WATCH THE SPLASHDOWN EVENT LIVE HERE, the SpaceX video embed in this post will go live with pre-event content sometime before 7pm EDT on Saturday August 1. Read the rest

I'd totally go. Read the rest

Definitely book me on the very first flight off this hell-planet 2020, yes please. Read the rest

OK, I really need this. It's the SpaceX Dragon rendezvousing and docking with the International Space Station with "Blue Danube" as the soundtrack. Holy 2001, Batman!

Image: Screengrab Read the rest

Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit failed on its first rocket launch attempt, which took place out of the Mojave Spaceport in Southern California. Read the rest

UPDATE: THEY DID IT. It couldn't have gone more perfectly. Read the rest

Federal safety officials say the builder of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is at fault for not anticipating the copilot error that caused the spaceship's disintegration during a test flight nine months ago.

Pluto haze! In my brain. Lately, things, they don't seem the same.

XKCD's hot take on the recent space news around Kepler 452-B and Pluto.

Today's launch was a good one.

All ISS systems continued to operate normally while the Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut sheltered.

Washington Post: "A sweeping review of NASA’s human spaceflight program has concluded that the agency has an unsustainable and unsafe strategy that will prevent the United States from achieving a human landing on Mars in the foreseeable future. The 286-page National Research Council report, the culmination of an 18-month, $3.2 million investigation mandated by Congress, says that to continue on the present course under budgets that don’t keep pace with inflation 'is to invite failure, disillusionment, and the loss of the longstanding international perception that human spaceflight is something the United States does best.'”

More here.

The report bolsters the case for manned missions to the moon, which President Obama oppose. “I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before,” the president said in a space policy speech in 2010. Read the rest

Space educator Sawyer "@thenasaman" Rosenstein, 19, is a hardcore space fan. His enthusiasm for space flight was captured in a 2011 Boing Boing special feature, and shines weekly in his "Talking Space" podcast. He traveled to Florida for the opening of the new permanent exhibit of Shuttle Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center, and shared photos with us. All images in this review are Sawyer's. —Xeni Jardin.

In the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, reader JMV shares this wonderful scan of a 1952 feature from the Vancouver Sun's "Weekend Picture Magazine" on the coming age of travel to Mars.

Illustration by Edgar Ainsworth.

"It will probably be some 50 years before any safe space flight from Earth to another planet and back is made, but there seems now to be very little doubt that the dreams of Roger Bacon in AD 1249 and Albertus Magnus in 1280 have left the realm of Wellsian imaginings and become a practical proposition."

Here's a larger size. Guess they didn't think of Rovers! Read the rest

Tonight is Yuri's Night — a holiday celebrating the first human spaceflight. You can throw a Yuri's Night party yourself, or simply join one of the 340 parties that are already scheduled. Scheduled events range from the ubiquitous "let's drink vodka shots in a Russian restaurant" to more kid-friendly, telescope-centric themes. And this year, you can even virtually join the Mars Curiosity Rover as it throws itself the first Yuri's Night party to be held on another planet. (Which, frankly, sounds a little lonely and sad, so hopefully people turn up for the virtual side of that shindig.) Read the rest

A highlights reel of Felix Baumgartner's spectacular space jump.

Red Bull Stratos is a mission to the edge of space that will try to surpass human limits that have existed for more than 50 years.