Awesome Space

Kurzgesagt explains the basics of black holes: how they form, how they distort time and how they dissipate in the first of a two-part lesson. Bonus points for the calm yet detailed explanation of a brutal death by gravity.

Jeff Bezos’ private space travel corporation Blue Origin successfully launched its New Shepard reusable rocket to appx. 62mi and then landed it back safely on Earth. It’s meant to be used for space tourism, i.e. to take a small group of people to the edge of space.

(Flashing lights) Playmodes used Eduardo Cajal’s upcycled fuselage to make Porta Estellar (Star Gate), an audiovisual installation that took audiences on a breathtaking six-minute interstellar trip. It was opened to the public in Barcelona’s Ciutadella park this past Sept.

“There are often several fire burning parts to an up goer.” MinutePhysics and XKCD teamed up to explain how to explore space – but with one major restriction – they could only use the 1000 most common words in the English language to describe rocket science.

While it’s still in Steam Early Access Alpha, this physics-based space simulator is still incredibly impressive, with the ability to create your own planets and universes, then play god with gravity, climate, and even collisions to wreak havoc on your worlds.

Planetbase is a resource management sim about colonizing planets. Start with a handful of settlers, then gather resources, build facilities and robots and survive the occasional solar flare and meteor strikes to grow your community.

Filmmaker Tom Kucy put together this soul-stirring short film using a mix of elements from NASA’s Apollo Archive, using a subtle technique called parallaxing to bring life to these serene scenes of space exploration. (Thanks Greg!)

An extended look at the hardcore space sim Star Citizen sees three players in two different ships take on a couple of missions, seeking and engaging with enemies in dogfights and on foot. We hope you can turn off the voice of the ships’ virtual assistant.

By combining water, food coloring and an Alka-Seltzer tablet, astronauts on the International Space Station created orbs which hover momentarily in space, then start bubbling apart like tiny planets that are about to go supernova. Watch in 4K if your display supports it.

Astroneer is a space survival game in which you participate in the interstellar equivalent of a gold rush. Land on alien planets to terraform and excavate, gather resources, expand and become wealthy or wiser. Coming to Steam Early Access in 2016.

Ahoy’s mini-series on Cold War and video games continues with a discussion on the Space Race. The United States’ influx of technology and adoration for space had a massive influence on video games that is still evident to this day.

In this brain-burner of an episode, Vsauce talks about the messages that NASA and other organizations have sent to space in a bid for humanity to communicate with, or at least be remembered by, other intelligent life. Then there’s this.

Acorn Studio’s Luna is a Moon-themed lantern made of Latex-coated fiberglass. It comes in seven sizes from 3.2″ to 23.6″ in diameter. The smallest one is battery-powered and uses an LED while the rest plug into an outlet and have dimmable halogen lamps.

Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh wanted to create an accurate scale model of our solar system, since it turns out existing models cheat to make things easier to visualize. The finished product required time, planning, seven miles of dry lake bed, and a mountain of creativity.

Have you ever thought about the possibility of leaving Earth and heading to another planet? TED-Ed looks at the challenges associated with life on Mars, where to buy martian real estate, and how it probably was a much better place to live 4 billion years ago.

“It looks like a planet, it’s got atmosphere, it even has a heart. Unlike you.” Incoming late night host Stephen Colbert talks to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about the scientist’s condescension towards Pluto.

What’s up Pluto? We come in peace! Launched in 2006, NASA’s New Horizons probe finally flew past Pluto as part of its over 3 billion mile journey. It took us 50 years, but we’ve now flown by all of the classic planets in our solar system.

Despite the heavy losses suffered by the failed SpaceX cargo mission and the other two missions before it, Smarter Every Day points out that these failures yield priceless data, and that they couldn’t have happened at a better time.

Adr1ft (aka Gravity, the video game) is a first-person space exploration game. You play an astronaut who wakes up in a ruined space station with no idea what happened. Coming to PC with Oculus Rift support, plus Xbox One and PS4.

Astronauts at the International Space Station recently acquired 4K cameras for capturing sights both inside and outside the ISS, which should help in research as well as in reaching out to the public. Download for local playback here.

SpaceX shares this brief GoPro footage of the Falcon 9 rocket twirling in space as it descends back to Earth after a test flight, capturing the sun and our planet in the process, set to the Blue Danube waltz – a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Astronauts are supplied a certain quantity of their food of choice to help keep their spirits up while at the International Space Station. ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti shows us how she makes her bonus food, a quinoa tortilla.

“When I opened the hatch, I had the whole universe in front of me.” NASA’s documentary looks at the history and future of spacewalks, from Alexey Leonov’s pioneering spacewalk in 1965 to the plans to explore Mars.