Awesome Space

Take a helping of Alien, a dash of Gravity, and a smidgen of The Thing, and you’ll have a good idea what to expect from this sci-fi thriller about a team aboard the ISS who discovers the first evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars. Sadly for the crew, it turns out to be a complete dick.

“Imagine it like setting a sea of gasoline the size of the universe on fire.” Kurzgesagt sums up vacuum decay, a theoretical catastrophe that would wipe out the universe at the speed of light and reconfigure it into a state where life as we know it would be impossible.

MB&F and Caran D’Ache teamed up to create this incredible limited-edition writing instrument, which looks like a tiny rocketship. It has retractable landing gear, and comes with a tiny magnetic astronaut and a display/storage box that looks like a launch pad.

YouTube channel Freethink has a new series of brief documentaries about private space technology companies. The first episode is about XCOR and its Lynx, an airplane-like rocketship that could one day make four flights a day, five days a week.

Tony Rettenmaier’s SpaceX tribute is too blunt for our taste. But to judge it purely for its merit as a work of fiction would be missing the point, because it’s really a visualization of a fantastic promise that, even more fantastically, appears to be within reach.

If you’ve ever wondered why we never built a lunar colony, not just because of the technical challenge, but because of the ridiculous amounts of money it would take to achieve. Wendover Productions estimated the cost of putting 4 astronauts on the moon for a year.

Etsy seller EdwardStickerhands offers a wide variety of skins and stickers for gadgets in his shop. We’re particularly entranced by these vibrant vinyl stickers which launch your MacBook’s key caps into outer space. Available for a wide variety of Apple keyboards.

A box set that contains the media in the Voyager Golden Record – a gold-plated copper phonograph record carried by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes as a message to extraterrestrial beings. It consists of 3 vinyl records, a hardcover book and a lithograph.

Danny Lacey’s short film follows a seemingly ordinary man who found notoriety after claiming he was abducted by aliens as a boy. In the end, there are more questions than answers, but we still appreciated Lacey’s style and storytelling approach.

“This is like one of those good lies. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.” Operation Avalanche is a satirical mockumentary by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller (The Dirties) about two young and ambitious CIA agents who end up helping NASA fake the Moon landing.

NASA used the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), to capture images of our planet over the course of a year – once every 2 hours at a distance of 1 million miles – then assembled them into a time-lapse. Scientist Jay Herman narrates and explains their mission.

Mario Wienerroither spins off his musicless music videos to make a silly dub of Felix Baumgartner’s world record freefall. But it’s still one of the craziest things we’ll ever see in our lifetime. Dude jumped from space! Space!

Back in 2009, astronauts on the International Space Station captured this amazing perspective of Russia’s Sarychev volcano erupting, as a massive plume of ash and smoke ascended towards the heavens above.

Scott Portingale’s stunning short film is an abstract look at the evolution of matter and energy, created using a mix of time-lapse, high-speed, and stop-motion photography. Incredibly, the images were were made with fluids and handmade props, not CGI.

“500 years from now… they will remember what we [did] to make their civilization possible.” In a 2014 talk about a manned exploration of Mars, aerospace engineer Dr. Robert Zubrin gave a rousing response as to why we should take on such a costly quest.

Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s upcoming Nat Geo miniseries looks ahead towards the first manned mission to the red planet. The story takes place in 2033, but is peppered with interviews with some of today’s most visionary and notable scientists and business leaders.

(PG-13: Language) YouTuber Exurb1a schools us on the history of rockets with the rapid-fire lyrical patterns of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic tune I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General, though we wouldn’t exactly call what he’s doing “singing.”

SpaceX just launched a communications satellite to space using its Falcon 9 rocket. For the third time in a row, the rocket’s first stage booster landed in the ocean on a drone ship. This brief time-lapse from an onboard camera shows the booster’s descent.

Director Tim Cahn’s animated short film merely shows us a rocketship as it leaves the burnt out remnants of Earth and heads towards a mysterious space station. Despite its lack exposition, it will draw you in, and make you wonder what led us here.

Our smarty pants friends at Kurzgesagt examines the idea of human exploration, and some of the currently known limitations of space travel, physics, and our own bodies which prevent us from traveling to an unfathomable portion of the great unknown.

Awe-inspiring GoPro footage of the launch of UP Aerospace’s SL-10 rocket, as it shot up to an apogee of 396,000 feet, with speeds as high as Mach 5.5. The payoff for the dizzying ascent are some of the most spectacular near space images we’ve ever seen.

Amazing first-person footage of the Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft as it makes its way through Earth’s atmosphere and safely lands on the ground 339,178 feet below. We loved hearing all the sounds it makes on its journey. See just how fast it was coming in here.

A scientifically accurate 1:20M scale model of the Moon with a light ring that simulates sunlight. You can make the light ring revolve manually or choose from one of two automatic modes: a 30s cycle or a real-time cycle that starts with the current lunar phase.