NASA did have an astronaut named Buzz so maybe this new spacesuit is more appropriate than we thought. You’re looking at the Z-1 Prototype Spacesuit and Portable Life Support System 2.0, aka a real space suit that looks a lot like Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear. THR writes, “And this isn’t the only Buzz Lightyear/NASA crossover: Disney and NASA have joined forces to develop hands-on educational activities and exhibits centered around the character’s fictional voyage to, and 450 days spent living inside, the International Space Station.”

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

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You might have heard how Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner successfully jumped from space yesterday, breaking several records (and the sound barrier) in the process. What you might not have heard is that a team representing the Model Maker Fair in Vienna recreated his jump with LEGO minifigs. Because what’s not improved by LEGOs?

(via: Hypervocal)

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Jeff Wright is an expert balloon artist. He skips the boring swords and poodles and goes straight to making full-body costumes. Here’s his Buzz Lightyear (complete with a fantastic impression) but you can check out some of his other work like Michelangelo from TMNT and Mario riding Yoshi on his website. Wright does children’s parties but is currently working towards getting funding for a year-long mission to a children’s orphanage in Bolivia.

(via io9)

With the help of a weather balloon, an HD camera, and an old cell phone, Awesome Dad of the Day Ron Fugelseth sent Stanley, his four-year-old son’s favorite toy, into space. If that doesn’t sound like a particularly awesome thing for a father to do (did he trip over Stanley one too many times?), I should note that the old cell phone was used for its GPS, so Fugelseth and his son had no trouble retrieving Stanley after the balloon burst and the train fell 18 miles back to Earth.

As if the whole thing needed to be cuter (and emotional… surprisingly emotional *sniff*), Fugelseth used some AfterEffects wizardry to give Stanley a face. Don’t look at me; I’m not crying. It’s just been raining on my face.

(via: Laughing Squid)

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First there’s the Curiosity Mars rover. Then the news that scientists might have figured out the warp drive. A pyramid on Mars. And now NASA tells us that it’s considering building a base on the far side of the moon to help facilitate exploration on the Red Planet. World, you’d better not be jerking me around with all these exciting space travel developments.

Caren Alpert has made her living taking, as she puts it, “mostly recognizable” pictures of food, but her microphotography project Terra Cibus (from the Latin for “ground” and “meat”… that’s ground as in what’s under your feet, sorry pun lovers) presents food as unrecognizable landscapes, patterns and textures. This right here? Chocolate cake.

It will take 7 minutes for NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover to travel from Mars’s atmosphere to it’s surface. However, it takes 14 minutes for that information to be relayed to Earth, meaning that by the time NASA scientists get the signal that it is beginning its descent, the rover will have already been alive or dead on Mars for  7 minutes — that, my friends, will be the scariest 7 minutes ever for NASA. Hey, I don’t blame them: that rover has to transition from 13,000 miles per hour to zero, and God knows how many bajillions of dollars is lining the infrastructure of that space exploration vehicle. Watch these scientists dramatically explain how the Curiosity plans to touch down onto Mars on August 6th problem-free!

(via Girls Are Geeks.)

And the Justice League and the Avengers, by necessity, have only five members. Photographed by Julian Wolkenstein and costumed by Tamara Maynes, these tiny heroes and heroines might possibly have their own adventures, but my German is a bit rusty (that is, nonexistent). From what I’ve been able to figure out, however, the above is Rocket Woman, and below we have…

Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock hails from Newark, Ohio and made a historic solo flight around the world that landed in Columbus in 1964. The trip took 29 days, with 21 stopovers, and made Mock one memorable lady. Now, residents in her hometown, as well as other admirers, would like to honor her with a full-size bronze statue. They just need a little help raising the funds. And if you can believe it, Mock is surprised anyone would want a statue of a woman. 

WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, is a telescope that began surveying the universe from our orbit in 2009. Because, as we learned in my Astronomy 101 class, the thickness of our atmosphere actually makes it harder for telescopes to see out with true accuracy, just like getting fingerprints all over your glasses. Though we’ve been launching tons of stuff into orbit for years now, the first space telescope (the Hubble) was only sent up in 1990. Space telescopes have had a huge impact on our ability to get a good accurate look at the vastness in which we float, and NASA’s release of the new information garnered with WISE has a lot of neat stuff in it.