Awesome Space

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.

Fly to up to 14 miles in altitude, and see the Earth’s curvature on MiGFlug’s unique 50-minute tour. You’ll ride in the company’s MiG-29 Fulcrum jet and experience air speeds of up to Mach 2 (~1520mph).

The music video for beatmaker Jamie XX’s trip hop single Gosh takes you on an extraterrestrial tour of a fictional moon and planet, courtesy of NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. From his upcoming album In Colour.

A mesmerizing fly-through visualization of brilliantly colorful gasses of nebula Gum 29 and star cluster Westerlund 2 inspired by the incredible 25th anniversary image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The first episode of Louis du Mont’s short animated series about a tiny spaceman who lands on Earth and must find negotiate our planet to assemble the resources he needs to return home. We look forward to seeing more of his journey.

NASA, GoPro and the Internet Archive released this amazing footage taken by astronaut Terry Virts when he went outside the International Space Station to upgrade its docking station.

Dakotalapse shares some of his best 4K time-lapse photography from 2014. Galaxies and thunderstorms dominate these overwhelming shots, which were taken in Wyoming, Utah and South Dakota. Buy the full 30min. version here.

YouTuber Neil Smith used Cinema 4D and the Octane Render plugin to turn the mission patches of NASA’s manned moon missions into 3D animations. You can buy the stills from the video as one large print.

In the first part of Smarter Every Day’s space series, Destin talks to astronauts Scott Kelly and Greg Wiseman to give us an idea of how the Soyuz spacecraft works and how it docks with the International Space Station.