predicts, ‘this will be written up in textbooks as one of the classic experiments in the history of physics.’“

Using “the most perfect spheres ever made by humans,” a NASA experiment known as Gravity Probe B finds evidence of space-time curvature, as Einstein predicted under general relativity. “Everitt recalls some advice given to him by his thesis advisor and Nobel Laureate Patrick M.S. Blackett: ‘If you can’t think of what physics to do next, invent some new technology, and it will lead to new physics. Well,’ says Everitt, ‘we invented 13 new technologies for Gravity Probe B. Who knows where they will take us?’”

Silence will Fall.

“‘There is a huge irony,’ said SETI Director Jill Tarter, ‘that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don’t have the operating funds to listen.’ SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project’s suspension to ‘the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock.’…This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It’s no good to have it sit idle.”

Another casualty of the lousy economy and the budget crises (in this case, California’s) SETI’s Allen Telescope Array goes dark. “‘We have the radio antennae up, but we can’t run them without operating funds,’ he added. ‘Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company.‘”

50 Years Ago, Our Journey Began.

“What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth…The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots…When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth’s light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquiose, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.“

Fifty years ago this week, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first, however briefly, to leave the cradle and get off-world. May there be many more.

Death of a Cosmonaut.

“Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Komarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space…In 1957, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn’t back out because he didn’t want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.“

By way of LinkMachineGo, NPR’s Robert Krulwich tells the tale of the sad and unnecessary death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. “As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, ‘cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.’“

Mercury Rising.

“‘This is the last of the classical planets, the planets known to the astronomers of Egypt and Greece and Rome and the Far East,’ said Sean C. Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the mission’s principal investigator. ‘It’s an object that has captivated the imagination and the attention of astronomers for millennia.’ But never before has science had such a good front-row seat. ‘We’re there now,’ Dr. Solomon said.” NASA’s Messenger sends back some photos of its fly by Mercury, a planet we haven’t visited since Mariner 10 in 1975.

My God, It’s Full of…Planets?

“‘The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy,’ said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the mission’s science principal investigator. ‘We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water.’“

After its initial sweep of 1/400th of the sky, NASA’s Kepler telescope finds over 1200 planets — 54 of them potentially inhabitable. (The picture above is a rendering of the six-planet Kepler-11 system, 2000 light-years away.)

Discover‘s Phil Plait puts today’s findings in proper perspective: “Mind you, Kepler is only looking at a sample of stars that is one one-millionth of all the stars in the Milky Way. So it’s not totally silly to take these numbers and multiply them by a million to estimate how many planets there may be in the galaxy…70 million Earth-size planets, and a million in the habitable zone of their stars. A frakking million. In our galaxy alone.”

Strapped to the Rocket.

“There is no shortage of proposals for radically innovative space launch schemes that, if they worked, would get us across the valley to other hilltops considerably higher than the one we are standing on now–high enough to bring the cost and risk of space launch down to the point where fundamentally new things could begin happening in outer space. But we are not making any serious effort as a society to cross those valleys. It is not clear why.“

In Slate, sci-fi author and technophile Neal Stephenson discourses on what rockets tell us about innovation and the course of technology over time. “The phenomena of path dependence and lock-in can be illustrated with many examples, but one of the most vivid is the gear we use to launch things into space.“

Into the Murky Deep.

“It is a smudge of light only a tiny fraction of the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, and it existed when the universe was only 480 million years old…If confirmed, the discovery takes astronomers deep into an era when stars and galaxies were first lighting up the universe and burning their way out of a primordial fog known as the dark ages.“

From a few days ago: The Hubble — also the subject of an excellent IMAX-3D movie I saw on Saturday — (probably) finds the oldest, farthest galaxy yet discovered. “Spectroscopic observations with the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope, however, are needed to cement the identification of the smudge as a galaxy…The Webb telescope, which is expected to be launched later this decade once NASA figures out how to pay for it, has been designed to find these primordial galaxies and thus illuminate the dark ages.”

A Hand-Up for the Earthless.

“The time to put our most vulnerable and our most needy in space is now. We can’t keep running from this problem, hoping it will go away. They have as much of a right to live in dignity and urinate in a specially designed suit built to withstand incredible heat and cold while protecting the body from violent and sudden changes in air pressure as anyone else.“

Their timing isn’t great, but The Onion strikes comedy gold again: The Money We Waste On NASA’s Space Program Would Be Better Spent On Space Programs For The Poor. “I’m not talking about a handout, I’m talking about a hand up — up 20,000 miles into space, where our nation’s most desperate and destitute can gaze down on this big blue marble ball of clouds and dreams and be inspired to lift themselves out of poverty.” (FWIW, my response to the space-is-wasted-money argument, when made seriously, is here.)