THE BEST Space

Peter Griffin’s Chris Roberts’ 2014 PAX East presentation of his upcoming space combat simulation game Star Citizen. Skip to 11:20 for gameplay footage, featuring dogfighting and asteroid ramming.

The Sci Show outlines the general clues that help scientists look for habitable planets, including the size of a planet, what type of galaxy it’s in and more. Being a stellar real estate agent is hard. Also quasars are more terrifying than black holes.

“I’m coming home now.” A humbling and nail-biting view of Felix Baumgartner’s 24mi free fall from the edge of space, captured through GoPro Hero2 cameras mounted on his balloon and suit. One of the best videos you’ll ever see.

Headphones on, folks. By using radio data collected from a satellite, then transposing and filtering the inaudible signals, Andrew Williams extracted sounds which make us feel like we’re deep in the rainforest, not in the silence of space.

Sci Code debunks a few myths about outer space propagated by science fiction. Find out why there’s no such thing as zero gravity, what space battles would sound like and how “cramped” asteroid fields are. Here’s our bonus trivia.

On 12/24/1968, astronaut William Anders of the Apollo 8 mission took one of the most memorable photographs in human history: Earthrise. This is NASA’s scientifically accurate reenactment of the moment the photo was taken.

The first spot for Christopher Nolan’s next movie shows very little from the film, but its concept certainly intrigues us. A group of explorers exploit a wormhole to travel through space at speeds never before achieved by mankind.

A new trailer for In Saturn’s Rings, a time-lapse movie made of over a million images taken by satellites, spacecraft, obervatories and more. Filmmaker Stephen van Vuuren is raising funds to get an orchestral score created for the movie.

This look at Star Citizen shows off one of the game’s more agile and lethal spaceships, the Hornet. It’s running in the game’s engine, though we’re not sure if it’s representative of gameplay. Watch it in 4K if you can.

In the year 2183 Earth has been reduced to a cloud of cosmic dust. A space archeologist uses his time-traveling telescope ship to catch a glimpse of our planet in its former glory. A visual feast by VFX artist Wes Ball.

Watch Felix Baumgartner’s 128,000ft supersonic freefall from three different angles, including one from Felix’s point of view. The video also shows metrics such as his speed and altitude synchronized with the footage.

A mesmerizing and intriguing time-lapse of the Mauna Kea Observatories by Sean Goebel. The bright beams of light are lasers used to adjust the telescopes. The song is All is Violent, All is Bright by God is an Astronaut.

We were hoping it was a bromance simulator, but The Mandate is equally ambitious. It’s an open world RPG set in space, with real-time ship combat, turn-based boarding combat, crew management, ship designing and more.

Are you digging Kerbal Space Program? Wait for Defect SDK, a ship designing game with space combat. Engage in an escalating war with your dissenting crew and build bigger and better spaceships to beat your previous creations.

A beginner’s guide to the major theories of physicist Stephen Hawking. He continued his pursuit for knowledge despite his extreme physical limitations, and in doing so elevated not just himself but the whole human race.

Alfonso Cuarón wants us to feel like we are realistically floating in space in the theatre; this extended featurette on his latest film Gravity gives a behind the scenes look at just how that will happen. Guess we need to see it in IMAX.

Visually stunning concept renders from the upcoming crowdfunded space shooter, Elite: Dangerous. If the finished gameplay looks this good, please sign us up now. £30 (~$48 USD) reserves a digital copy of the game.

Every time we see more of Gravity, we want to see it even more. With incredible visuals, an amazing sense of realism, and buzzworthy performances, even James Cameron recently called it “The best space film ever done.”

The Space Shuttle may be gone, but that doesn’t make this footage shot from the perspective of the booster rockets on Atlantis and Endeavour any less amazing, as they travel into the upper atmosphere, then plunge back to the Earth.

A space exploration game for Windows, Mac & Linux. Build your own spaceship and if – if! – you don’t crash and burn, you can build space stations and erect bases in various planets. Buy now and get beta access. Free demo here.

If an asteroid was on its way to Earth, what can we do to stop it? Bill Nye The Science Guy dropped by ASAP Science to talk about possible solutions. None of them involve oil drillers. Because this is serious business.

This clip from Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming movie Gravity shows rookie astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) get separated from astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) as their space shuttle is destroyed by debris.

A film about the Solar System by Stephen van Vuuren. In Saturn’s Rings was made by stitching together over one million photographs taken by various satellites as well as from spacecraft, observatories and more. Best watched in HD.

Ever wanted to float in space like an astronaut? It turns out that it’s less like floating, and more like a free-fall in orbit around the Earth. Watch and learn in this short TedEd lesson from Matt J. Carlson, animated by Josh Harris.

When he’s not making Teslas, Elon Musk is running his private space exploration company, SpaceX. Here’s footage of their Grasshopper vertical-take-off/landing rocket flying to 1066 feet, then smoothly landing back on the pad.

A stunning time-lapse movie captured by Stéphane Guisard using fish-eye images from Chile’s Paranal Observatory, providing us with a beautiful view of two neighboring galaxies, and the galactic center of the Milky Way.