A couple of weeks ago the sixth man on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, in an apparent bid to catch up with James Watson in the "man of science inexplicably becomes a crackpot" stakes, went on the radio and claimed that the human race has made contact with aliens and there's a big cover-up to disguise this fact.

Maybe he's not mad after all if Aviation Week, a publication not usually known for its hyperbole (or generally not known) is right with its story about NASA deliberately sitting on a huge announcement?

To be fair to the Bebo group by the name of A Message From Earth (AMFE), who are about to beam cultural data out into space, their content might actually be quite be good. The question remains though as to whether their intended alienlife targets will actually enjoy it or understand it at all.

The idea is that the group will send 500 multimedia messages, via Alexander Zaitsev and his radio telescope in the Ukraine, out into the black void, directed towards a planet by the name of Gliese 581c and any possible inhabitants. With its distance from a red sun and the likelihood of water, it has the right kind of conditions to support life such as ours.

The important point about this is that they are the kind of ET life that might just be able to work out that the YouTube clip of the sneezing panda is actually funny. One step ahead of me then.

For some, the dream of shrugging off earth's seeming inescapable pull just got a big step closer. Sir Richard Branson has just finished the grand unveiling of his first commercial space craft in the Mojave desert.

At the naming ceremony, the ship was christened 'EVE' in honour of Branson's mother. Aside from a potentially lucrative way for Branson to earn more cash, the White Knight II series of aircraft represents ground-breaking leap forward in aerospace technology. It is the largest completely carbon fibre aircraft in the world.

I feel rather sorry for the sixth man to walk on the moon aka Dr Edgar Micthell. Here he is, on radio, telling the world exactly what they want to hear and I'm about to sit and just take the piss. I can't help it, but I promise to be gentle Dr M, I promise.

So, the Apollo 14 veteran spills the lot:

"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real."

"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so," he says. "But slowly it's leaked out," he says. He says, "Some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it." But the trouble lies in his picture of these beings and their culture.

Now just before we all rush out to the boozer, take a second to remember how small we all are and, basically, how bloody brilliantly mind-blowing space is. Here are pictures from the stars of what it looks like when the moon passes in front of the Earth - from 31 million miles away.

Far out, man.

(via Gizmodo)

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You know all that saving you've been doing? No, not real saving. I mean like money tied up in your house and anything you might have stashed away for your children's education. Yeah, well it's time to cash it in because there's an auction about to take place for a truck load of movie props including Marty McFly's hoverboard and Darth Vader's T.I.E. Fighter from Star Wars.

It may be only an 18-inch prop but the curve-winged space vessel is expected to fetch £100,000. If you haven't quite got that kind of wonga, then may I recommend the holy grail from The Last Crusade at £12,500 or, perhaps something to convince the kids to get to bed, Jack's axe from The Shining at just £3,500?

The auction takes place on 31st July and 1st August at the Profiles in History auction house, Hollywood, but I'm sure they take telephone bids.

(via Daily Record)

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It may take decades to qualify as an astronaut but you can get your name on the moon in a matter of minutes. Since 1st May NASA has been inviting people of all creeds and nations to sign a register online that'll be taken up there in America's return flight to our favourite hunk of cheese in the sky.

The deadline was at the end of last month but it's now been extended to 25th July. So far they gathered over one million names and each of them has received their very own printable certificate to prove the fact. That a piece of the has just gone stellar.

The must-have Christmas gift of 2008 for the 3-11-year-old demographic, it is, and we can hardly believe such an amazing item exists, a TARDIS wardrobe. It is such a great idea. One of the world's best ideas, alongside automatically slicing bread with a machine and trainers with air in the soles for extra bounciness.

Fashioned out of the finest canvas and non-sustainable pine, the TARDIS wardrobe boasts a "single rail" and "zippable doors." But it's not about features. It's about shape and colour, and it saying "POLICE BOX" in the correct font.

It is also the ideal Christmas gift for those in the 33-49-year-old sci-fi fan demographic, along with some Babylon 5 slippers and a Star Trek pipe. The TARDIS wardrobe is yours on Amazon for £30.

Imagine cutting feet holes in it and wearing it to a cosplay convention. Guaranteed sex.

(Via Toyology)

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Recent testing of ancient moon rock collected by astronauts in the 70s has found evidence of water. Scientists have been applying new and more powerful techniques on the volcanic glass 'pebbles', which were unavailable back when we were popping back forth to our orbiting neighbour.

These findings challenge long-held beliefs that the moon is completely dry and that in turn throws doubt on a theory that the moon was formed when Earth had a bit of a misunderstanding with a passing proto-planet.

Our lives are monitored by an increasingly sophisticated array of digital observers, be it from CCTV, speed cameras, internet usage monitoring, those blokes from TV licensing that won't leave me alone... There's no way around it, but what if - WHAT IF? - you could have your very own eye-in-the-sky, silently watching everyone and everything around you? That would take the edge off, right?

