You know how when you buy a new car, you suddenly see them everywhere?  Maybe it's because I've been paying more attention to space, but it seems like space stories are everywhere...

NASA have a new blog, a Tumblr, and of course you should subscribe.  Or you could rely on the Ole filter, because I'll definitely be linking away... 

So ... greens grown in space are now on the Space Station astronaut menu.  Excellent.  It is no accident that The Martian is a botanist; think about it and you'll realize growing (and raising!) food in space will be a critical need.  It is SO expensive to send stuff out of Earth's gravity well, that synthesizing it on the fly is well worth it. 

This applies to all sorts of things besides food, too, like rocket fuel, building materials, and even the "air" we'll breathe...

Among the amazing pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, this one, of the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius.  "Hubble can see astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arc seconds, which is like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Maryland."  This is not false color by the way.  Click through to enbiggen amazingly! 

From Engadget: Watch live as two ISS cosmonauts perform a spacewalk.  Yeah, every part of that sentence is surprising, but remember, Russia is currently the only country that can fly astronauts into space.  (I think the correct term is "EVA", however, technically a spacewalk only occurs on a surface :) 

When you see these pictures, it looks like something from a movie, doesn't it?  Except that maybe the spacesuits are bulkier in real life :) 

Here's a cool video from astronaut Scott Kelly, also on the ISS, showing our "galactic home".  Kelly is there for a year, as part of a twin study; he has an identical twin brother, also an astronaut, who is not on the ISS. 

In a NASA video, they ask: Why do we explore?  "Simply put, it is part of who we are, and it is something we have done throughout our history. In “We Are the Explorers,” we take a look at that tradition of reaching for things just beyond our grasp and how it is helping us lay the foundation for our greatest journeys ahead." 

The design story behind NASA's "worm" logo, sadly retired.  Sadly is right, this was cool.  Nothing looked better on the side of a huge rocket, either... 

... Okay, I take that back :)

To infinity, and beyond!