A British Company has the answer: small, cheap, easy-to-build spy satellites that can be launched into space and left to take photos of anything you care to gawp at from your orbiting observation post. Surrey Satellite Technology (SST) is making these babies at the low low cost of $10 million. Call it five million quid, or one decent EuroMillions win.

Try not to panic - Mercury, the smallest resident of our close-knit solar system, is shrinking. Scientists studying data sent back by the Messenger probe, launched in 2004, reveal that it's disappearing; withering away like a long-forgotten prune (not their words).

Before you pack up the car and head over to Aunt Margaret's place in the highlands, you should know that this galactic disaster isn't happening very quickly but at a considerably faster rate than previously suspected. Nonetheless, NASA reckons the old girl could last another few billion years yet.

Ancient space probes sent out on a long-distance research mission during the 1970s are continuing to send back valuable data 30 years after they first launched. The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft have each now entered a vast region of space on the very edge of the solar system, a point where the solar wind blowing outward meets the interstellar wind blowing in.

You can think of it a bit like a balloon or bubble. The probes each crossed the threshold - excitingly named the Termination Shock (there's a superbly poor taste abortion joke in there somewhere) - at different points a mere 10 billion or so miles from each other. However, the twist is that Voyager 2 reached it considerably closer than its twin, taking scientists by surprise.

Technically, that flying saucer to the left there is known as a wingless electromagnetic air vehicle, or WEAV for short. We'll just scream "UFO!" and run from it in terror, though, if that's OK.

It runs on "magnetohydrodynamics" - a way of propelling vehicles by ionising air with an electrical current then shooting it out at great speed. The thing also spins, to help keep it stable. It is, basically, your archetypal flying saucer.

Three cheers for British entrepreneurs! That man there is Steve Bennett. He's built a rocket called Nova 2.

Steve's rocket is a three-seater, one which he hopes is going to make him one of Britain's first "space tourism" millionaires. He heads up the Space Technology Laboratory (!) of Salford University (!!) and has spent the last ten years planning and building the craft.

Steve will be testing Nova 2 next year - if all goes well (ie, if there are no casualties or fires), the project will head into full production, in preparation to charge people aroung £98,000 to get into space for a few minutes of the year 2013 - as long as he and his company Starchaser can raise the £7m required.

(Via Daily Mail)

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The Phoenix Mars Lander has almost completed its first set of 'wet chemistry' experiments on the red planet's soil and scientists very excited with what they've found. A preliminary analysis of soil samples have found it to be a lot more alkaline than expected, meaning that it could support life.

A single cubic meter of soil was recovered by the lander's robotic arm. Its pH has been measured at between eight and nine, and the instruments have also detected salts components, including magnesium, sodium, potassium, and chlorine.

Now that drama of the sticky Mars mud incident is firmly behind it (results are expected on Friday), the Phoenix Mars Lander is on the lookout for fresh Martian discoveries, and they seem to be in no short supply. Using its robotic arm, Phoenix has been scraping away at the rocky surface and uncovered some mysterious white patches that scientists say are most probably ice.

Adding weight to their belief is the fact that the patches of white have been slowly disappearing over the past week, which would eliminate the other possibility that this was a salt deposit. Scientists explain that water ice can change into water vapour when exposed to air, via a process known as sublimation.

In 2020, humankind is going back to the moon (baby), and what's more we're going to be looking goooood. NASA has picked out a new organisation, Oceaneering International, and awarded it a contract to design and build a next-gen space suit, boringly entitled the Constellation Space Suit System, or CSSS.

The Houston-based organisation defeated a rival bid from the current spacesuit contractor Exploration Systems and Technology. The contract is worth something in the region of $745 million and includes design, testing, evaluation and production of two new types of spacesuits.

It could be one small step for Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, but it could be a giant leap for search-engine-kind.

It seems that Mr Brin wants to take a trip as a space tourist with Space Adventures Ltd, and has already made a five-million dollar down payment to the company. It's not clear whether he's waiting for a $100 million trip around the moon, or will plump for a trip to the international space station instead.

Might Sergey be checking out whether it's possible to put a big "G" on the Moon?

(Via Mashable)

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For today's little nugget of space news, we turn our eyes away from the red planet to one a bit smaller, darker and colder: Pluto.

Pluto has been through a rough patch in its career since it was officially downgraded from its planetary status two years ago. However, sympathetic scientists have decided to give it a much needed publicity boost by using its name as the basis for a whole class of dwarf planets.

Now I know that none of you were even remotely interested in what has been happening in the world of mobile telephony, so I bring you another report from the icy depths of space. Scientists are jubilant this morning because it seems yesterday's desperate battle against Mars' fiendishly 'clumpy' soil has been won and samples are now being delivered to the lander's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA).

Efforts were originally thwarted when despite soil successfully being scooped up and deposited over one of the single-use TEGA ovens, nothing made it through the fine sieve to reach the sensors. Since that failure, NASA has been affecting a sprinkle motion in the hopes of dislodging a small enough sample to pass through to the sensors. This appears to have worked.